Life on the River: The Archaeology of an Ancient Native American Culture William R. Hildebrandt and Michael J. Darcangelo Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2008,120 pages, 3 tables and 65 figures, $13.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-59714-086-7.

Albert Hurtado published an intriguing picture in his book Indian Survival on the California Frontier that portrayed an Indian village on Dry Creek, near the present- day town of Thornton. After becoming fascinated by the image and the story that went with it, I tracked down some additional background information on the village and on an attack that it sustained from the neighboring whites. Aspects of the village shown in the drawing—including a mixture of what appear to be conical tule houses mixed with slab-sided tent-like dwellings, and what looks like a wooden stockade wall—suggest a mixed community with some background in European warfare. After consulting contemporary newspaper accounts and census records, additional details came to light on the incident. This article thus becomes a useful case study on the complicated Indian/White interactions, often leading to violence, of the 1850s.

The history of San Diego County has been sorely deficient in recording the account of a remarkable man. Jose Panto, the capitan of the Indian pueblo of San Pascual, led his people over a period of at least 37 years through the last decade of the Mexican rule of California and into the era of American dominance. By turns a fighter and a peacemaker, Panto was a highly respected man, both by his own people and by the dominant power of the time, whether it be a Mexican governor or an American Indian agent. As later history has been written, Panto has been largely ignored, perhaps because he did seek the way of peace rather than rebellion. His trust in the authorities was sadly misplaced, as the onslaught of the American frontier prevailed to destroy his village and rout his people from their land.

In 1818, a Russian scientific expedition, under the direction of Vasilii Golovnin, visited Bodega Bay (called Port Rumiantsev by the Russians). Apart from the written accounts of at least three members of the expedition concerning the native people there, the expedition artist, Mikhail Tikhonovich Tikhanov, produced five known paintings picturing the life of the people. These remarkable paintings are the only ones known of the Bodega Bay Miwok people near the time of early contact with Europeans. What makes the drawings even more valuable is that they were done by an artist specifically commissioned to render detailed ethnographic drawings of peoples encountered on the expedition. Because of their association with the Russians headquartered at Fort Ross, some authors have mistakenly identified the individuals pictured in Tikhanov's paintings as Pomo. Thanks to some contemporary Spanish accounts and mission records, we can piece together additional details of the individuals and what was going on at the time, especially the fact that the expedition was at Bodega Bay at the time of a shift in the leadership of the Bodega Miwok people due to the death of the old chief.

The growing field of paleo-nutrition calls for ever more precise data. Whereas P. monophylla has been accepted as an important vegetal food for the Great Basin peoples, the nutritional data show it to be an even more remarkable food item than it appeared to be based on the earlier and more commonly used analytic report. In particular, the former emphasis on the exceedingly high fat content must be reconsidered. The importance of this high carbohydrate food item in the Great Basin may well lie in the lack of such food products as acorns (as in California) or corn (as in New Mexico and Arizona). To each of these food items, by contrast, the nutritional qualities of the dominant pine nuts in each area would seem quite complementary. Further nutritional research will shed greater light on the accuracy of this conclusion.

Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush. Ramon A. Gutierrez and Richard J. Orsi, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, xi + 395 pp., 13 color photographs, 76 black and white photographs, 5 maps, $60.00 (hard cover), $27.50 (paper).

A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1769-1810. Randall Milliken. Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 43, 1995, xvi -l- 364 pp., 17 figs., 5 maps, 12 tables, and 4 appendices, $32.95 (hard cover), $24.95 (paper).