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).

Many examples of vigesimal counting systems are given and ably discussed in Menninger's Number Words and Number Symbols (1969) and so, in terms of a world-wide overview, I will not try to improve upon this excellent and comprehensive study. Rather it is my intention to turn to a specific area, namely the rich linguistic province of California.

Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers Kent G. Lightfoot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 338 pp., $45.00 (cloth).

The aesthetic trait represented by pine nut beads appears to be centered among the Wintu, Shasta, and Karok. From there it spreads widely across tribal boundaries down the trade routes of the Klamath, Trinity, and Salmon rivers to the Pacific coast, as well as in an eastward direction along the Pit River and on out into the northern Great Basin. Trade, rather than mass population movement, was undoubtedly the means of transmission of pine nut beads in prehistoric times. Since pine nut beads were so often associated with women and their apparel, the movement of women from tribe to tribe may have contributed to its appearance outside the core areas. An expanded trade in goods and the exchange of women through marriage that followed the introduction of the horse in northern California circa A.D. 1800 (Layton 1981) probably influenced some of the spread. Why pine nut trade to the south was inhibited is not as yet understood. It does not seem likely to have been due to competition with clam shell disc beads. Such beads were real money items and thus represented wealth as well as decoration. The best explanation for the limited spread seems to be related to time. The trait had not been around long enough to be accepted by many of the more southerly tribes.