Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

There is great potential to address critical issues in contemporary culture contact studies through the study of the initial encounters (1542 to 1603} between natives and Europeans in California. Early exploration scholarship tends to focus on either the European ships and crews or the native communities they described, but rarely on the interactions between them. By reanalyzing the voyager accounts and relevant archaeological remains, one may evaluate how and why peoples from very different backgrounds responded to each other, and begin to examine the implications of early encounters with respect to cultural ideologies, ceremonial practices, gift giving, the meanings of foreign material culture, and disease. The purpose of this article is to consider four main issues underlying the social contexts of early encounters in California—the nature of initial contacts, the diverse responses observed, the role of material culture in early contacts, and the probability that lethal pathogens spread from these initial interactions. We find that religious practices played a critical role in structuring native and nonnative relations, and that the timing of encounters was very important, especially in relation to native and Christian ceremonial cycles. Furthermore, in considering the voyager chronicles and relevant archaeological remains, we question the conventional view, at least in California, that foreign goods were regarded as "merely trifles" by native peoples. Finally, we argue that early contacts with voyagers may have introduced lethal pathogens to coastal native populations, but that epidemics were probably geographically limited, sporadic, and short-lived.