Archaeological Research Facility

The unity, such as it is, of the present collection of earlier articles is that they all deal with the people of one California tribe, the Pomo, whose center lay around Clear Lake in the northern Coast Ranges. The extent of the lands occupied by the several divisions of the Pomo tribe, their village locations, and boundaries of the numerous village communities or tribelets are shown on the accompanying map which is reproduced from O. Stewart's Notes on Pomo Ethnogeography (1940). Stewart's quite thorough work, carried out in the late nineteen-thirties, is to be taken as more accurate than the listing and mapping of Pomo tribelets given in Kroeber's Handbook of the Indians of California (1925, pl. 36). Kroeber's map was apparently mainly based on one earlier published by S.A. Barrett in 1908 and which is important in showing a very large number of village site locations.

The Pomo may have numbered in the late 1700s before the Spanish settlement of the coastal section of California about 8,000 persons. In the U.S. Census of 1910 some 1,200 were counted, making them, except for the Mono, the then most numerous tribe in the state. At present, or at least until very recently, somewhat more than a thousand Pomo lived on rancheria lands ranging from 50 to over 2,000 acres in Lake, Mendocino, and Sonoma Counties. The causes of this population decline were the same ones which affected all of the native Californians--the requirement of survival being to change their way of life to accomodate to the Americans who moved in and took over the land, introduced diseases, and homicide.*

Linguists have suggested that the Pomo language has been spoken in this area for about 15 centuries. Who the predecessors of the recent Pomo were, and what languages they spoke, we do not, and probably cannot ever, know. M.R. Harrington, working under the auspices of the Southwest Museum, excavated a site near Borax Lake, not far from Clear Lake itself, and recovered evidence of the presence of an ancient people who made a distinctive kind of projectile point which archaeologists know as Borax Lake Fluted. Opinions on the age of this site have been varied, but the recent work of C. Meighan and C. Haynes (Science 167:1213-1221, 1970) at the site and through a reexamination of the materials recovered