Research Items

Abstract

PIT RIVEB INDIAN TRIBES, CALIFORNIA.—An attempt to reconstruct the culture and distribution of Indian tribes of north-eastern California, before the coming of the whites, in field work carried out in 1926, is made by Mr. F. B. Kniffen in vol. 23, No. 5, of the University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology. The Achomawi and Atsugewi were oriented around the Pit River in a region with a certain general unity of climate and resource which contained a series of semi-isolated habitable tracts. There were certain unifying factors in a common culture and a largely common language which encouraged trade, exchange of food privileges, and unity against a common foe. Even within groups, however, political unity was generally circumstantial rather than natural. The population was roughly in the neighbourhood of 3000. The Indian has now been pushed back to the rocky edges of the valleys or works for the white rancher. They once claimed as their own a vast territory extending from Mount Shasta and Goose Lake to the Madeline Plains and Mount Lassen on the south, and from the Warner Range on the east to Montgomery Creek on the west; but it was especially along the Pit River that the centres of attraction were found. The valley areas offered an amazing variety of animal and vegetable food, the vegetable being capable of being either consumed immediately or stored for winter. The Indians recognised eleven groups, each composed of those living on a single site or on several nearby sites, nine of them being collectively termed Achomawi in anthropological literature, though they had no collective name for themselves. The two Atsugewi groups differed from the Achomawi in language and, while friendly with some, were at enmity with others. The four western groups of Achomawi and the Atsuge buried their dead, built round winter houses, used dug-out canoes, possessed the full Californian acorn technique, owned food-tracts privately or by families, but recognised no chieftainship over the group as a whole. The five eastern groups and the Aporige cremated their dead, built their winter houses over rectangular or oval excavations, had no canoes or acorn complex, and recognised a group chief, but no private ownership of food-bearing tracts of land.