RESEARCH ITEMS

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Archaeology of Buena Vista Lake, CaliforniaTHE Smithsonian Institution has recently issued a volume on the “Archaeological Investigations at Buena Vista Lake, Kern County, California“ by Waldo R. Wedel (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bull. 130). Buena Vista Lake lies at the southern end of the great Californian valley which runs roughly north and south inland and parallel to the Pacific coast. Houses were excavated and a rich haul of finds resulted. These included objects made from steatite, chipped and ground stone, basketry (both coiled and twined), as well as skeletal remains. There were two main culture levels. It would appear that contacts with folk to the north, settled further down the San Joaquin River, can be predicted, but probably too, especially at the time of the later culture levels, some connexion was established with the folk of the Santa Barbara coast region which, though the other side of the hills, is only some fifty to sixty miles away and reached by several passes. At no time were the Buena Vista people highly civilized, indeed their economy was always elementary. Especially was this true of the earliest occupation where the mano and mealing slab occurred to the exclusion of the pestle and mortar, and the material culture was of the simplest. The dead were buried in the extended position in shallow graves near the camping–grounds. The date of this first occupation is unknown, but at least one of the sites would have been later for a time uninhabitable when, as shown by the deposits, the general level of the lake rose during a period of greater precipitation. The more recent culture shows several distinctive traits and was considerably more developed, perhaps because of its greater contact with the Santa Barbara coastal region. While the results of the investigation do not appear to be startling, they do supply important information about the archaeology of a little–known area and fill in one more gap in the regional survey of Southern California.