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Twined Water Bottles of the Cuyama Area, Southern California*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Albert Mohr
Affiliation:
University of WashingtonSeattle, Washington
L. L. Sample
Affiliation:
University of WashingtonSeattle, Washington

Extract

Although the basketry of many parts of California is known ethnographically and a few archaeological descriptions are appearing, the textiles of the Santa Barbara region remain relatively unknown. The ethnographic information available on the historic occupants, the Chumash, has been limited by the early missionization and subsequent disintegration of native culture, and most archaeological reports of basketry from this area have been sketchy. It is hoped that the following discussion of twined water bottles from archaeological sites in northern Santa Barbara County will supply some needed information and indicate the relation of these water bottles to twined ones of the Great Basin and Southwest.

A few of the specimens described herein have been pictured by Kroeber (1925: 561, PL 53) with a mention of some weaves employed in their manufacture.

With one possible exception, all of the specimens are from the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Santa Barbara County. This range, stretching in a general northwest-southeast direction, is bounded on the north by the arid Cuyama Valley and on the south by the precipitous Sisquoc Canyon.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1955

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Footnotes

*

The authors are indebted to the following institutions and individuals for making basketry available for this study: Bowers Memorial Museum, F. E. Coulter; J. G. James of Cuyama, California (private collection); Los Angeles County Museum, Robert Ariss; Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Phil C. Orr; Southwest Museum, M. R. Harrington and Ruth Simpson; U.S. National Museum, F. M. Setzler; University of California Museum of Anthropology, E. W. Gifford. In the text, catalog numbers of specimens from the above repositories and collections are prefixed BMM, J, LACM, SBM, SWM, USNM, and UCMA respectively. We are particularly grateful to the National Park Service Museum at Boulder City, Nevada, and Albert Schroeder for arranging the loan of the National Museum specimens, to Leo Hitchcock of the University of Washington for making a number of botanical identifications, and to the office of the Los Padres National Forest, U.S. Forest Service, for geographical information. We further wish to thank W. W. Elmendorf and Douglas and Carolyn Osborne for helpful suggestions. Permission to reproduce the University of California Museum of Anthropology photographs was granted by T. D. McCown.

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