The Topanga Culture: Final Report on Excavations, 1948 — John Shaqi
The Topanga Culture: Final Report on Excavations, 1948Treganza, Adan E. (Adan Eduardo)
History
The Topanga Culture: Final Report on Excavations, 1948
Treganza, Adan E. (Adan Eduardo)
California -- Antiquities; Topanga Canyon (Calif.)
In addition to the economic and subsistence aspects we now know something
concerning the socioreligious patterns as practiced at the Tank Site.
Disposal of the dead is expressed in three forms: (1) primary inhumation
in the flesh; (2) partial reburials under metates; and (3) fractional
burials with interment of leg bones only. This variation in a single site
is of interest. Formality appears present only in the first form; here all
the bodies were fully extended with the heads orientated toward the south.
Other than manos and metates, mortuary offerings were rare. In only one
instance (Treganza and Malamud, 1950, burial 3) did we find what could be
called a positive artifact association, that of a chert blade and a quartz
crystal.
Artifacts of apparent nonutilitarian usage leave us with the convenient,
but not to satisfactory, classification of "ceremonial." It is only
through inference that we can assume functional use in ceremonies of such
objects as cog stones and a variety of stone disks. Since the
spindle-shaped charm stone and the stone cogs and disks appear to be
nearly mutually exclusive of one another in their distribution between
central and southern California, it is not improbable that the latter
constitute the "charm-stones" of the south.
Too frequently typological construct and metric measurements lead to
sterility of interpretation divorced of any humanistic concept. At one
time the Tank Site was occupied by a living culture and to some degree the
occupants must have participated in activities other than those
surrounding a fulfillment of a food economy. To this point it is difficult
to explain large lithic concentrations consisting of unworked stone,
broken metates and manos, core tools, and occasional sections of human
long bones. Such occurrences are too large and too frequent to have
resulted from mere chance, and for this reason we have given them the term
"features." The material content of these aggregations suggests refuse
dumps of worn out and broken implements, but if so they would collectively
have occupied a considerable part of the central living area. Conceivably
their central location could suggest some ceremonial involving the concept
of a "shrine." That these features could represent some manifestation of
the "Annual Mourning Ceremony" seems most dubious. Irrespective of the
probability that the Mourning Ceremony is ancient in southern California
the differences in cultural inventory and time between the Tank Site and
the early and historic phases of the Gabrielino are such that it would be
wishful thinking to imply any historical connection.
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