Native sites a link to the ancient past
In the East Bay hills, there are roughly 80 village sites and 2,000 mortar holes from ancient tribes. Dozens more can be discovered in Marin County, the Peninsula and hills of the South Bay.
Each fall, the ancients used the mortars to grind the seeds of acorns into flour.
About 8 million people now live in the Bay Area, depending on where you draw the boundaries. Few seem to know that 200 years ago, about 10,000 lived here in a matrix of tribes and that the fall acorn harvest was a foundation of their culture.
Perhaps a template for how to educate the public and protect the sites at the same time is available at Indian Grinding Rock State Park. The centerpiece is the “grinding rock,” where you can see 1,185 mortars, along with a reconstructed Mi-Wok village. It is located in the foothills of Amador County near the town of Volcano, east of Jackson.
Visiting the park is like a living history lesson. Last weekend, the park held its annual Acorn Harvest Festival.
Over the years, I’ve shelled the acorns, ground them with a pestle, and then, just as the ancient tribes once did, tried to rinse out the bitter acorn taste to make a base flour to cook with. Turns out as a fisherman and hunter, I may have been able to survive in the ancient days, but as a cook, well, pretty much a failure! The flour looked kind of like a tannish glop, and to eat it set off gag
reflex. But it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.
The American Indian sites in the Bay Area could take on the same historical and educational values as Indian Grinding Rock.
In the foothills surrounding the Bay Area, for instance, while hiking or mountain biking, keep an eye out for sandstone outcrops. You can sometimes find grinding mortars in them. Then you can transport yourself back in time to the ancient days, to when the tribes caught salmon in the creeks, hunted deer and elk, and collected acorns from the oaks.
A group called the East Bay Hill People has envisioned a park where existing parks with American Indian sites would be linked and protected. Their motto: “Respect the history.” The template for how to do his is at Indian Grinding Rock.
Re-created villages are also available at Point Reyes National Seashore and Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont.
Fall flight spectacle
The first aerial survey of the fall season counted 209,755 waterfowl that already have arrived at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex, reported Mike Carpenter at the refuge. That number includes 107,951 pintail ducks and nearly 40,000 geese. By Thanksgiving, more than 500,000 pintail are expected to arrive. As fall arrives, the flyways will be full of ducks, geese, shorebirds and migrants of all kinds, heading to California and the wetland marshes and uplands of the Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin Valley, bay and delta. The best driving tour is on the levee roads amid the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, located along Interstate 5, just north of Maxwell. Information: U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, (530) 934-2801; www.fws.gov/refuge/ sacramento.