CALIFORNIA’S COASTAL HOMELANDS
In the shade of a ground-floor parking deck inside a campus garage, Santa Clara University archaeologist Lee Panich points out a dark rectangle etched into the gray concrete surface. It marks the foundation of an adobe structure, one of the few physical reminders of a part of California history usually left out of the books.
Between 1777 and 1833, what is today the city of Santa Clara was the site of a Spanish missionary outpost. Home to a few Franciscan friars, a handful of Spanish soldiers, and hundreds of Indigenous Californians, it was one of a string of missions that extended the reach of the Spanish Empire nearly 2,000 miles north of Mexico City in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
In 2012, construction work prompted the university to dig up an area the size of a city block a few hundred yards from the campus’ missionstyle church, built in 1926 after a fire destroyed the original. Historical records showed that many of the mis-sion’s Native inhabitants were crowded into long adobe barracks near the mission church like the barracks whose foundation is marked in the parking garage. During the excavation, archaeologists found evidence—postholes, artifacts, and plant remains—that other Native residents had made their homes nearby in dwellings constructed of lightweight tule reed, creating a bustling town around the church. Members of Native American tribes from across the San Francisco Bay Area lived alongside each other, for perhaps the first time. “This was the core of the Native neighborhood,” Panich says, walking out into the bright California sun. “The only way you could have found it was with ground-penetrating radar or a big construction project like this.”
The soil stains left by postholes and firepits weren’t all that researchers uncovered. Hundreds of obsidian tools, glass and shell beads, and other finds now rest in dozens of cardboard storage boxes at the university. These artifacts and others are helping to illuminate how Indigenous Californians reacted to Spanish
