Gabrielino Bibliography

 

Bates, E. H.

      1972    Los Altos (LAn-270):  A Late Horizon Site in Long Beach, California. Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 8(2):1-56.

The report for this site describes it as a fairly typical southern California Indian village site, which was excavated as a salvage operation.  The site has been placed within Horizon IV:  Late Prehistoric Cultures (Wallace 1955).

 

Bean, L. J., and C. R. Smith

      1978    Gabrielino. In California. R.F. Heizer, ed. Pp. 538-549. Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 8. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

This article from the California volume of the Smithsonian’s Handbook of North American Indians discusses several aspects of Gabrielino history and ethnology.  Included are sections on language, territory, environment, history, and religion.  In the section on Gabrielino culture, topics such as clothing and adornment, technology, structures, social and political organization, shamanism, life cycle and subsistence are covered.  A section on external relations, covers topics such as war, feuds, intermarriage, and trade.

 

Blackburn, T. C.

      1963    Ethnohistoric Descriptions of Gabrielino Material Culture. University of California, Archaeological Survey Annual Report, 1962-1963:1-49.

“Although archaeologists have generally recognized the significant contribution that ethnohistoric information can make toward the solution of many otherwise insoluble archaeological problems, they have all too often failed to utilize fully this important source of complementary data.  While this neglect may occasionally reflect a suspicion of “biased” or “non-professional” information, it may also be due to a reluctance to enter what is often considered the proper domain of the historian.  It is a difficult, tedious and time-consuming task to ferret out useful scraps of information from the mass of nondescript and often uninteresting diaries, traveler’s accounts, local histories, newspaper articles, manuscripts and antique scholarly contributions that comprises the bulk of the material that must be consulted in the course of such research.  It is not surprising, therefore, that the average archaeological report either ignores the problem of ethnographic interpretation, or else is content to follow the guidance of a more ambitious (or less cautious) contribution.

      The paper presented here was undertaken with this problem in mind, and the resultant compilation, while of immediate areal interest, will, hopefully, also indicate some of the archaeological potentialities inherent in such research.  It is composed primarily of early historic and ethnographic descriptions of the material culture of the Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles County, a group that was extinct as a living tribal entity long before the period of modern ethnographic research began.  Since our knowledge of Gabrielino culture is limited to the little we can learn from archaeological excavations or cull from the few and scattered early written sources at our disposal, it was felt that the presentation of data from these sources in the form employed here would be of value in the interpretation and efficient utilization of the sparse and rapidly disappearing archaeological record.  Because this paper is intended to serve primarily as a convenient reference work for the archaeologist working in former Gabrielino territory, the author has limited its scope to those items that might conceivably affect the archaeological record.  The anthropologist or ethnologist will find little reference to non-material aspects of culture, while at the same time a large umber of items have been included which would only be encountered in an archaeological context under unusual (but not impossible) circumstances.” [Author’s abstract]

 

Hudson, D. T.

      1971    Proto-Gabrielino Patterns of Territorial Organization in South Coastal California. Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 7(2):49-75.

“This paper will attempt to interpret social organization and to define the patterns of territorial organization within the proto-Gabrielino area of south coastal California.  The most basic level of this approach will be to consider the available local resources that were exploited to determine activities and seasonalities.  From this the formation of spatial units can be defined and compared for different macro-environmental areas within the proto-Gabrielino area.  The data to be presented here will to be based totally on archaeological evidence but will be defined first on the basis of ethnographic and ecological grounds.  Archaeological data, however, will form the basis of this paper” (Hudson 1971:51-52).

 

Hudson, T.

      1979    A Rare Account of Gabrielino Shamanism from the Notes of John P. Harrington. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 1:356-362.

“Narratives which concern shamanism among the Gabrielino of southern California are always important, since so little of this aspect of their culture has survived.  It was thus with great delight that I discovered one such narrative among some notes on Gabrielino material culture that I had ordered from the Smithsonian Institution.  The account, recorded by John P. Harrington, pertains to shamanism at Mission San Gabriel and Santa Catalina Island, and its rich detail provides the opportunity to make comparative studies.  I have lightly edited the account, and at the end of the narrative the reader will find a few notes made where confusion or contradiction existed, or elaboration was felt justified” (Hudson 1979:356).

 

Johnston, B. E.

      1962    California's Gabrielino Indians. Los Angeles: Southwest Museum.

Originally published as a series of articles for The Masterkey running from 1955 through 1957.  At the time it was published, it filled an important gap in the knowledge of Los Angeles’ aboriginal inhabitants.  Johnston compiled her information from various publications and manuscripts, as well as through fieldwork, relocating sites and interviewing informants.  She drew heavily on the work of J. P. Harrington and A. L. Kroeber, as well.  This work is adequately illustrated with maps, drawings and photographs of artifacts.

 

Koerper, H. C., C. E. Drover, A. E. Flint, and G. Hurd

      1978    Gabrielino Tizon Brown Pottery. Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 14(3):43-58.

“Interpretation of data from neutron activation analysis of Orange County Tizon Brown Ware pottery sherds allows acceptance of the hypothesis that at least some Late Prehistoric Gabrielino were manufacturing rather than trading for ceramics.  It is speculated that pottery manufacture may just as well have diffused to the Newport Bay area from the Serrano or Cahuilla as from the Luiseño.  Notes on thin section analysis of Tizon Brown sherds are added as are notes on the subject of southern California plain ware taxonomy.” [Authors’ abstract]

 

Koerper, Henry Carl

      1981    Prehistoric Subsistence and Settlement in the Newport Bay Area and Environs, Orange County, California.  Dissertation. Department of Anthropology. University of California, Riverside

 

McCawley, William

      1996    The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles. Banning: Malki Museum Press.

      2002    A Tale of Two Cultures: the Chumash and the Gabrielino.  In Islanders and Mainlanders: Prehistoric Context for the Southern California Bight. Edited by Jeffrey H. Altschul and Donn R. Grenda.  Tucson: SRI Press.

 

Munoz, Jeanne

      1982    A Partial Index to the Mission San Gabriel, Baptism, Marriage, and Death Registers.  Los Angeles: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Los Angeles District, Environmental Planning Section.

 

Reid, H.

      1926    The Indians of Los Angeles County. Los Angeles: Privately printed.

This volume is a reprint of articles written by Hugo Reid (1811?-1853), and published in the Los Angeles Star.  They have been compiled by Arthur M. Ellis, from the scrapbook collection of clippings in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.  The title is slightly misleading, since the subjects of his articles were specifically the Gabrielino Indians, whereas there were several groups present in Los Angeles County at the time, among them Serrano, Alliklik, Fernandeño, Juaneño, and probably some Chumash, and Yumans.  Reid was married to a Gabrielino woman, Victoria, which gained him entrée into the culture of these people.

 

      1968    The Indians of Los Angeles County:  Hugo Reid's letters of 1852.  Edited and annotated by R. F. Heizer. Los Angeles: Southwest Museum.

Same as the above reference, with notes and comments by Heizer.

 

Woodward, A.

1944        Gabrielino Indian Language. Masterkey 18:145-149.

This short article contains the translation of a manuscript in the museum found in the San Gabriel Mission, and a letter from Hugo Reid originally published in The Los Angeles Star, Feb. 28, 1852.  Both of these documents contain short vocabulary lists and grammars of the Gabrielino language.