Prehistoric California: Boats, Shell Money, and Acorns (Prehistoric North America)

California today is the most populous state in the United States of America. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are world famous and are major tourist attractions. Yet few can mention a single aspect of California’s Native American prehistory. This video gives a thorough overview of the activities of Native Americans across California’s vast and varied regions from the San Francisco Bay Area, to the Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego areas, to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys (The Central Valley), to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and finally to the Mojave and Colorado Desert regions. Towering mountains, deserts, sprawling river and lake systems and a long coastline all rounded out by a mild climate. This is California today and was once the California that many Native Americans experienced before the arrival of Europeans in Prehistoric North America. Perhaps due to California’s vast variety of landscapes prehistoric California had an enormous amount of cultural diversity. At the time of contact with Europeans there were 100 different groups of Native Americans. Incredibly despite many of these groups living across California’s multiple different environments many of them often relied upon one primary food source to fill their bellies – the acorn. This was made possible by the abundance of acorn bearing oak trees in California. It is because of this sheer abundance of food that some researchers think that prehistoric California may have been a “Garden of Eden” where there was no need for agriculture or other developments such as pottery. This characterization may however be far from reality. Though there indeed was an absence of agriculture and pottery, it was extremely labor intensive to turn acorns into food products. There also may have been frequent warfare between prehistoric Californians due to the many battered remains that have been found. The populations of the prehistoric Californian groups were large and managed by complex chiefdoms and sociopolitical organizations. Many of the economies of these groups used shell beads as currency. Trade networks were also vast and wide ranging. Prehistoric California was likely far from being a simple and carefree landscape. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits: All music from the YouTube Audio Library --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sources: Sutton, Mark Q. A Prehistory of North America https://denniscassinelli.com/2014/02/... https://www.thoughtco.com/crescents-p...