Third, such variations are shaped by the specific demands of subsistence. When a people’s diet is based on hunted game, they tend to move more frequently, occupying circular or semicircular dwellings built from locally available or transported materials—especially if they have dogs, horses, or caribou that can carry tents and poles. When a people’s diet is based on fish, mollusks, or marine mammals, they tend to be less mobile, living in more permanent and substantial dwellings.
Binford’s insights imply that the earliest forms of mobile homes reflect the calculations of survival. We have to consider the dwelling within a complex framework of other decisions—about food-getting and movement—that hunter-gatherers make in order to survive. Rather than the blind clawings away from beastliness as the Enlightenment thinkers had suggested, such little rustic huts reflect a rationality that those savants would have prized.
. . .
On the Pacific Coast of Baja California, powerful waves chisel away at the coastal terrace. The coastal terrace consists of uplifted marine sediments, ancient shorelines raised as the Earth’s tectonic plates groaned and buckled. The soils are an unconsolidated jumble of wave-rolled cobbles, clays, and silts. In deep, ancient times when glaciers melted and sea levels rose, the Pacific Ocean cut a long escarpment that runs for 150 kilometers, still visible 130,000 years later. A handful of brief rivers and numerous small arroyos cut through the coastal terrace in search of the sea.
Arroyo Hondo forms a large and (as the name suggests) deep drainage that slices a convoluted landscape whose names portray the difficulties of travel by Catholic missionaries and Mexican soldiers. Almost two hundred years after sea voyagers claimed the Californias for Spain, the colonization of Baja California was a slow and painful process in a landscape of agony. Even when translated into English, the place-names reflect this. Viper Pass. Arroyo of the Martyrs. The Sacrifice.
The Native American experience of this same place was profoundly different. Traveling over the cactus-spiked mesas between the warm waters of the Gulf of California and the cold waves of the Pacific Ocean, small bands of Kiliwa and Cochimi sought food, raised children, and told legends of the making of the land. The legends recounted how Menchipa, the gigantic original deity, created freshwater springs with the tip of his walking staff as he strode across the world. Each night the three Mountain Sheep stars, known to Europeans as the stellar trio in Orion’s belt, galloped across the peninsula in the luminous night sky.
Few Europeans perceived this order, the way landscape and movement could result in the creation of home. One Jesuit missionary, the German priest John Jakob Baegert, described the natives as Naturvoelklein who “by no means represented communities of rational beings, … but resembled nothing less than a herd of swine, each of which runs around grunting as it likes, together today and scattered tomorrow till they meet again by accident at some future time.”7 Another Jesuit, the usually informative observer Miguel del Barco, said of the generally naked natives, “The house and dwelling of the Californians are no better nor comfortable than their costumes and dresses.”8 A Mexican Jesuit who spent the late eighteenth century in northern Baja California lamented the general disorder of indigenous society: “They have no government nor do they recognize a king … but only some captain and as they possess no titles to land, no houses, no real estate, nor have any sort of towns, … the need to find food prevents them from establishing themselves in fixed places.”9 What these Europeans failed to see was the stability of movement, a durably flexible response that is evident in the archaeology of Baja California.
Since the early 1990s, I have conducted archaeological research in the San Quintín–El Rosario region, on the Pacific coast about two hundred miles south of the U.S. -Mexico border. My students and I have recorded hundreds of sites.10 The oldest known site dates to 5890–5660 B.C., and a handful of other sites are from the first half of the sixth millennium B.C. Since older sites have been discovered to the north and south, I assume that people moved through the region even earlier. Presumably, these older sites were eroded away or flooded as glacial sheets melted and sea levels rose to modern heights after the Pleistocene.
But after about 5500 B.C., we have dated enough archaeological sites to suggest how people made this landscape into home. First, just as the Jesuits had observed, there were no towns or cities: sites are relatively small open-air camps, most probably inhabited for a single season. There are no traces of permanent houses or other structures, and dwellings were probably brush windbreaks. Second, people seem to have followed the same basic pursuits: they made stone tools, collected shellfish from sandy beaches and rocky coastlines, hunted deer with spear-throwers and darts, and gathered agaves, trimming away the barbed leaves and roasting the agave hearts. Third, the prehistoric foragers lived in the region only part of the year. Most of their sites are kilometers away from permanent springs and rivers, suggesting that people camped in the area when temporary water sources were available during the wet winter months. And this basic pattern of seasonal, short-term encampments along the coast seems to have been followed for nearly seven thousand years.
In 1996 my students and I mapped a small site on the north bank of Arroyo Hondo. Stretching over three hundred meters, the site consisted of several discrete clusters of the debris of prehistoric daily life. The clusters formed two groups, probably reflecting two or more encampments by different bands of hunters and gatherers. Bright white shells of mussels, clams, and abalones glinted among the chaparral, but they too formed clusters of species: mussels and abalones from rocky coasts, Pismo clams from open sandy beaches, and Pacific littleneck clams from quieter, protected waters. Each cluster of mollusks represented a separate collecting trip to the seashore, a distance of three kilometers or more, and then the return to the sheltered campsite at Arroyo Hondo.
Other features and objects were evidence of ancient lives. A circular platform of fire-cracked rock was the base of a hearth where agave had been roasted. Two concentrations of dark grey basalt cores, hammer-stones, and flakes were temporary workshops where stone tools were made. And sprinkled across the site were eighteen metates, flat-topped cobble grinding slabs, and a half dozen manos, fist-sized cobblestone tools rubbed back and forth to pulverize and mill hard seeds or dried meat on the metates. Because the metates are heavy stone slabs, they were not carried from place to place but simply cached under a bush until the band returned. And this was the case at Arroyo Hondo: there were two piles of cached metates, stored under sagebrush in anticipation of return.
In contrast to the Jesuits’ biases, the native occupants of Arroyo Hondo were anything but a disorganized horde, desperately roaming the landscape in search of something to eat. The site at Arroyo Hondo clearly demonstrated planning, forethought, and order. The anthropologist Michael Jackson, who lived with mobile Aboriginal peoples in Australia, has written of “the Eurocentric bias to see all human experience from the perspective of the sedentary cultivator or householder…. In the West we have a habit of thinking of home as a house. Walls make us feel secure. Individual rooms give us a sense of privacy. We tend to believe that living in a house is synonymous with being civilized.”11
But, in fact, even when hunters and gatherers make brief encampments, they clear brush, build windbreaks, light fires, and cook food. They make home.
. . .
One of the defining qualities of modern human behavior is the way we organize the places where we live. In early hominid sites, there is a jumble of activities; flakes, cut bones, and hearths are intermixed. However, with the emergence of Homo sapiens there is a greater tendency to spatial order.
For example, in Kebara Cave, located in Israel on the western escarpment of Mt. Carmel and overlooking the eastern Mediterranean Sea, excavations in the 1980s uncovered a complex record of place-making by Neanderthals.12 Archaeologists had excavated different portions of Kebara Cave since the 1930s, and by the late 1950s the Middle Paleolithic antiquity of the site was recognized (see