The Santa Barbara Indians

During the course of his pioneering involvement with California archaeology, Stephen Bowers wrote a number of brief essays (in often somewhat obscure venues) on the prehistory and Native American inhabitants of the Santa Barbara region. These essays can occasionally seem repetitious to the modern reader, since Bowers was fond of using particular phrases or even entire paragraphs more than once, and the same wording and examples can be found in various combinations in manuscripts often separated by many years. The unpublished manuscript presented here (which was written in 1897, well after Bowers’ period of active involvement in archaeology) is no exception, in that it contains some of the same material found in other, recently published Bowers writings (see particularly Appendix B of Arlene Benson’s the Noontide Sun: the Field Journals of the Reverend Stephen Bowers, Pioneer California Archaeologist [Ballena Press, 1997]). However, it also contains previously unpublished information that is unique, signi cant, and still germane to contemporary discussions of Chumash social organization. The manuscript (Southwest Museum Ms. 532, Folder 19) is reproduced here through the courtesy of the Braun Research Library, Autrey National Center of the American West, Los Angeles