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The Dead Must be Fed: Symbolic Meanings of the Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2009

Edward M. Luby  and
Mark F. Gruber
Edward M. Luby
Affiliation:
Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, 103 Kroeber Hall, and Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Mark F. Gruber
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, PA 15650, USA
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Abstract

Long viewed as ‘kitchen middens’, the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area have -provided archaeologists of coastal California insight into the subsistence and ecology of precontact native groups. In this article, the authors develop a framework for understanding the cultural significance of these shellmounds which regards them as intentional cultural features, incorporates social context, and builds on earlier subsistence-focused studies of the shellmounds in order to better appreciate the meaning of the numerous human remains interred therein. A structural analysis is then used to show that the concepts of food and ancestors joined together at shellmounds, so much so that ritual attention to the ancestors was very likely regarded as essential to ensuring a continuing supply of food.

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Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 1999 , pp. 95 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 1999

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