Often these scenarios come from connecting things that don’t normally get connected.  In this case, the things that aren’t normally connected are three books I recently read.  What follows aren’t formal book reviews.  They just point to the facts or theories that I cherry-picked from the first two of the books.  I initially planned to do the same thing with the third book, and then go to a scenario that used that information, but I ran out of time, and didn’t feel that I had enough background to do the scenario yet.
This portion is going to involve two books and the background for one part of the scenario.  Hopefully the third book and the rest of the scenario, including the Siberian Connection will come next issue.
 
Book 1: Islanders & Mainlanders: Prehistoric Context for the Southern California Blight edited by Jeffrey H. Altshul and Donn R. Grenda


This book collects a number of essays involving the Chumash and Gabrielino Indians of Southern California.  The Chumash and Gabrielino were non-agricultural, but they developed relatively large populations, craft specialists, and complex political and economic institutions based on intensive use of marine resources.  Both tribes built large seagoing plank canoes that the Chumash called tomols.  Those canoes were capable of hauling up to 3000 to 4000 pounds of cargo, and the tribes often towed a second canoe filled with trade goods to increase the cargo capacity.  Both tribes used the canoes for extensive trade with off-shore islands, and had a kind of bead money that they used in a rather complex economy.  

The Chumash apparently had a much larger and denser population than the Gabrielino.  They also had a much more complex political and economic system. Chumash tomol owners belonged to an association called the Brotherhood of the Tomol which regulated economic activity to reduce the potential for intercommunity violence in a climate where food availability fluctuated a great deal.  The Gabrielino had similar but less complex institutions.

According to the book, the tomol was probably a relatively recent innovation, developed around 500 AD from a less sophisticated dugout canoe and not reliably seaworthy until around 800 to 1000 AD.  

The Indian population appears to have expanded noticeably starting around 500 AD and more rapidly starting at around 1000 AD.  By the time of sustained Spanish contact Chumash villages had populations of up to 2000 people while Gabrielino villages were much smaller—in the 100 to 150 range.  The overall Chumash population was probably close to 20,000 while there may have been around 3000 Gabrielinos.  The Chumash and Gabrilino weren’t at the same level of some of the northwestern tribes but they were very advanced for non-agricultural groups.

Two of the essays in the book look at possible reasons why the two societies, and especially the Chumash became so complex.  One prominent explanation is that as populations grew over time Indian mobility decreased.  Land was increasingly ‘owned’ by some group.  That meant that Indians in the area could no longer respond to short-term local fluctuations in food supply caused by floods or droughts by moving to less affected areas.  Local food resources would be very unpredictable in Southern California for a large population of hunter-gatherers.  Institutions that allowed trade over a large area may have developed to deal with that unpredictability.  The ability to store value in bead ‘money’ that could be exchanged for food in times of local shortage would have also helped buffer against times of famine.  

There is a certain amount of chicken and egg argument going on here in my opinion.  The increasing complexity probably made at least part of the population growth possible, while the population growth made the complexity necessary.   

Book 2: Before the Wilderness-Environmental Management by Native Californians edited by: Thomas C, Blackburn and Kal Anderson

Book says that most California Indians were “quasi-or semi-agricultural”.  They manipulated plants and environments in a variety of ways that gave them a lot of the same benefits of agriculture and that blur the line between hunter-gatherer and farmer.

When you think about it’s unrealistic to expect cultures to fit neatly into boxes—hunter-gatherers in one box, farmers in the other.  It’s more realistic to expect a continuum of adaptations, with pure hunter-gatherers at one end, a wide variety of adaptations to various environments in the middle, and essentially pure farmers on the other.  California Indians were in the middle, probably on their way to eventually becoming farmers if they had been given several hundred or possibly a thousand additional years to develop the potential of the plants they used for food.

One complication in California is that systematic collection and preparation of acorns and other nuts, along with salmon fishing and in some places use of ocean resources, often gave Indians a livelihood that compared reasonably well to farming in terms of ability to support large populations and sophisticated political systems.  That well-developed and sophisticated way of life may have made California Indians somewhat resistant to full-scale agriculture, especially agriculture based on plants not adapted to California’s climate, such as corn.

The book claims that while the acorn/salmon complex was important, other plant foods were also important.  Indians in much of California planted tobacco.  Some tribes planted seeds from wild plants and transplanted individual plants for plants where that was possible.  In some tribes individuals, and especially medicine men cleared little areas at a convenient place and planted favored wild plants.  Several California Indian groups, including the Chumash, burned vegetation to encourage various favored plant species.  The burning actually created an environment favorable for the development of large seeds, and early Spanish accounts talk about species of large-seeded grains that were exploited by the Indians.

This subsistence base allowed activities that are normally associated with agricultural people in some favored areas.  The Chumash had craft specialists, large-scale trade, hereditary chiefs, and even a calendar based on astronomical observations.  

Some Alternate History potential: If you’ve read many of these scenarios, you’ve probably figured out the general direction I’m headed with this.  How can we end up with California Indians developing further along their road to civilization before the Spanish got to California?

My impression is that by 1500 AD the most advanced California Indians were at the same general level of development that the most advanced groups of the eastern US had been at around 1500 years earlier.  Any comparison of that kind is obviously very subjective, and California Indians certainly were much more advanced than that in some areas, especially economic and political, and behind in others such as development of farming.  Overall though I think that captures the general level of development.   

The most obvious way to get the California Indians further along would be to move the big population boost further back in time.  That’s more difficult than it sounds because the developments may be tied in to a specific sequence of climate changes in the area.  For example, more frequent rough seas might have made tomols and the trading networks they allowed too risky to use routinely earlier than the time they developed.  That may or may not have been the case, but if I can avoid that problem and just figure out a way to move the developing cultures along a little faster than they moved historically that would be the preferred point of divergence.

How much would things have to accelerate?  Let’s say we’re aiming to get the California Indians to about the level of the Mississippians of the eastern US at their highest point.  Let’s aim to get them there by about 1540.  Historically, California Indian development probably slowed down somewhat and may have regressed in some ways during the roughly 250 years between the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the start of Spanish missions in California.  There is some evidence that European diseases, including smallpox, hit some parts of California during that period.  Also, trade networks that included Indians outside of California would have been disrupted by Spanish conquests in Northern Mexico and the Pueblo areas, along with the spread of Spanish diseases in those areas.  

All of these factors probably mean that the California Indians that the Spanish saw when they established missions in California were somewhat less advanced than they would have been at that time in the absence of Spanish activity around California.

Mississippian civilization began to hit its stride around 700 to 800 AD, initially using mostly native eastern US plants, but then shifting to corn and other plants ultimately from Mexico.  That followed a gradual shift to greater and greater dependence on cultivated plants over a period of well over a thousand years.  California Indians didn’t have that kind of time.  If we figure that based on the experience of the Mississippians and their predecessors, plus some other transitions to agriculture, the process would typically take somewhat over a thousand years, we would need to get the California Indians on a faster-paced trajectory by around 500 AD.

Somehow introducing already established crops like corn to California probably wouldn’t do the trick by itself.  Corn can grow in many parts of California, but the most of the rain there comes at the wrong time of the year for optimum corn farming.  Historically the acorn/salmon complex seems to have been reasonably competitive with corn in California’s climate.  Also, corn isn’t the easiest of crops to grow on a casual part-time basis.  It would probably be easier for agriculture to develop out of the native California wild food plants because they were already adapted to the California climate, but that historically took more time than the California Indians had before the Spanish arrived.

What point of divergence could realistically do that kind of compression?  One possibility would be increased contact with already agricultural societies early in the development of complexity in California.  That would expose more California Indians to the infrastructure and ideas involved in farming.

 What would bring about that kind of trade?  California had two things that might bring in long distance traders.  The first potential trade good was steatite or soapstone, a kind of stone that could easily be carved into a kind of pseudo-pottery that actually had several advantages over pottery.  Steatite was exploited to some extent for several thousand years, but only became a major trade good around 1650 AD, and rarely got far from its point of origin.  The second thing that might have been attractive to traders was a hallucinogenic drug that some tribes southeast of the Chumash used to promote visions in various ceremonies.

At this point I’m afraid I’ve run out of time.  What would it take to give us more advanced California Indian societies?  What would those societies look like?  And what’s that Siberian Connection business all about?  Hopefully I’ll answer all of those questions next issue.