Conventional wisdom holds that the Spanish mission system effectively led to the collapse of Native American societies in coastal California. These assumptions, in turn, create artificial temporal and spatial boundaries for archaeologists interested in post-contact Indigenous communities. To date, such scholars have largely focused on sites founded by Euroamericans—such as missions, ranchos, and mercantile outposts—while prehistorians continue to study Native villages which are typically thought to have been abandoned early in the colonial era. Recent research, however, demonstrates that Native Californians continued to use a broad constellation of places as sites of refuge and persistence well after the arrival of Euroamericans.  Focusing on Tomales Bay, north of San Francisco, this talk will examine the archaeological and documentary evidence for Native autonomy during and after the mission period. In this region, mission records, early maps, and artifacts such as glass beads, point toward a complex but understudied landscape in which Native Californians navigated active missionization and early American settler colonialism.

Lee Panich is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Santa Clara University and holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research employs a combination of archaeological, ethnographic, and archival data to examine the long-term histories of the indigenous societies of western North America. Lee has conducted archaeological excavations at multiple Spanish mission sites, including Missions Santa Clara and San José in the San Francisco Bay region as well as Mission Santa Catalina in Baja California, Mexico. He is currently the co-director of a collaborative research project focused on autonomous indigenous villages that existed at the crossroads of the Spanish, Russian, Mexican, and American frontiers in Marin County, California.