 That is how it was then in the beginning. All the earth was covered with water, darkness was everywhere. Then one day, coming along one day, turtle came, came along swimming in the water. Then down from the sky, down from above, came he who began all things, he, earthmaker. And he was bright, very bright, he shone like the sun. Brother said, turtle, brother, can't you make me some nice dry land so I can come up out of the water sometime? And so earthmaker sent turtle down to get some mud, to dive down deep to get some mud from the bottom. And then turtle said, brother, I cannot stay in the dark all the time. Can't you make a light so I can see? And earthmaker said, look that way. Look to the east. I'm going to tell my sister to come up. How do you like it, said earthmaker? It's very good, said turtle. Is that all you're going to do? And earthmaker said, no. I'm going to do more yet. And then he made a tree, a tree with 12 kinds of acorns, with all the acorns growing on it. This is the world that earthmaker and turtle saw. It is still here in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California. But the people who told the stories of its creation are gone. The windtoon, the atu-geiwi, the akomaui, the yana, the miwak, and the maidu. All are gone. The questions that we as archaeologists seek answers to, questions about culture and changes in cultural system or evolution of man's behavior. There is such a thing as a discipline of anthropological archaeology which is generating theories and methods which are new, which are innovative, in some ways which are, let's say, much more promising than those coming from other kinds of social science. The questions that these archaeologists are asking are based on contemporary anthropological theory about man and time. How do societies exist, change, and adjust to changing environments? Why do they sometimes fail to adjust and survive? This film is about one group of anthropologists working with one culture within a particular span of time. They have chosen to limit their investigation to the Maidu Indians of Northern California who last inhabited the Sacramento Valley in the late 19th century. They know that there were changes in the Maidu culture. Their goal is to determine how and perhaps why these changes took place through time. Ecology, history, geography, ethnography. The archaeologists must become thoroughly familiar with the world as the Maidu and others of the time experienced it. On this day we came to the first Indian village built on the banks of the river and consisting of at least 30 or 35 well-made huts dug half in the ground and walled and roofed very much like those of the Maidu Indians of North America. The huts were dug about four feet deep into the ground, strong posts being set up in the inside and in the middle, with rafters and beams across them which were overlaid and connected with branches and finally covered with a thick and well-beaten coat of earth which was of a perfectly round shape and turned off the rain completely. Above ground those rose to a height of six or eight feet having a small and low entry. The point is that we're simply not supplementing historic evidence or ethnographic accounts. We're actually using historic evidence and ethnographic accounts to supplement archaeologically generated theories about evolution of California Indians and other things. The archaeologists go out to look at the world that they have until now known only through written accounts and previously gathered data. They will learn to work and think in different dimensions of time. I think that the local Maidu had a rather civilized approach to this damn yellow stuff. It wasn't worth anything. You can't make a fish hook out of it. What can you do with it? It may hadn't gotten around to filling teeth. The weekly current June 17th, 1871, Butte Creek Mines. These mines have been doing well this season yielding from fifteen to twenty five dollars per day. The scarcity of water has been a great drawback but the Cherokee company commenced piping in their claims. They have an ample supply of water and are washing down the side of the hill with great rapidity. If you can swap a day's labor for some cloth or a hatchet or a iron knife, you have something of value. But what good is this yellow stuff? What is this passion of these bearded characters have? Mr. Harris has gone below with a large sack, apparently enough to buy half of San Francisco or Chico. When the water improvements of Cherokee are completed, there will be nothing in the way to prevent her miners from getting rich. Field research continues. The world of the Maidu begins to take form. The questions which should be asked about it become clearer. The nature of the introduced things is obvious. The downfall of the original vegetation is a little easier. It has too many crystals in it. When you try to chip these into forms, they would probably break unevenly. We noted in our aero reconnaissance that almost all the hilltops in the basin show a different soil color than the surrounding gullies. This appears to be due to... We have another kind of site which is a deep midden which may or may not have house pits on. First of all, it was Squire Wright and he was my grandmother's brother. He settled in about 1849 and that became the California man. He got a hotel to be done quick in about 1850. I don't remember knowing any Indians when I was little. My dad did when he knew them. I mean, when he was living, he said there were about 200 Indians down at the ranch. We found a lot of shafts, straighteners and mortars and pestles and there was loads and loads all the time. It was there before they moved away. But since I was born, there's never been any Indians around here. I never knew any of them but there have been none. Gradually, the scope of their research narrows. Attention is focused on a large village site which appears to be representative of Maidu culture as it may have existed from AD 1500 to the end of the 19th century. Four butte one. Four the number given to the state of California. Butte the county name. And one indicating that it was the first site recorded in the county. It is here that the archeologists will attempt to find answers to their questions about the Maidu. For the next six weeks, their world will be a small patch of land which may or may not. Yield data that will answer questions about a now extinct tribe. Perhaps more important for student and archeologists alike. Four butte one will offer a chance to test, to reject, to learn. When a modern archeologist goes through an archeological site, he doesn't view the site as simply a mine out of which he gets things. He views the site as a laboratory in which he's going to carry on an experiment. I think that's the real thing quite a bit. When they're bulldozing and they cut down all this land out here and fill in the slough, soil rises or dips. You look for indications of bulldozers and so forth. And what you will probably come up with, a lot more questions and you'll ever come up with answers. But never, once you start working in this area, never forget to realize that you're still in a larger world when you're driving home in a truck. How long was four butte one inhabited? Where were village activities carried out and by whom? What did the houses of the Maidu look like? The study of artifacts and the relationships between artifacts may provide some of the information needed to answer these questions. Preliminary clearing and measuring of the site begins. The archeologists are here to gather data. They must precisely record the detailed location or provenience of each object found at the site. Keep track of the absolute elevation with respect to that concrete marker. And we obviously do that with the stadia rod and transit there. We also keep track of what we call arbitrary level. The first unit that I took out would always be level one. Here, regardless of whether you're high on a hill or low in the valley, you start counting from the top. 90 pieces freshwater clam shell. Two iron nails. 26 fragments small mammal bone. Eight shell beads. One obsidian floor. Two olivella side-lopped beads. Five square nails. One deer pelvis, burnt. Four groundstone fragments. July 10. We covered two pestles, three beads, one projectile point, 30 pieces of bone. Jim said we should look out for unusual pieces. Three shotgun shells. Five pieces worth bone. Level two. Found four clam shell disc beads. Also a piece of shell shaped like an arrowhead. Badon said they didn't make them out of shell. 90 pieces freshwater clam shell. Two iron nails. 26 fragments small mammal bone. July 10. Found two pestles, three bone awls, 20 basalt flakes today. Had to throw out a lot of things I thought were artifacts, but weren't. One horseshoe. Two mortar fragments. 15 glass fragments. The large rock pedestal in area two turned out to be a mortar with one hole. We made a drawing, measured it, took a depth measurement, and removed it to the laboratory. One pestle fragment. 50 pieces freshwater shell. One possible charm stone. It's very difficult for a student. It's like an antiquarian. To distinguish between discovering things and interpreting things. That is just because it's an experiment. That doesn't mean that you rule out discovery, but you don't go there simply discover things. You're reconstructing something. And it involves both elements of discovery from the standpoint of discovering relationships between things which are not necessarily always very obvious. You have to collect data in a certain way so that subsequent analysis will allow you to perceive kinds of relationships that maybe you can't immediately see when you're in the field. The next thing, and this is just for sampling, you'll understand this later. If you're starting out a new level and it's level with the ground, in other words it's already been excavated several levels and it starts out at a level and it goes down a full half a foot. You write complete level, right? This clues us in to look for other bags from other days perhaps that would have artifacts from the same level in it. Then when you're done that level, get out of the pit and write some notes. Now it may be that you didn't find a damn thing. You say you didn't find a damn thing. But if you found something, you can make comments to yourself. I'm not expecting a list of artifacts that you found. I found two and a half projectile points and so forth. What I'm expecting is you want to build up some sort of a comparative memory and say well we found a lot of this compared with yesterday or a little of this compared with yesterday or say a lot of bone was turning up in the pit. This is just a matter of experience. You'll learn through time what you have to put in there. The field laboratory. Artifacts are brought here each day for the preliminary processing that is the beginning of formal archeological classification. One of the big changes here between antiquarian interests and modern anthropological interest in archaeological remains is that as a modern archeologist, I'm primarily interested in the systematic relationships that are preserved for us in the archaeological record between things. I'm interested in the organization which is manifest in archaeological remains. And this is what all of my data collecting techniques and my complicated analysis is aimed at both discovering order in the archaeological record and revealing relationships between products of man's activity and byproducts of his behavior. The national ornaments seem to be of very simple kind. They all had both men and women, their ears pierced, in these sympathies that would acquit ornament and paint it. You're always bouncing back and forth like a yoyo between these two poles of working experimentally, orienting yourself in terms of some kind of problems, but at the same time trying to maintain as many nerve endings as you can to the possibilities of new things and variations. When people live on the surface of the earth, they tend to modify the natural chemistry of the soil and they do this by discarding waste products. And many of the chemical compounds remain mixed with the soil. With time and abandonment of the site, the chemically altered soil becomes buried. When the archeologist digs into the site, he uncovers the chemically altered soil. You simply can't be an objective machine that gets all the facts because the facts themselves have to be defined in terms of your problem. And so you try to maintain as much flexibility as you can. But invariably, it's just like any man going out and studying the tribe, he comes home and analyzes his information, he finds, well, there are certain kinds of things I should have tried to find out. And I didn't. I was always more serious when you do this in archaeology because you destroyed the site. And actually, by getting some kinds of data, you probably destroyed the other kinds. We're getting fewer core tools in area five than in area one, but a lot more bone. Could this be an area of bone tool manufacture or was it just a trash dump for garbage? August 6th. We're getting deeper and beginning to find burnt orange clay and small ash lenses in the soil. But we're not sure of their significance yet. Little bits of charcoal scattered through some of the clay. There's been an increase in grinding stones in the northwest area on the northwest side and a decrease of chipping waste. This may be an area of women's work. August 14th. We're finding quite large charcoal fragments with burnt clay. This may be an indication of roof covering and beam. Well, there's sort of a split personality that any really sophisticated archaeologist has. In that he has to have the sophistication of flexibility. But at the same time, he has to meet a payroll. That is, there are always practical limitations to what he can do. And this plays an enormously important role in that it is impossible to objectively get all the different kinds of data that are available. We're beginning to uncover burnt house posts. We have to work carefully because we don't know how the posts are laid out yet and we might cut through one or miss one. Spent two hours today putting preservative on house posts. We're going to try to take it out whole. We've come down on the center of the house and are following the floor out to the rim. The floor is fragile, so we work barefoot. They're basically the same. There are posts around the edge, sometimes one in the center, and a central fire pit with one or more mortars near it. We found that the floor is more compact near the center of the house. It appears that most indoor activities were carried on here. We're beginning to see the saucer shape of the house and the pattern of the posts. The floor around the house is very important. Okay? Do you think that's all the same floor there from here over there? Mm-hmm. Yeah, same level. Same floor. I don't know really where it goes. There's a lot of posts in there. Yeah, there's a pit post right down there. Mm-hmm. Two of them, right? Is that another one? Well, that's a good one, man. This one you can't see. This one's wild. Is it real? Yeah. We'll tell you about the time that they went in and lived there at the site. And the chief came up and asked his grandmother to come down to the celebration, down to the big sweat houses. They went down there and went in their sweat house to see the celebration. And when they got there, the Indians all got, they had a bonfire in the middle of this dance hall. It was dark in there and smoky. And a whole lot of the Indians lined up all around the wall. They brought them in there and set them down. The remnant of the tribe of Indians, which some years ago, number 2,000 souls, were removed a few days ago by Colonel Henley to the Nome Lackey Reservation. The first manifested a great unwillingness to be removed from their old stamping ground, and it was only on the adoption decisive measures that their removal affected. After finding that they would be compelled to abandon their rancheria, they determined to destroy it in total, even to their acorns that had been garnered for the winter. These, the colony suggested, should be left for those who remained behind. They objected and would not be satisfied unless they destroyed them. He then offered to purchase them and give them blankets in payment. They are sent into the arrangement, but occasionally during the night they would steal away, and presently the mounting flame would note the destruction of a lodge, till all were in ashes. The summer at 4 Butte 1 is reaching its end. Final measuring, recording and removing of artifacts takes place. The individual units of excavation are looked at in the framework of the whole site. Just as the site will be regarded as only a part of the total Maidu culture, and that culture in turn is part of a larger natural system. The data has been collected. The archaeologists must now attempt to understand the fragments he has gathered as part of a system that tried to maintain a particular balance. And when that balance was upset beyond regulation, died. 4 Butte 1 may provide some information as to the nature of culture and cultural systems. But quite possibly it will also raise new questions that archaeologists must seek to answer at another time, another place.