The Chumash Indian culture of south central California was actually a network of seventy-five to one hundred hunting, fishing, and gathering communities who spoke eight related languages and numbered between twenty thousand and thirty thousand members on the eye of Spanish arrival. These politically independent Chumash villages of various sizes were concentrated in three regions spread over an area encompassing seven thousand square miles.
———Most numerous and largest were the coastal Chumash villages dotting 250 miles of shoreline between present-day San Obispo and Oxnard, with creek mouths and estuaries the most desirable locations. There were the island Chumashes, occupying the four channel islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel, and Anacapa. Finally, there were the interior settlements, located up to seventy-five miles into the mountainous valleys of present-day Santa Barbara County. At the conceptual center of this landscape was Mount Pinos, the Chumashes' sacred 8,831-foot peak just to the east of the present-day city of Santa Barbara.
———Chumash culture developed over many hundreds of years. Archaeologists identify the so-called Millingstone Indians to about ten thousand years ago as probable Chumash ancestors. Over time their egalitarian way of life produced the most complex, stratified society of hunters and gatherers in California. By the sixteenth century the spread-out Chumash communities were knit together by common customs and shared symbols, similar social and political systems, a far-reaching trade network, and a sense of national identity.
———Every Chumash village was governed by its wot, or chief — a position that generally was inherited through the male line. Among the wot's principal duties was caring for the indigent and elderly among his people. A larger community — such as Syuhtun, at present-day Santa Barbara, or Shisholop, at present-day Ventura — might have several wots whose other duties included assigning hunting and foraging areas, passing on requests from other Chumashes to gather food in their territory, and making sure that sufficient supplies were set aside for religious and social festivals.
———A typical Chumash village would feature fifteen to fifty tallish, bowl-shaped tule-thatched houses roughly aligned along a street. Inside the houses were woven mats, fur blankets, beautiful handmade hardwood bowls, and elegant soapstone pots decorated with shell beads. Paths led to other special-use areas, such as the community's game-playing field for intervillage tournaments and sacred enclosures for rituals. Beside many houses stood a temascal, a mud-coated, dome-shaped cleansing sweat bath that most Chumashes enjoyed daily. Close by the wot's house was a granary for stockpiling food for distribution among his neediest people.
———Since Chumash society was patrilineal and patrilocal, all of any village's married women would have come from other villages, thereby producing kinship connections across village lines. Chumash society was divided into three classes, with specialists organized into guilds on one rung, astrologers and priests on another, and on top the Wot lineages. These chiefs were assigned by their special messengers, the ksen, and assisting them in meeting their responsibilities was the community paxa, a ceremonial official who oversaw key religious rites, such as the fall's acorn harvest festival and the winter solstice rites.
———Performers at these collective ceremonies belonged to the prestigious antap ritual society. Their members were recruited from high-born families and initiated as children by learning secret dances and songs. In addition the Chumashes had shamans who mediated between tribal members and the spirit world. They cured the sick, interpreted dreams, and guided vision seekers during toloache-drinking rituals, when the highly dangerous hallucinogenic was used to enable Chumashes to make direct appeals to their spirit helpers.
———It is often suggested that the celebrated rock art of the Chumashes was applied during these toloache rites. Located throughout sandstone rock shelters and valley caves in the interior valleys, and generally near fresh water sources, Chumash rock paintings featured animal-like beings, fishes and birds, and what look like astronomical phenomena — stars and planets. Chumash rock art stands out in its varied palette and stylistic complexity. Pulverizing various colored rocks produced red, white, blue, green, yellow, gray, and brown with black coming from charcoal. Animal fat or milkweed sap bound the colored powders together before they were applied with stiff feathers or fiber brushes.
———Benefiting from their exceedingly rich, varied habitat, Chumash hunters, fishermen, and foragers fully exploited their marine, coastal, and river resources. In unique redwood-planked boats known as tomols, lashed together with thongs and waterproofed by the natural asphalt that leaks out of the region's beaches, they regularly conveyed resources from their offshore islands to the mainland. Known as the Brotherhood of the Tomol, these mariners imported specialized stone blades and drills manufactured on the islands, plus marine resources such as shark, bonito, and halibut.
———On the open sea and along the rivers, Chumash fishermen used a variety of nets, traps, baskets, hooks, spears, and plant poisons to catch or stun fish and catch seal and sea otters. On the coast they collected abalone and mussels, while inland they hunted small animals, deer, bear, and mountain lions. Foremost among the nuts and seeds they gathered in season was the staple of the Chumash diet, oak acorns, which were processed using a variety of baskets. Indeed Chumash basketry rivals any in California, with women employing coiling, twisting, and wickerwork techniques to create gift baskets, grinding baskets, and storage baskets that can hold five to six gallons of water when protected by linings of natural asphalt.
———On the mainland the Chumash trade network passed to the interior raw marine materials such as fish, whale bones, and oils. Black soapstone, quarried from Santa Catalina Island, changed hands eastward to the Colorado River in exchange for materials made or harvested by Yuman-speaking peoples. Chumash shell beads, cut and smoothed from purple Olivella shells, were sent north to the Salinans, east to the Yokuts, and south to the Mohaves.
———Although the Portuguese conquistador Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo first encountered the Chumashes in 1542, it was not until 1772 that five Catholic missions were established within the Chumash Nation; Mission Santa Inez was the last to be built in 1808. But the Chumashes bristled at the harsh Spanish regime and staged short-lived rebellions in 1824 at Santa Inez, La Purissima, and Santa Barbara. After secularization of the missions in 1833, the Chumash population fell into severe decline, with 250 left around the outskirts of Mission Santa Barbara by 1839. In 1901 the U.S. government allocated seventy-five acres along Zanja de Cota Creek near Mission Santa Ynez to the surviving Chumash community. Over the following decades the tribe's numbers steadily increased. Today the Chumashes have their own business council, a thriving bingo operation, and a federal housing program on their small reservation; there are approximately five thousand people who now proudly identify themselves as Chumash Indians.

PETER NABOKOV
University of Wisconsin at Madison