New Perspectives and Collaborations on the Ancestral Biology of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe

New Perspectives and Collaborations on the Ancestral Biology of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe Cara Monroe, Monica V. Arellano, and Alan Leventhal KEY WORDS Muwekma, Ohlone, Community-Based Archaeology, California Archaeology, Cultural Resource Management, Indigenous Archaeology, Collaboration, Isotopes, Bioarchaeology, Proteomics, Metabolomics Over the past three decades, there has been a growing emphasis on community archaeology or community-based archaeology (CBA), approaches that involve collaboration between archaeologists and local communities in both archaeological research and its interpretation (Atalay 2012, 2019; Wylie 2014). CBA, along with collaborative and indigenous archaeology, emerged in response to criticisms of traditional archaeology, which often focused on the excavation and interpretation of archaeological sites without engaging indigenous stakeholders or considering the social and political contexts in which archaeology takes place (Atalay 2012, 2019; Colwell 2016). However, community-engaged projects in California have been carried out in academic settings and deserve recognition (Lightfoot and Lopez 2013; Panich and Schneider 2014; Panich 2020; Schneider 2021). Meaningful collaboration with tribal descendant communities becomes considerably more challenging in cultural resource management (CRM) projects, primarily due to time, coordination, cost constraints, and the inability to have control over site mitigation (Byrd et al. 2020, 2022). Regardless of these challenges, it can also be an opportunity and a platform for tribal communities to be proactive in formulating and overseeing mitigation processes and includes recommendations for additional funding, uses of multiple methodologies (radiocarbon dating, botanical analyses, etc.), and collaborations that might otherwise be unavailable. As a previously federally recognized tribe, historically identified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the Verona Band of Alameda County, the present-day Muwekma Ohlone Tribe has ancestors who were missionized into Mission San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose. During the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries the tribe served as linguistic and cultural consultants to renown University of California, Berkeley and Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologists, such as Alfred L. Kroeber, C. Hart Merriam, Edward W. Gifford, John Alden Mason, Jeremiah Curtin, and John Peabody Harrington. As the Most Likely Descendent (MLD) tribe identified by the State of California's Native American Heritage Commission to have legal oversight on the projects and studies included in this special issue, the Muwekma Tribe is represented by Vice-Chairwoman and MLD Monica V. Arellano, who has contributed to the field recovery program and as coauthor on all of the articles presented here. The Muwekma Ohlone Tribal Council has been a leader in initiating, bridging, and maintaining collaborative projects within the Tribe's ancestral territory of the San Francisco Bay region dating [End Page 5] back over 40 years, most of which were under the stricter confines of CRM policies and law and, until recently, generally did not embrace the ideals of CBA or indigenous archaeology. Despite this, the Muwekma persevered and have had direct participation in many projects, including some that were managed by the previous CRM arm of the Muwekma tribe, Ohlone Family Consulting Services (e.g., Leventhal 1993; Cambra et al. 1996; Field and Leventhal 2003; Leventhal et al. 2010, 2011), and today directly under the auspices of the Tribe. Primary aims were to protect and learn from ancestral remains and sites and, importantly, to dispel the pervasive belief that the Ohlone people are extinct with no direct connection to their ancestral lands, history, and heritage (Byrd et al. 2020, 2022; Severson et al. 2022). Dispelling this myth has resulted in articles, monographs (coauthored and produced by the Muwekma Tribe), and a language committee dedicated to decolonizing archaeology and giving agency back to the Muwekma people through a reclamation process of renaming and naming their ancestral heritage sites and places of historical significance. Consistently, advanced archaeometric methods were sought and embraced. This research not only enhanced the Muwekma's established understanding of their ancestral past but also produced scientific knowledge that has benefited American archaeology and related sciences more broadly. The multidisciplinary methodologies presented here include isotopic and genomic as well as proteomic and metabolomic analyses and is the direct result of decades of collaborative and participatory research which collectively seeks to understand the lives of the ancestral Muwekma Ohlone. In this issue of Human Biology, Buonasera et al. combined traditional osteological analyses along with isotopic

Biology · Evolutionary biology · Geography · Sociology · Tribe · Animal Diversity and Health Studies · Anthropology · Health and Conflict Studies

• Fighting erasure and dispossession in the San Francisco Bay Area

  Open Access•L M Panich, Monica V Arellano et al.•Frontiers in Environmental…•2024

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