The California Department of Parks and Recreation (formerly the California Division of Beaches and Parks) has endeavored to publish the results of its investigations and management of a wide range of California's most important cultural heritage sites for over 50 years.
To request a copy, please email SACRF@parks.ca.gov. PDF copies are available for free. Hard copies are available for purchase, though supplies are limited.
Volume 37: Maritime Cultural Landscape of Sonoma's Doghole Ports (2021)
This report is the result of a two-year collaborative project between California State Parks and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, with other key partners, to complete a resource inventory of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. Rather than focus on sites either “on land” or “underwater,” this survey documents the interrelationship of historic settlements, archaeological sites, and the marine environment using the concept of the cultural landscape to reveal the inherent maritime nature of human activity coast. Life, industry, and society on the Redwood Coast was shaped by interaction with the sea for thousands of years. This report focuses on the latter aspects of that interaction beginning in the midnineteenth century and continuing into the present.
Volume 36: Archaeological Investigations of Yreka's Chinese Community (2019)
This report presents the results of an excavation of a Chinese community in Yreka conducted nearly 50 years ago by archaeologists with the Department of Beaches and Parks (now, the California Department of Parks and Recreation) working for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). The 1969 excavation of Yreka’s third Chinatown is one the earliest archaeological investigations of a Chinese community in California and one of the first large-scale historical archaeological salvage projects in the State. While the collection has been cataloged, the report of the project findings has never been finalized. The goal of this report is to share the results of this excavation with the archaeological community and interested members of the public, particularly those who worked on the project from start-to-end and descendants of Yreka’s Chinese community.
Volume 35: Shipwrecks and Lime Kilns: The Hidden History of 19th Century Sailors and Quarryman of the Central Coast (2018)
Volume 35 features two separate reports on unique cultural resources from the central California coast. The first report, authored by Santa Cruz District Archaeologist Mark Hylkema, is the tragic story of shipwrecks, loss of life, and the efforts to protect the graves at the ad hoc cemetery at Franklin Point, a particularly perilous area of the San Mateo coast for nineteenth-century mariners. The second report, written for State Parks by West Valley Junior College professor Andrew Kindon, details the archaeological investigation of the Adams Creek Lime Kilns site located at Wilder Ranch State Park. The use of lime in the production of mortars and plaster has a long and worldwide history and, in California, it dates to the mid-eighteenth century with the arrival of the Spanish missionaries, who used lime for processing and construction purposes. Unifying these seemingly divergent archaeological sites and the histories they convey are the storylines of the “invisible” and unsung laborers of the nineteenth century who, as Dr. Kindon writes, are “relegated to the shadowy borders of the historic record.”
Volume 34: Archaeology of the Kumeyaay: Contributions to the Prehistory of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, San Diego County, California (2017)
In this volume of Publications in Cultural Heritage, we present two archaeological investigations from CRSP, each engaging themes relating to the Cuyamaca Complex. Joan Schneider, retired Associate State Archaeologist, wrote the first report and describes the “Stacked Stone Site” as a previously unknown site exposed in the aftermath of the 2003 Cedar Fire. Lynn Gamble headed the 2008 San Diego State University field school excavation at the Dripping Springs Site (CA-SDI-860), True’s type-site for the Cuyamaca Complex, and she presents their results in the second report. Among other significant findings, this report confirms many of True’s observations about the nature and age of the complex.
Volume 33: Contributions to San Francisco Bay Prehistory: Archaeological Investigations at CA-MRN-44/H, Angel Island State Park, Marin County, California (2016)
This report represents the findings of archaeological data recovery of the “Angel Island State Park Immigration Station Area Restoration Project.” This Immigration/ Detention station (the west coast point of entry to the United States for predominately Asia immigrants) was built between 1905 and 1910 directly on top of a shellmound. This destroyed much of the site, as noted by Nels Nelson in 1907 during his survey of Bay Area shellmounds. Fortunately, intact portions of the mound survived and were re-discovered in 2005 during construction of a septic tank and utility trench for a renovation project. The report that follows presents the archaeological data recovery program that mitigated impacts of the immigration station renewal project, and this study represents an important contribution to the “island” prehistoric archaeological record of San Francisco Bay.
Volume 32: Loveliest of Places: A Study of the Pre-Mansion Historical Resources of Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park (2015)
This volume focuses on John Bidwell, an important early California pioneer, whose estate is preserved within Bidwell Mansion State Historic Park (SHP). This report reviews the 1990 test excavations for the park Visitor Center and two earlier excavations conducted in 1976 and 1987. It also provides a meticulous analysis of relevant historical documents that enabled the author to conduct line-of-sight interpolation and triangulation of key structures, leading to identification of their locations and the overall layout of the pre-Mansion (1864–1868) rancho landscape. Of equal importance, this report identifies the locations of the Native American communities that were extant on the rancho during this period and highlights the critical role that the local indigenous community had in making Bidwell so successful—an aspect of California history that is too often unrecognized and underappreciated.
Volume 31: Conversations with John Foster, David L. Felton, and Glen Farris: Thirty Years of Cultural Stewardship at California's State Parks (2014)
This volume, constructed from oral interviews, celebrates the careers of three prominent State Parks archaeologists who through their activities and diverse skill sets developed modern cultural stewardship practices to the benefit and preservation of California State Parks invaluable cultural resources. Contained in these transcribed interviews are the personal histories of these remarkable three men and how their collective backgrounds shaped the trajectory of their philosophical approach to cultural heritage stewardship in the Department at the beginning of State Parks embracement of the "compliance mandates" of the early 1970s.
Volume 30: Archaeology, Ethnography, and Tolowa Heritage at Red Elderberry Place, Chvn-su'lh-dvn, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park (2013)
This volume is the result of three years’ worth of research conducted by California State Parks, National Park Service, University of California, Davis, private cultural resource management firms, and local historical societies in cooperation with the Elk Valley and Smith River Rancherias and the general Tolowa community. The report represents a collaborative study for preserving and interpreting an ancient village site located on the banks of the bucolic Smith River. It contains archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data of this north coast indigenous people. The unique and ongoing partnership between all these parties has led to the discovery and documentation of an extremely long occupational history spanning about 8,500 years. Among other discoveries, this project has revealed the earliest plank houses and the only semi-subterranean sweathouse recorded to date in northwestern California.
Volume 29: An Isolated Frontier Outpost: Historical and Archaeological Investigations of the Carrizo Creek Station (2012)
This volume is part of the recent renewal of the longstanding series featuring cultural resources related projects conducted within California State Parks. It presents a history of the Southern Overland Trail through Eastern San Diego County from the earliest Spanish and Mexican explorers through its establishment and use by Mexican traders, Mountain Men, conquering armies, Gold Rush immigrants, Civil War battalions and the stagecoaches of the Overland Mail. The report includes the site history and archaeology of Carrizo Creek, one of the most historically significant locations in the Colorado Desert.
Volume 28: Archaeological Investigations at CA-NEV-13/H, Locus F & G, Donner Memorial State Park (2011)
This volume is part of the recent renewal of the longstanding series featuring cultural resources related projects conducted within California State Parks. This report documents an archaeological investigation within a large and complex prehistoric deposit at Donner Memorial State Park. The results of this investigation indicate that Donner Lake was occupied some 7,700 years ago and, because of its unique geographical position, served as a hub for an east-west prehistoric obsidian trade network.
Volume 27: An Archaeological Perspective on the Human History of Red Rock Canyon State Park (2010)
This report by Michael Sampson documents 20 years of cultural resources investigations within the original boundaries of Red Rock Canyon State Park and the 17,100-acre parcel known as the “Last Chance Canyon Addition” that was transferred to the State from the Bureau of Land Management in 1994.
Volume 26: Archaeology and History in Ano Nuevo State Park (2009)
This volume, the first in 20 years, represents the renewal of the tradition of publishing and presenting exemplary work conducted within California State Parks. The volume contains two separate reports: one on a prehistoric Native American site and one concerning the history of the Light Station on Año Nuevo Island.
Volume 25: The Archeology of Mitchell Caverns (1989)
The Mitchell Caverns are limestone caves located on the east slope of the Providence Mountains, located in the eastern Mojave Desert, San Bernardino County, California. The Chemehuevi Indians, a division of the Southern Paiute, occupied the Providence Mountains region in the historic era. This report documents excavations and archeological collections from Mitchell Caverns State Parks. The collections contain basketry fragments and other textiles, chuckwalla hooks, projectile points, hafted and unhafted knives, fire drill hearths, arrow shaft straighteners, ground sherd disks and other pottery, wood forceps, bone awls, a bone needle and a scapula grass cutter. The accumulation of data reported herein adds to the knowledge of culture history of the eastern Mojave Desert.
Volume 24: The Chinese Laundry on Second Street: Papers on Archeology at the Woodland Opera House Site (1984)
This report details the results of historical and archeological investigations undertaken by the California Department of Parks and Recreation as part of the Woodland Opera House restoration project. The primary objectives of this work were to identify significant cultural resources and to document or recover those threatened by the impending restoration work. The historical and archeological evidence reported here is designed to reinstate the nineteenth-century Chinese residents of Woodland as an important part of the history of that community.
Volume 23: The Diaz Collection: Material Culture and Social Change in Mid-Nineteenth Century Monterey, California (1983)
The Cooper-Molera Adobe in Monterey, California has long been a prominent local landmark. The adobe is operated by the California Department of Parks and Recreation, which since the 1970s, has sponsored several archaeological investigations at the site as part of the restoration effort. This report deals with the excavation and analysis of a mid-nineteenth-century privy deposit, associated with the household of Manuel Diaz, a Mexican-born merchant who purchase the northwest half of the house and land in 1848. This study of the artifacts from the Diaz privy interprets these objects to represent the choices by the individual household based on particular geographic and social settings during a specific historic period.
Volume 22: Ceramic Marks from Old Sacramento, California (1983)
The report is a directory of identified historic period ceramics recovered from archeological excavations in Old Sacramento State Historic Park. Thousands of marks were examined, the majority referring to potteries in Staffordshire, England. The document includes all the printed and impressed marks, found on Euroamerican dinner and utility wares recovered in Old Sacramento. A total of 238 marks are included in this report, representing 103 manufacturers and importers. This directory of marks was compiled with three objectives. First to simplify the accurate identification of ceramic marks found at Old Sacramento archeological sites. Second, provide great accuracy in dating archeological deposits in reference to specific marks, rather than to manufacturers. And third, providing a reference for identifying and dating ceramic marks, contribute to the growing study of historic ceramics on the West Coast.
Volume 21: Papers on Merced County Prehistory, California (1983)
The excavations at CA-MER-130 marked the final phase of field work in the San Luis Reservoir area under the salvage program implemented by the California Department of Parks and Recreation for the State Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The investigation of this small upland site expands our knowledge of occupation patterns along the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley. More importantly, work here marked an introduction to problems of tribal identification base on archeological data in an area previously simply classed as Northern Valley Yokuts, by Kroeber in 1925.
Volume 20: The Bottles of Old Sacramento: A Story of Nineteenth-Century Glass and Ceramic Retail Containers, Part I (1980)
This report is on the nineteenth-century bottles recovered during archeological excavations in Old Sacramento State Historic Park. It has long been obvious that in the urban deposits of this period, glass and ceramic bottles and their remnants are among the best preserved and most abundant of artifacts. This report attempts to describe and provide a historical context for all the labeled nineteenth-century bottles from this National Historic District, and includes a few artifacts from the beginning of the twentieth century as well. Information deals with both glass and ceramic containers and their closures, our criterion for inclusion being their use as containers of retail products.
Volume 19: Papers on Old Sacramento Archeology (1980)
Over the last two decades Old Sacramento has been the scene of increasingly large-scale archeological investigations. Indeed, it is possible that the Old Sacramento National Historic District, as the original mercantile heart of the city, is the most intensively investigated nineteenth-century urban site in the western United States. Most of the work has consisted of salvage excavations, the primary goal of which was rescuing from destruction the buried remains of Sacramento’s history. This report increases both our understanding of the potential of urban archeology in Sacramento and to facilitate scientific study of the cultural remains of earlier Sacramentans.
Volume 18: Archeology of the Jonson Site: (CA-Sac-65) Sacramento County, California (1977)
The Jonson Site (CA-SAC-65) is located within former Plains Miwok territory in southwestern Sacramento County, California. The site is located on low-lying alluvial lands, protected by natural levees of the Sacramento River. This paper reports the 1974 excavation of the Jonson Site and relates the recovered materials to the settlement pattern of the lower Sacramento Valley.
Volume 17: The Archeology of Ven-100 (1979)
CA-VEN-100 is an important relatively undisturbed Native American site in the Santa Monica Mountains of southern California, with remains that possibly extend back to 7,000 B.P. This report is based on test excavations of the site conducted in 1968 by the California Department of Parks and Recreation. These excavations were made to determine the nature of the four separate deposits and how the deposits might be affected by recreational use of the area.
Volume 16: Archeological Test Excavations within Border Field State Park, San Diego County, California (1978)
The Monument Mesa Site (CA-SDI-222) is important to the understanding of early adaptation to the San Diego seacoast during a geological period when the physical features of the region differed from those of today. Monument Mesa embodies lithic artifacts of the enigmatic culture referred to as San Dieguito, the earliest people known to inhabit the south coast of California. Remnants of a shell midden reflect the importance of the prehistoric bay in the subsistence pattern of subsequent native groups. The Cultural Heritage Section of the State Department of Parks and Recreation tested the archeological site and made recommendations for the mitigation of proposed impacts from recreation facilities to the midden deposit.
Volume 15: The Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station, Sacramento: Historic Sites Archeology at the Location of the Western Terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad
The Old Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Depot is an important part of the reconstruction of Old Sacramento State Historic Park. Archeological investigations were undertaken at the site by the Cultural Resources Section of the California Department of Parks and Recreation in 1975 to contribute to the reconstruction research. This study contributes to the historical understanding of the site both prior and subsequent to the interpretive period of the Passenger Depot. It also demonstrates how archaeological research can contribute to the restoration and reconstruction of a historic property.
Volume 14: Perris Reservoir Archeology: Late Prehistoric Demographic Change in Southeastern California (1973)
Surveys and excavations at Perris Reservoir were designed to gain an understanding of the nature of prehistoric human adaptation and change through time within a discrete region of southeastern California. The archeological work was done before the construction of one of the final links in the most ambitious water development and distribution project in history. This present report can be viewed as a substantial contribution to the prehistory of inland Southern California.
Volume 13: Archeology of the Menjoulet Site Merced County, California (1970)
Archeological investigations were carried out at the Menjoulet Site (4-MER-3) in 1964 and 1965 prior to the construction of the Los Banos Detention Dam. The excavation revealed two discrete periods of occupation evident of a major village site with year-round occupation, which contradicted the previous understanding of habitation in this part of the San Joaquin Valley.
Volume 12: Archeology of the Grayson Site Merced County, California (1969)
The Grayson Site (4-MER-S94) was excavated prior to the construction of the San Luis Dam by the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Department of Water Resources, and the National Park Service in 1966 and 1967. The results of the excavation contributed to the understanding of the temporal sequence of the San Luis-Little Panoche Locality.
Volume 11: Archeology of the Little Panoche Reservoir Fresno County, California (1968)
The Little Panoche Detention Reservoir was initially surveyed for archeological sites in 1961. The sites recorded within the project boundary were designated as 4-FRE-128 and 4-FRE-129. Salvage of the archeological remains within the reservoir began in the spring of 1966. This report documents these archeological investigations.
Volume 10: Archeology of the Oroville Dam Spillway and A House Floor in Napa County, California (1964)
This report is a two-part document. Part I deals with archeological work done at the site of the Oroville Dam Spillway. Investigations were carried out at three aboriginal villages sites located along the spillway, BUT-99, BUT-100, and BUT-101. Part II records work on a house pit at a village site in Napa County, NAP-234. The Napa site work was done in 1958; where a large floor was excavated that was consistent with the Late Horizon deposits in the Napa region.
Volume 9: Arroyo Sequit-LAN-52 Archeological Investigations in Leo Carrillo State Park, Los Angeles County, California (1963)
This report describes the results of archeological investigations at Arroyo Sequit shell mound, LAN-52; situated on a portion of Leo Carrillo State Park, Los Angeles County, conducted from June 22 to July 9 in 1962. The Central California Archeological Foundation conducted the research.
Volume 8: "Tco'se," An Archaeological Study of the Bedrock Mortar-Petroglyph at AMA-14, Near Volcano, California (1963)
This report is based on Archeological Field Investigations executed at the “Indian Grinding Rock” between March 21 and 31, 1961. This field work is the first comprehensive study of its kind at site AMA-14. Indian Grinding Rock is an outstanding bedrock mortar site, undoubtedly the most outstanding example of its kind in the western United States and is certainly a monument to the hunting and gathering cultures of aboriginal Californians.
Volume 7: The Archeology of the Western Pacific Railroad Relocation, Oroville Project, Butte County, California (1963)
With the beginning of the construction of the Oroville Dam it was necessary to relocate the Western Pacific Railroad. An archeological survey of the relocation right-of-way identified 12 cultural sites, four of which were deemed of sufficient significance to bear test excavation. Archeological investigations were carried out at sites BUT-78, BUT-103, BUT-105 and BUT-131. These investigations are documented in this report.
Volume 6: Salvage of the Rio Oso Site, Yuba County, California (1962)
The Rio Oso Site, YUB-14, was identified in 1957. At that time, an estimated 25 to 30 burials were unearthed but, due to previous levee repair activities, it was only possible to salvage eight burials. This volume documents the efforts of volunteer archaeological crews to recover the information available at that time.
Volume 5: Archaeological Explorations in the Southern Section of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California (1962)
An Anza-Borrego Desert State Park archeological review was conducted of the southern section of the park by the California State Division of Beaches and Park, UCLA, and USC in 1957. A total of 173 sites were discovered that belong to the latest Aboriginal period, dated to <1,000 A.D. The results of these investigations are presented in this report.
Volume 4: Archeological Excavations at Chilcoot Rockshelter, Plumas County, California (1961)
This report presents the results of archeological excavations of the Chilcoot Rockshelter in Plumas County, California. The results of this study indicate that the rock shelter was likely used as a hunting blind, rather than an occupation site, during the Late Prehistoric period.
Volume 3: Excavations at Sutter's Fort, Sacramento, California (1960)
Archeological research was undertaken at Sutter’s Fort in 1955, 1957, 1958, and 1960 in hopes of solving some of the questions as to the location and size of the original Fort. This report deals with those research findings.
Volume 2: Archaeological Investigations at Whale Rock Reservoir, Cayucos, California (1961)
This report documents the excavation of several archaeological sites at the Whale Rock Reservoir, San Luis Obispo County conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles.
Volume 1: Archeological Investigations at Sutter's Fort State Historical Monument, Sacramento, California (1961)
Report describes results of excavations carried out at Sutter’s Fort State Historical Monument from July 3 to August 5, 1959, under the provisions of a contract between the Central California Archeological Foundation and the California Division of Beaches and Parks.