Abstract:

How are animals and people connected? How do the seemingly mundane realms of foodways and ranching in colonial California signify greater social processes taking place amongst the diverse historic communities of the state? Through historical archaeology, this dissertation traces the creation and evolution of a Californio identity, c. 1776 to 1850. With specific attention to faunal remains and through the lens of a single family--the Peraltas--this research explores the complexities of social relationships and identity formation between colonists and natives and rancheros and laborers as they perform the daily practices of foodways and ranching.

Incorporating zooarchaeological methods, archaeological analysis, and documentary history, this project investigates these questions in two historic colonial institutions: El Presidio de San Francisco and the Rancho San Antonio. The sites are linked by the Peralta family, but more importantly by the notion of community strategies. As a diachronic study, this dissertation traces the fusion and fission of pluralistic communities at these two settings as they strategize together and struggle with communal, household, and individual identities.

The position of families like the Peraltas shifts over time, as do those in the background of this story who made it all possible: the servants, natives, and laborers at the presidio and the rancho. As families move from communal living at a military fort to private land-grant ranchos, the meaning of Californio changes. Where once disparate presidio communities united in common struggle as gente de razon (non-native), the later rise of an elite class of rancheros in the 1820s and 1830s saw a redefinition of that Californio identity, one that was no longer shared. These changes are visible in the archaeological record--even in those seemingly mundane tasks of foodways and ranching. While the research presented here takes the Peralta family as its center, their story is not the only one. Other voices in the past peek through, and it is in the identification of communities at the presidio and the rancho--real, fictive, forced, or willing--that we can hear pieces of these other stories as well.