Syuxtun

Foreword to Our Story

This story is set at Syuxtun — the largest Chumash village on the mainland coast — approximately fifteen years before Mission Santa Barbara was established in 1782. The village occupied the bluff and beachfront at present-day Santa Barbara, centered on a large burial mound that archaeologists later named Burton Mound after a 19th-century landowner. The mound was not a monument. It was a place — the ongoing home of the community's dead, integrated into the life of the living village the way a cemetery and a living room can be integrated in a community that does not separate those things as sharply as European tradition did.

In 1765, the Spanish had been in Baja California for roughly a century and were beginning to push north into Alta California. The first permanent settlement in Alta California would not come until 1769. But the Spanish were already present in a way the Chumash could feel: in rumors carried by the trade routes from the south, in the occasional sighting of large ships on the horizon, and in the glass trade beads that had begun arriving from the south in advance of any direct contact. These beads — made in Europe, carried to the Americas by Spanish ships, traded north through indigenous networks — were among the first physical objects of European manufacture to reach the Chumash world. They arrived, as harbingers tend to, before anyone had a category for what they foretold.

This story places itself in that pause: the moment after the bead arrives and before anything else does. It belongs to two elderly women who are paying close attention, and to a figure from the upper world who is paying attention from a different angle.

A word about that figure. Chumash cosmology describes a three-world structure: the upper world, the middle world (in which people live), and the lower world. The worlds are held in precarious balance by a cosmic figure who is also the North Star — Ksen, Sky Coyote, a trickster of immense age and complicated motives who watches the middle world from his fixed point above it. He does not move. Everything else moves around him. In the Chumash world he is as real as the star he occupies — which is to say, real. This story takes that seriously. When Ksen speaks in these pages, he is not speaking as a character in a myth the story is retelling. He is speaking as himself.

It is still the ground.

Characters

Tsiwas is in her late sixties — which in this time and place means she has survived everything: childhood illness, childbirth, two husbands, three of her children. She is 'antap, has been since her initiation at fourteen, and she holds more of the ceremony knowledge than anyone else currently living at Syuxtun. She notices things from the side, the way long practice teaches you to notice: not looking directly at the thing, but knowing its shape from the peripheral evidence. She has been carrying the bead for three days before the story begins.

Kahkol is roughly the same age as Tsiwas — they have known each other for sixty years, since childhood. She was married to the wot's younger brother for thirty years and has been a widow for seven. She is less patient than Tsiwas and more direct, the kind of person who says out loud what other people are thinking. She is not 'antap but she understands the world well enough to follow where Tsiwas is going, and she is the person Tsiwas tells things to first.

Ksen — Sky Coyote, the North Star — is older than anyone can say. He has been watching the middle world from his fixed position in the upper world since before the mound was as large as it is now, before the village had so many houses, before the name of the wot had been passed down so many times. He does not move. He narrates one chapter of this story in his own voice, because he was there, and because it seemed wrong to leave him out.

Introduction

This is a story about a bead. It is also a story about a mound, and about two old women sitting near it in the late afternoon, and about the North Star watching them from above. It is set at the last moment of the world that this collection has spent nine stories describing: the moment before the mission system arrived, when the Chumash world was still intact, when the mound was still a living place, when the channel was still the channel and the ground was still the ground by the names the ground had always had.

The bead is made of cobalt blue glass. It came from far away, through a chain of trade that nobody in this story can fully trace. It is beautiful. It is unexplained. It is, in the language this collection has been developing, a message from one map to another — arriving, as messages tend to, before anyone has a frame for what it says.

The Bead

The afternoon light was coming off the channel at an angle that made everything glow: the water, the kelp line visible just offshore, the pale sand below the bluff, the houses at the lower edge of the village. In an hour it would be the best light of the day.

Tsiwas was not watching the light. She was watching the bead.

It sat in the center of her palm — small, perfectly round, a blue so pure and deep it looked less like an object than like a hole in the world: a place where you could see through the surface of things to something on the other side. She had been carrying it for three days, since the trader from the south passed through with a handful of them, wanting dried fish and shell money. She had given him more than it was probably worth. She hadn't cared about that.

Kahkol leaned over and looked. She had known Tsiwas for sixty years. She knew how to read her silences.

"Let me see it," she said.

Tsiwas handed it over. Kahkol held it up to the slanted light. It flared: deep blue, with something at its center that was not quite fire but behaved like fire, catching and throwing the light back in a way that olivella shell never did. The shell money she had worn all her adult life was beautiful in its own way — smooth, white, translucent at the edges when light hit it right. But this was different. This was a different category of made thing.

"Nobody made this here," Kahkol said.

"Nobody I've ever talked to knows who made it," Tsiwas said. "He said it came from a long way south. That was all he knew. He had seven of them."

Kahkol turned it over. The hole through the center was perfect — too perfect. She had bored holes through thousands of shell discs in her life, and you could get very good at it, but there was always some trace of the making: a slight asymmetry, the marks of the tool at the entry and exit, the small roughness that proved a hand had done it. This hole had no such marks. Whatever made it had made it differently, with tools or processes she had no way to imagine.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"Yes," said Tsiwas.

Behind them, the mound rose at the edge of the upper village — not tall, not dramatic, just a gentle rise in the ground that anyone who had grown up here knew without having to look. The people in it had been there a long time. Some of them Tsiwas had known. Her mother was in there, and her mother's mother, and before them, all the way back to people nobody remembered by name but who were still there in the way that the very old dead are still there: as weight, as company, as the particular quality of attention that a place acquires from having been lived in for a long time.

"Whoever made this," Kahkol said slowly, "makes things the way we make things. With patience, with skill, with care for the thing being made. But differently." She paused. "Differently in a way I can't account for."

"I've been trying to account for it for three days," said Tsiwas.

Kahkol was quiet. A gull called, down on the beach. The light moved on the water.

"Have you told anyone?" said Kahkol.

"I told you."

"Before me."

"No." Tsiwas looked at the mound. "I wanted to think about it first."

Kahkol understood this. There was a kind of thinking that required quiet and time before it could be shared — the kind of thinking that needs to settle, the way ochre settles in still water before you can see what color it truly is. You didn't rush it.

"Is it bad?" said Kahkol. Not anxious — genuinely asking, the way you ask about the weather when you need to plan.

Tsiwas considered for a moment. "I don't think I know yet," she said. "It's a bead. Beautifully made, from far away, from people none of us have met." She paused. "But it's here now. So that much of the distance is already crossed."

The Fixed Point

I have been watching Syuxtun for a long time.

I was here before the mound was as large as it is now. I was here before the lower village had so many houses, before the current wot's grandfather's grandfather was born. I watched the first houses go up on this bluff, a long time ago, and I have watched every generation since. I am the North Star. I do not move. This is my nature and my position: everything else moves around me — the seasons, the storms, the fish, the whales, the birds in their great arcs — and I watch all of it from the same fixed place.

I saw the bead arrive.

I know where it came from. I have been watching the large canoes with white wings work their way up the coast from the south for several generations now — slowly, cautiously, charting things and naming them in their own language, occasionally leaving and then coming back. They are not the first people from far away to arrive at a coast that was already occupied by people with their own names for everything. This has happened many times, in many places I can see from here. I have seen how it tends to go.

The beads travel faster than the ships. This is a thing I notice. They move through the trade networks, passing from hand to hand, north and north, arriving in villages where no one has yet seen the sails they came from. They arrive as objects that fit into the existing world — they are beautiful, they are bead-shaped, they can be strung and worn and valued — and yet they are also unmistakably from somewhere outside the existing world. I find this interesting. It is a kind of message that does not know it is a message. It travels ahead of its meaning.

I am a trickster. I am allowed to find things interesting.

I know Tsiwas. I have known her since she was a child of eight learning her first 'antap songs at the edge of the ceremony ground, and I have watched her become what she is now — which is a very great deal. She is the person in this village who holds the most of what I would call the necessary knowledge: the songs, the names of the people in the ground, the careful astronomy that keeps the world on its schedule. She and I have an understanding — she watches me the way astronomers watch stars, with a precision and attention that I find pleasing, and in return I do not play tricks on her. Not often.

She noticed the bead the way she notices everything: from the side, carefully, without rushing toward it. Three days she has been thinking about it before telling anyone. This is correct. There are things that require time before they can be shared, and this is one of them.

Kahkol I also know. She is less patient and more direct, the one who says the thing Tsiwas is thinking. Together they are what two old women who have been paying attention all their lives become: a kind of doubled sight, each one seeing what the other's angle misses. I find this arrangement very good. It is, in its way, the same arrangement I have with the rest of the sky — everything moving, and me watching from the still point.

I want to tell them something. I am not supposed to, exactly — the protocols around direct communication between the upper world and the middle world exist for reasons that have been established over a very long time, and I have violated them before, with results that were instructive if not always pleasant. But I want to say: the bead is from a world that is much larger than the trade route it came through. The ships I have been watching are carrying a logic with them — a way of organizing land and people and names — that does not accommodate the possibility that the land already has names. This is not because the people on the ships are unusually cruel. It is because the logic they are carrying does not have a place in it for what they are about to find. And a logic that has no place for something tends, eventually, to act as though that thing is not there.

But that is not tonight. Tonight there is the light coming off the channel, and Tsiwas with the bead in her hand, and Kahkol beside her, and the mound behind them holding fifty generations of the same community in the same ground, and the village going about its evening business in the way it has gone about its evening business for longer than any of them know. The 'antap songs exist. The ceremony calendar is accurate. The mound knows who is in it. The channel is doing what the channel does.

I am the North Star. I do not move.

I watch all of it, from here, turning this thought over in the way I turn things over when I am not sure what to do with them:

They make beautiful things. I will grant them that. They make beautiful things, and they do not understand yet what they are carrying with them, and neither do the people about to receive it. This is the most dangerous moment — the moment before anyone has a name for what is happening, when the thing is still just a bead, still just beautiful, still just a hole in the world through which the light passes and comes back changed.

What Kahkol Keeps

After the fire was banked and most of the village went quiet, Tsiwas sang.

She didn't sing the ceremony songs — it wasn't the right occasion for those, and they required the full preparation of the 'antap, which she would not do alone at the edge of the mound at night for no reason but a bead. But she sang a few lines of the older song — the one that was not ceremonial but was ancient, the one women had sung at the mound since before anyone's grandmother's grandmother was born. The mound song: the one that said, simply, in the oldest form of the language anyone remembered: I am still here. You are still here. The ground between us is the same ground.

Kahkol sat beside her and listened. She knew the song. She didn't join in, because it was Tsiwas's song to sing tonight.

When it was done, Tsiwas was quiet for a moment.

"They should know," she said. "There's a new thing."

"They probably already know," said Kahkol.

"Probably. Still."

Kahkol had been holding the bead for the last hour, turning it in her fingers in the dark the way you turn a good thought — not because you expect it to change, but because the turning is part of how you come to know it. She had made her decision during the song.

She had a string of shell money around her neck — long, the olivella discs smooth and white, worn and buffed from decades of wear, each disc with its own small history of transaction and gift and ceremony. She found the knot at the back, worked it loose, and threaded the cobalt bead onto the string between two of the oldest discs, near the center where the weight of it would rest against her collarbone.

She retied the knot. The bead settled: cobalt blue among all that white, unmistakably from somewhere else, clearly there now.

"That looks like it belongs," said Tsiwas.

"It belongs somewhere," said Kahkol. "Might as well be here, where I can keep an eye on it."

Overhead, the stars were doing what they did — moving, turning, the whole slow wheel of the sky going around its axis. The North Star fixed, as always. Tsiwas glanced up at it without ceremony, the way you check something you trust: it's there, it's where it belongs, that's fine.

"Ksen is watching," she said.

"Ksen is always watching," said Kahkol.

"Yes," said Tsiwas. "I find that mostly reassuring."

They sat for a while longer without speaking. The mound was behind them. The channel was dark below the bluff, the kelp line invisible in the night, the water moving in the way it had always moved.

Eventually they went inside.

The bead went with them.

— The End —

All place names are attested Chumash (Ventureño/Cruzeño) names unless bracketed. Character names are working names pending verification. The songs are not translated because they are not ours to translate; their existence in the story is represented only as the fact of their being sung.

I. Syuxtun and Burton Mound: The Place and Its History

Syuxtun was the largest Chumash village on the mainland coast — a major political, ceremonial, and economic center at present-day Santa Barbara, at the mouth of what is now called Mission Creek. The site had been occupied continuously for several thousand years. At its center was the burial mound that archaeologists would later name Burton Mound, after Lewis T. Burton, a 19th-century landowner — a characteristic act of colonial renaming applied even to the dead.

The mound was not a monument in the European sense. It was a place of ongoing relationship: the dead were buried there generation by generation, and the living maintained that relationship through ceremony, song, and the regular practice of acknowledging that the mound was present and the people in it were still part of the community. This is a different model of the relationship between living and dead than most modern Western practice assumes — not because it was more "primitive," but because it operated within a cosmological framework in which the dead did not simply stop mattering to the world above the ground.

The history of what happened to Burton Mound after Spanish contact is a compressed version of what happened to Chumash culture more broadly. Mission Santa Barbara was established in 1782, on land adjacent to or overlapping the village site. The reducción — the Spanish colonial policy of concentrating indigenous people in mission settlements — drew the Syuxtun community into the mission system over the following decades. By the early 19th century, the village as a living community had been effectively absorbed. The mound remained.

In the 1870s and 1880s, amateur and professional archaeologists began excavating Burton Mound, removing thousands of Chumash human remains and associated burial objects. The site was later developed as the Hotel Miramar, a resort whose grounds covered much of the original village site. Further archaeological work in the 20th century continued to remove remains for study. The bones and objects went to museums and university collections across California and the country.

Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed by Congress in 1990, museums and federal agencies are required to return Native American human remains and objects of ceremonial significance to affiliated tribes upon request. The process is slow, bureaucratically complex, and often contested — institutions that held remains for decades do not always relinquish them smoothly. The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and other Chumash tribal organizations have been engaged in repatriation efforts for decades. The work is ongoing. Some remains have come home. Others have not yet.

The mound at Syuxtun is not a historical artifact. It is the ongoing home of the Chumash dead. The question of whether those dead are treated with the respect owed to people — rather than as archaeological specimens — is not a historical question. It is a present one.

II. Ksen and the Chumash Cosmos

Chumash cosmology describes a three-tiered world: an upper world above the sky, a middle world in which people live, and a lower world beneath the earth and sea. The three worlds are not stable — they are in constant tension, held in balance by cosmic beings and by the ceremonies the 'antap society performed to maintain that balance. If the ceremonies were not performed, the worlds could slip: earthquakes, floods, the failure of the sun to return.

The North Star — Ksen, Sky Coyote — is a central figure in this cosmology. Unlike other stars and celestial bodies, Ksen does not move: he is the fixed point around which the sky turns, the still axis of the turning world. He is also a trickster — clever, old, fond of the people below him, not always predictable. The trickster figure appears in many indigenous cosmologies around the world, often associated with Coyote in North American traditions. What distinguishes the trickster from both the hero and the deity is that the trickster operates at the boundary between order and chaos, between the known and the unknown — which is precisely the position this story asks him to occupy.

This story gives Ksen a first-person narrative chapter. This is a deliberate structural choice, and it is worth being explicit about why. The conventional academic framing of Chumash cosmology places figures like Ksen in the category of "mythology" or "belief system" — things the Chumash believed, which the narrator and reader stand outside of, observing. But the Chumash did not stand outside their cosmology any more than a physicist stands outside physics. Ksen was not a story the Chumash told about the North Star. He was the North Star. The story does not argue this; it simply proceeds as though it is true — the same way the Nunašiš story in Unit 5 proceeds — and asks the reader to sit with the experience of a narrative in which the cosmological frame is not available for ironic distance. What do you see differently when you read it that way? What becomes thinkable that wasn't thinkable before?

The "Shimilaqsha" — the Chumash land of the dead — is located in the upper world and is reached by traveling west along the Milky Way, which the Chumash called the path of souls. The dead were not absent; they were at a distance, reachable through ceremony. The mound was one of the points of contact between the world of the living and the world of the dead — not a storage facility for the past, but a place where the past was still present and in relationship with the present.

III. Glass Trade Beads: The Harbinger Before the Thing

European glass trade beads — primarily manufactured in Venice and the Low Countries, carried to the Americas on Spanish ships, distributed through indigenous trade networks from Mexico northward — began appearing at California coastal sites in the mid-18th century, before any permanent Spanish settlement in Alta California. The first Spanish expedition to Alta California overland was the Portolá expedition of 1769. Glass beads appear in some Chumash archaeological sites from the 1740s or 1750s — two or three decades earlier.

This gap is significant. The beads traveled through indigenous trade networks on their own, ahead of the people who made them. They arrived as objects: beautiful, unfamiliar, bead-shaped and therefore immediately legible within the existing economy of shell bead currency and ornamental trade goods, but unmistakably from somewhere else. The hole was too perfect. The color was wrong. The regularity was wrong.

The "two maps" framework this collection has been developing is useful here. The beads fit both maps simultaneously: in the Chumash map, they are beautiful trade objects, capable of being incorporated into the bead economy and worn as ornament. In the Spanish colonial map, they are a commodity produced by European industrial manufacture and distributed through a global trade network. These two interpretations are not wrong simultaneously — but they are incommensurable. The bead does not know it is carrying a message. The people who receive it do not yet have the frame to read the message fully. This is the moment this story is interested in: the interval between the arrival of the sign and the arrival of what it signifies.

Archaeologists use glass trade beads as one of the primary chronological markers for pre- and post-contact layers at California indigenous sites. The presence or absence of glass beads tells excavators roughly which side of European contact a given deposit falls on. The beads are, in the language of archaeology, a "horizon marker" — they mark a boundary in time, a before and after. The Chumash at Syuxtun in 1765 were, in this sense, living through the horizon without knowing they were on one side of it.

IV. The 'Antap: What They Held and What Was Lost

The 'antap society was the primary institutional structure through which Chumash ceremonial, astronomical, and healing knowledge was organized and transmitted. Membership was earned through initiation — not inherited, though family connections helped — and the society included members from across the community: men, women, and the 'aqi (the third-gender individuals recognized and honored in Chumash society). The knowledge held by 'antap members was specialized and not publicly shared: astronomical observations used to maintain the ceremony calendar, plant medicine for healing and ceremony, the songs and rituals that maintained the relationship between the three worlds and kept the cosmos in balance.

The mission system's suppression of 'antap knowledge was systematic. The missions required renaming (you became Tomás or María, not your Chumash name), religious conversion (the Chumash cosmology was classified as paganism to be eliminated), and cultural erasure (the ceremony calendar, the momoy ritual, the songs were prohibited or disrupted). The transmission of 'antap knowledge depended on initiated practitioners passing it to the next generation in person, through ceremony and direct teaching. When that chain was broken — by death, by separation, by the prohibition of ceremony — the knowledge that depended on it could not be recovered from books, because it had never been in books.

Some of it survived. Chumash people carried what they could in memory and in practice, hidden from mission surveillance, transmitted in gaps and at risk. The Chumash language revitalization movement, the 'Aqtumush Brotherhood of the Tomol, the ceremony work being done today by Chumash individuals and communities — all of this is continuous with the 'antap, not a reconstruction of something lost but a continuation of something that was never fully extinguished. The distinction matters. Survival is different from recovery.

Tsiwas is 'antap in this story because the 'antap is the right frame for a person who notices things from the side, who thinks before speaking, who holds the knowledge that keeps the world on schedule. She is not a symbol. She is an elderly woman who has been paying attention for sixty years, and who has just received an object that is asking to be thought about carefully. The 'antap training is exactly what has prepared her to receive it.

V. The Collection Pauses at the Beginning

This story sits at Unit 9 and is set earlier in time than any story before it. The arc has moved: from the kelp forest at Limuw in the early mission period (Units 1–2), to the three villages of the island and the five crossings that connect it to the mainland (Units 3–4), to the deep time of Chumash cosmology (Unit 5), to a mountain in 10th-century Fujian (Unit 6), to the swordfish ceremony on the eve of contact (Unit 7), to the Salinas Valley in spring 2025 (Unit 8) — and now to 1765, before any of the California stories had begun. Three more units follow: the mission's ledger at Tucutnut (Unit 10), the pre-contact cosmos under Momoy (Unit 11), and the revolt and the walk east at Hetspah (Unit 12). The collection steps back here, at Unit 9, to stand on the bluff in the last intact moment.

This is not accident. The collection has been organized around a single argument: that the colonial and administrative maps drawn over indigenous and local worlds do not replace those worlds — they are drawn over them, and the thing underneath persists, damaged but present, legible to those who know how to look. The fish still knows the kelp forest. The cormorant still knows where to nest. The song still exists in the memory of the person who learned it. The ground still has its names, even when the map calls it something else.

The bead at Syuxtun is a figure for all of this. It arrives before its meaning. It is beautiful. It fits into the world that receives it — is incorporated, strung, worn — and it also does not fit, is also clearly from somewhere else, is also the leading edge of something that has not yet arrived. Kahkol puts it on her string of shell money. This is not naïveté; it is the practical wisdom of someone who has lived long enough to know that new things arrive in the world, and that the response to a new thing is to give it a place and watch it carefully.

The two maps coexist at Syuxtun in 1765. The Chumash map is intact. The other map is still over the southern horizon, in the form of ships that have not yet arrived. But the bead is here. And Ksen is watching.

He does not move. Everything else moves around him. He has been watching a very long time. He will keep watching after the story ends.

Discussion Questions

For the Story

1. Kahkol puts the glass bead on her string of shell money. What does this act mean? Is it incorporation, adaptation, something else? What would it mean to refuse to put it on the string?

2. Ksen says the bead is "a message that does not know it is a message." What does he mean? Can you think of other examples — in history, or in your own life — of something that turned out to be a message before anyone had a frame to read it?

3. Tsiwas sings the mound song — a few lines to let the dead know "there is a new thing." What is the cosmological logic of this act? What assumptions about the relationship between living and dead does it require?

4. Ksen describes himself as a trickster who is "allowed to find things interesting." What is the relationship between the trickster's perspective and the ability to see things clearly? Why might a trickster be better positioned than a hero or a deity to observe the moment before disaster?

5. The story ends without catastrophe — the village is intact, the bead is incorporated, the women go inside. How does placing this story at Unit 9, directly after the 2025 Salinas Valley story, change how you read its ending? What does it mean that the bead sits here, between Temblor and Tucutnut?

For the Framework

6. This collection has argued that colonial renaming does not replace what it renames — that the older map persists beneath the new one. How does the bead challenge or complicate this argument? The bead does not rename anything. What kind of force does it represent?

7. The story gives Ksen a first-person narrative voice. What is the effect of reading a chapter in which a cosmological figure narrates directly? Does it change how you think about the Chumash cosmological framework? Does it change how you think about your own cosmological framework?

8. Ksen says the ships are "carrying a logic with them — a way of organizing land and people and names — that does not accommodate the possibility that the land already has names." How does this differ from simple greed or cruelty as an explanation for colonialism? What are the implications for how we think about the colonial project?

9. What is NAGPRA, and why is it significant that the repatriation process described in Section I is still ongoing? What does it mean for a museum to "hold" human remains? Whose framework is being applied when those remains are classified as archaeological specimens rather than as people?

10. The collection's chronological arc is deliberately non-linear: from the mission-period kelp forest and the pre-contact cosmos, across the Pacific to 10th-century Fujian, forward to spring 2025, back to 1765 in this story, then to the 1772 mission ledger, deeper still to the pre-contact time before, and finally to the 1824 revolt. What is the argument made by this structure? What would be different if the stories were in chronological order?

Further Reading

Blackburn, Thomas C. (1975). December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives. University of California Press. Primary source collection of Chumash oral literature, including cosmological narratives involving Ksen and the structure of the three worlds. The indispensable starting point for Chumash cosmology.

Hudson, Travis, and Ernest Underhay (1978). Crystals in the Sky: An Intellectual Odyssey Involving Chumash Astronomy, Cosmology, and Rock Art. Ballena Press. Detailed study of Chumash astronomical knowledge and its integration with cosmology and ceremony. Essential context for understanding the 'antap's role as the community's astronomical record-keepers.

King, Chester D. (1990). Evolution of Chumash Society. Garland. Comprehensive archaeological study of the Santa Barbara Channel region, including detailed discussion of Syuxtun and the regional role of the Burton Mound site.

Johnson, John R. (2000). "Chumash Social Organization: An Ethnohistoric Perspective." In The Chumash World at European Contact. University of California Press. On the social and political structure of Chumash communities at the time of Spanish contact, including the roles of the wot, the 'antap, and the 'aqi.

Deetz, James, and Edwin Dethlefsen (1967). "Death's Head, Cherub, Urn and Willow." Natural History 76(3). A classic article on the relationship between material culture and attitudes toward death. Useful counterpoint for thinking about what European and Chumash burial practices reveal about their respective relationships to the dead.

Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians — Tribal Historic Preservation Office The THPO maintains ongoing documentation of Chumash cultural heritage sites and repatriation efforts. Their published materials and tribal news provide the most current information on the status of NAGPRA negotiations and the return of ancestral remains.