Reuse and Avoidance - Baja and California

Idea systems are usually the aspects of prehistoric culture that are least amenable to archaeological reconstruction. However, among the partial exceptions to that generalization are prehistoric attitudes toward the locations where prior human activities took place and toward the material residues left from those activities. Reuse may be recognized through a variety of absolute or relative chronological indicators. Decisions to avoid such places and things may be recognizable archaeologically through redundancy (Laylander 2014).

Two main motives for avoiding reuse are suggested by the regional ethnographic record: exclusivity in ownership, and postmortem taboos. Ethnographic accounts indicate that individual ownership of objects, including subsistence equipment, was recognized, as well as collective ownership of territories and resources. The accounts also often report that personal possessions and houses were burned or otherwise destroyed at or shortly after the time of an individual’s death. In some cases, surviving family members are specifically said to have moved their residence to a new location. Beliefs concerning the spirits of the dead suggest that, except in mourning rituals, any actions that might tend to link the living with the dead were considered dangerous or otherwise undesirable.

The reuse or avoidance of reuse of particular artifacts, features, and sites may be recognizable in a variety of cases:

Flaked lithic tools may have distinctly different degrees of patination on different flake scars. Archaeological assemblages in San Diego County seem to contain this sort of evidence of reuse fairly commonly, although only on a small proportion of the specimens in a given assemblage (cf. O’Neil 1982:126-128). Similarly, obsidian specimens may have different hydration band thicknesses on different surfaces; this has been documented as occurring with moderate frequency in the region (e.g., McFarland 2000).
Chronologically diagnostic artifact types, such as particular projectile point forms or ceramic types, may be recovered in anachronistically late contexts (e.g. Thomas 1976). Problems with chronological control have made this difficult to document, although it has often been invoked as an explanation for apparent anomalies.
Materials may occur in contexts dated to periods when their direct procurement would not have been possible. Notably, obsidian from the Obsidian Butte source in Imperial County may be found in contexts that were contemporaneous with full stands of Lake Cahuilla, when Obsidian Butte was submerged. Such material must have been curated or scavenged from secondary contexts. However, chronological uncertainties about the timing of the lake’s multiple stands and recessions also make this circumstance difficult to document.
The presence of considerable numbers of slightly used, non-exhausted, functionally equivalent lithic tools in a site deposit may indicate a pattern of avoiding tool reuse.
The reuse of roasting pits may be detectable through anomalies in pit design, the character and distribution of fire-affected rocks, or multiple radiocarbon dates. Such reuse has been suggested but not yet convincingly documented for San Diego County features. On the other hand, the location of multiple thermal features within relatively small area, such as seems to have prevailed in southeastern San Diego County, suggests a pattern of avoiding the reuse of the features (Laylander 1992b, 2014; Williams 2014).
Bedrock milling features that cluster too tightly to have been used simultaneously and that lack evidence of functional exhaustion appear to indicate avoidance (cf. Chace 1980; Laylander and Christenson 1988; True et al. 1991).
Rock art panels may show reuse by the presence of overpainting on pictographs and of differential repatination on petroglyphs (cf. Hedges 1970). However, in comparison with central Baja California, for instance, rock art panel reuse in San Diego County seems to have been relatively rare.
Site reuse may be documented by chronological indicators attesting to a long total range of occupation, or by patterns in shifting activity areas. Site avoidance might be indicated by the presence of functionally redundant sites that cluster too closely together for either their functional complementarity or their simultaneous use to be plausible (Laylander 2014; Laylander and Christenson 1988).

Present evidence suggests that reuse and avoidance were both practiced in prehistoric San Diego County. Several possible explanations for this pattern may be proposed:

There may be functional explanations for some of the patterns. For instance, sites may have been abandoned and avoided for a time because of pest infestations, but then subsequently reused.
Some reused materials may not have been recognized by their reusers as cultural in origin, and therefore not to be avoided. However, given the strong continuities in technology throughout San Diego prehistory, this explanation seems unlikely.
There may have been a “statute of limitations” observed in ideologically motivated avoidance. Locations, features, or artifacts that had been owned by or associated with a particular individual may have been avoided while the individual was still living or while he was remembered, but they may have become available for reuse after his memory had lapsed.

PROSPECTS

Future archaeological investigations may be able to document the range of sites, features, and artifacts that were reused or avoided and the time scales at which reuse or avoidance predominated. Evidence relevant to this issue will include direct indications of the presence or absence of reuse, the exhaustion or suitability for reuse of abandoned artifacts and features, the presence of artifacts in chronologically anomalous contexts, and redundancy in the spatial occurrence of artifacts, features, and sites.