Burial Practices

The ways in which the remains of the dead were treated offer important clues concerning San Diego prehistory. Burial practices are among the most archaeologically visible and interpretable aspect of prehistoric ideological culture. Conservatism and strong cultural conditioning of the traits may make them effective markers for broad periods of time and distinct ethnic identities. Differences in the mortuary treatment of individuals according to their status, gender, and age may reveal aspects of social organization.

(Archaeological investigation of burial practices is limited by legal restrictions arising from the strong concerns of many contemporary local Native Americans about the disturbance of burials. However, such concerns also provide an added incentive to recognize the contexts within which human burials are likely to be found, in order that they may be avoided, and to refine criteria for distinguishing associated grave goods and funerary objects from other classes of archaeological remains.)

Malcolm J. Rogers (1945) recognized two phases for coastal Archaic culture, with two successive burial patterns. According to Rogers, in La Jolla I times, burials were unsegregated and lacked mortuary offerings. “Sometime during [La Jolla II], burials became segregated and true cemeteries were formed….Typical Channel Island shell beads and stone digging weights were included with burials which were marked with one or more inverted metates” (Rogers 1945:172).

James R. Moriarty, III (1966) suggested the existence of three or four successive Archaic burial patterns. La Jolla I (ca. 5500-3500 B.C.) burials were flexed, unoriented, and unsegregated, with large, crude shell beads as rare mortuary offerings. La Jolla II (ca. 3500-2000 B.C.) burials were flexed, generally oriented with the head to the north and the face toward the east, and segregated in cemeteries. Mortuary offerings were the rule with La Jolla II burials, and they included shell and stone beads and pendants; functional tools such as scrapers, choppers, manos, and metates, the latter usually placed over the head and upper body; and perhaps food offerings involving bone and shell. By La Jolla III times (ca. 2000-1000 B.C.), the practice of including food offerings was well established. A burial at the Spindrift Site in La Jolla, dated to about 1000 B.C., suggested to Moriarty a possible modification of La Jolla III practices under Yuman influences. The burial was oriented to the north, with a metate over the head and with associated food bone and shell, but the body was extended rather than flexed.

In the Colorado Desert at Indian Hill Rockshelter, Robert M. Yohe, II (1986) reported a female burial with utilitarian grave goods, dated to 4,070 ±100 radiocarbon years (ca. 2600 B.C.). The burial was apparently flexed, with the head oriented to the south, although the possibility was also noted that it may have been a disturbed or secondary burial.

A different Archaic burial pattern was found in the Yuha Desert immediately east of San Diego County. The remains of a young adult male were found “in an earth burial mound approximately 9 by 12 ft. in horizontal dimensions, covered with various sized stones of irregular shape” (S. Rogers 1977:2).

A cultural discontinuity separated Archaic inhumations from Late Prehistoric cremations. The views of Malcolm J. Rogers concerning the chronology of cremation in the region were ambiguous. At least in the deserts, he suggested that cremations without funerary offerings predated the adoption of ceramics by the Yumans (Rogers 1945). On the coast, the Yumans were thought to have arrived later (ca. A.D. 1500), bringing ceramics and the practice of cremation with them. An anomalous development in Ipai (northern Kumeyaay) territory was the use of cinerary urns. According to Gena R. Van Camp (1979:35), Rogers proposed a chronological succession running from ungathered cremations to pit-gathered cremations to urn-gathered cremations. Van Camp also cited unpublished notes of Clark W. Brott indicating that all three cremation types, as well as non-cremated inhumation, were found in association with historic-period artifacts at site SDM-C-144 in Mason Valley.

Moriarty (1966) concluded that inhumation had ceased and cremation had begun by about 500 B.C. This change was seen as the principal defining criterion for the Diegueño I phase. Also according to Moriarty (1966:24), “there is good evidence of variations or modification in cremation practices from certain sites….Radiocarbon dates correlated with these variations indicate an evolution from a simple pit-cremation to the creation of special cremation areas with cobble-lined cremation pits. Very specialized and segregated cremation areas were discovered in northern San Diego County near Vista and at Witch Creek…. [These developments] undoubtedly reflect this influence [of the northern Kumeyaay’s non-Yuman neighbors].” At the Witch Creek Site, mortuary offerings included “bows, arrows, food beads, pendants, etc.,” which were gathered with the ashes and cremated bone, placed in an olla, and buried at the cremation site (Moriarty 1966:26).

Burial practices figured prominently in D. L. True’s (1966, 1970) definition of the Cuyamaca Complex. Characteristics that were proposed to distinguish that complex from the contemporaneous San Luis Rey Complex included the presence of cemetery areas separate from living areas, the use of grave markers, placement of cremations in ceramic urns, and the “use of specially made mortuary offerings such as miniature vessels, miniature shaft straighteners, elaborate projectile points, etc.” (True 1970:54).

G. Timothy Gross and Michael Sampson (1990:146) noted that site SDI-903 in Cuyamaca may have contributed to the proposal that distinct cremation cemeteries were characteristic of the Cuyamaca Complex. The site reportedly yielded 21 cremations from a limited area that was apparently also a living area. The work at this site supported the observations that cremations were usually placed in urns and were commonly marked with metates.

The regional ethnographic record is often vague or inconsistent concerning burial practices, perhaps because of the radical alterations in such practices that attended missionization. Before contact, the dead were cremated, apparently usually on a pyre over an excavated pit. The ashes were often put into the pit, but sometimes they were gathered into a ceramic vessel for burial or caching elsewhere, or were ground in a mortar. Houses, clothing, and other property were burned, either at the time of the funeral or on a later occasion. Special morturary offerings, defined cemetery areas, and prohibitions concerning later contact with the physical remains of the dead were not indicated (Davis 1921; Drucker 1937, 1941; DuBois 1907; Gifford 1931; Heye 1919).

Both ethnographic and archaeological evidence concerning burial methods, associated materials, and burial locations in the western Yuman region have been reviewed (Laylander 2011).

PROSPECTS

Future archaeological investigations may be able to refine the chronology and the spatial distributions of various burial practices, including primary, secondary, and cremation burial; individual or group interments; separate cemeteries or burial in occupation middens; flexed and extended burials in various orientations; burial accompaniments, including personal, ceremonial, utilitarian, and food offerings and the use of cremation urns; and differences in burial practices according to the age, gender, and status of the deceased.