SOME PRIMITIVE CALIFORNIANS. 



495 



held together in their village as a social unit, with a limited 

 commerce. The range of trade indicated by the excavations 

 and confirmed by Donna Maria reveals a narrow world, with a 

 diameter of not much more than twenty miles. The two broken 

 arrowheads from Napa and one broken basaltic lava mortar, 

 whose material must have come from far to the northward, are 

 unique importations to be explained by accident rather than by 

 regular trade, since the other mortars are all made of bowlders 

 easily found in the vicinity, and since, as I have said, the broken 

 arrow points are unique. The hill tribes eastward essentially 

 bounded their world. Tradition and evidence alike show them 

 to be a spur of population entering the valley from the south- 



FiG. 7. 



ward. Contact with the more warlike and better equipped 

 northern tribes would either have destroyed them or developed 

 their own culture to a higher status of defense. 



This low status of defense, the fact that their implements are 

 so similar to the natural objects which suggest them, the low type 

 of skull (Fig. 7), all go to show that the Indian of the Santa Clara 

 Valley was one of the most primitive types known to ethnology 

 within the historic era. The early fathers and voyagers have left 

 a good deal of observation in regard to him, but all this observa- 

 tion is more or less vitiated by the fact that it was made after the 

 contact of Spaniard and Indian had already begun its work. For 

 this reason the evidence of the Robles Rancheria is especially 

 valuable, since it apparently antedates this influence entirely and 

 shows us primitive man in one of his most primitive seats. Noth- 

 ing possessed or made by the men of the Robles Rancheria indi- 



