Native American Basketry Of Central California

This unique book provides a complete study of the exquisite Native American basketry from the San Francisco Bay Area and the Monterey Bay region north to Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino and eastward across the Sacramento Valley to the crest of the Sierras. Baskets of the Pomo, Ohlone (Costanoan), Coast Miwok, Esselen, Huchnom, Lake Miwok, Maidu, Wappo, and Yuki people are lavishly illustrated and knowledgably and sensitively described. Color photographs and drawings illustrate the rare, fine California Indian baskets from museum and private collections in the United States and Europe. The vast majority of these baskets are illustrated for the first time. Ralph Shanks is vice president of the Miwok Archaeological Preserve of Marin. Lisa Woo Shanks is editor of the Basketry of California and Oregon Series. They are the authors of The North American Indian Travel Guide.

California Indian Baskets is lavishly illustrated in full color with rare baskets from the magnificent collections of the University of California, Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, The British Museum, Madrid's Museo de America, Royal Museum of Scotland, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Southwest Museum and many other world-class museums and private collections. The vast majority of these rare baskets have never appeared in print before. Made possible in part through the support and vision of three California Indian tribes, this remarkable book is the result of decades of research by noted basketry scholar Ralph Shanks. Expertly researched and well written, California Indian Baskets honors the achievements of the First Californians. The book illuminates Native American art, history, technology, population movements, cultural interactions, and native plant uses. The book demonstrates basketry studies can rank with archeology, linguistics and DNA research in understanding and appreciating Native American culture and history. This is especially true in California where baskets were central to daily life. It was through basketry that the most populous and linguistically diverse Native American population in the United States was able to create a highly productive economy and vibrant cultural life with no agriculture and very limited use of pottery. Native California was not "pre-agricultural," but rather a land where basketry was combined with native plant resources so successfully that agriculture was not needed.

Through a special arrangement with the San Diego Museum of Man, we are distributing three outstanding titles based on traveling museum exhibits from their collection. Each volume presents a unique display of Native American artwork, fully color illustrated, together with insightful commentary from museum curators. These books have not been previously offered except through the museums these extraordinary shows have visited. They may be purchased individually or as a set.

At the time of its publication in 1908, Pomo Indian Basketry was the most complete and detailed study of a single Native American basketry tradition. The work, prepared as Samuel Barrett's doctoral dissertation, earned the author the first Ph.D. in anthropology at UC Berkeley. Among its contents are sections devoted to materials, techniques, forms, and designs. This edition is supplemented with two early articles, "Basket Designs of the Pomo Indians" by Barrett (1905) and "California Basketry and the Pomo" by his teacher Alfred Kroeber (1909). Sherrie Smith-Ferri's introduction reviews Barrett's early life and research and identifies the human sources of Barrett's collections and information--a community of talented Pomoan basket weavers. Sherrie Smith-Ferri (Dry Creek Pomo/Bodega Miwok) is a curator at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, California.

This bibliography includes more than 1,100 entries from books, journals, newspaper articles, and dissertations concerning North American Indian basketry. More general cultural works with some information on basketry are also included, and the materials date from early ethnographic work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to 1987. . . . The introduction offers a good overview of research in Native American basketry, and although the annotations vary greatly in thoroughness and length, they are generally useful. This unique, well-produced bibliography is recommended for collections supporting programs in anthropology, crafts, or Native American Studies. Choice Interest in Native American basketry dates from the late 1800s, when an enthusiastic public, together with curators, academic collectors, and archaeologists, first began to appreciate the value and uniqueness of these beautiful hand-crafted artifacts. This bibliography is the first comprehensive guide to publications on the subject. Organized by major cultural areas of North America, it offers annotated listings of books, journal articles, dissertations, theses, monographs, and selected newspaper articles published over the last 100 years. In his introductory essay, Porter discusses the history of Native American basket making and the findings and views of some of the anthropologists, archaeologists, and popular writers whose works contribute to our knowledge of the subject. The bibliography is divided into eleven sections, each dealing with a specific geographical/cultural area. Entries are cross-referenced, and a comprehensive index gives convenient access to authors, titles, and subjects.

The origins of basketry are lost in the mists of prehistory, but making baskets is certainly one of the oldest and most nearly universal crafts of mankind. In the Americas, basket artifacts found in caves in Utah have been dated at 7000 B.C., while twined baskets said to be at least 5,000 years old have been uncovered in Peru. In the American Southwest, an entire Indian culture (ca. 100–700 A.D.) is known as "Basket Maker" because of the distinctive baskets it produced. This exhaustive survey (two volumes in one) of American Indian basketry, perhaps the finest book ever published on the subject, documents basketmaking throughout the Americas — in Eastern North America, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, Oregon, California and the Interior Basin, as well as Mexico, Central and South America. Spanning a wide range of indigenous cultures (Aleutian, Tlinkit, Shoshonean, Athapascam, etc.), the detailed, carefully researched discussions in this book offer a wealth of information about woven and coiled basketry, watertight basketry, materials, basketmaking techniques and preparation, ornamentation and symbolism, as well as the uses of baskets as receptacles, in preparing and serving food, for gleaning and milling, in mortuary customs, in religion and social life, in trapping, carrying water, and in many other areas of Indian life. An interesting and informative chapter on collectors and collections and the preservation of baskets, followed by a helpful biography, rounds out the book. In addition, the author, once Curator of Ethnology at the U.S. National Museum (part of the Smithsonian Institution), enhanced this encyclopedic study with over 450 excellent photographs and illustrations. For collectors, preservationists, anthropologists, students of crafts and culture, modern basketmakers, this is an indispensable reference — a massively rich source of information about baskets, the peoples who made them, how they were made, and their role in native American life and culture.

Presents over sixty examples of beautiful California Indian basketry, with commentary upon each basket by native basketweavers, scholars, and California Indian artists in other media.