Los Angeles

Early History

The LA area was for millennia the home of the Tongva and Chumash and their ancestors. Their uses of the landscape helped to shape the actions of the earliest Europeans and have continuing impacts in the 21st century. The Chumash lived at the western edge of LA and along the Santa Barbara Channel to the northwest. Their important coastal village, Humaliwu, lent its name to the famed celebrity colony of Malibu. The Tongva people occupied the [Page 480]LA basin and San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. Both tribes had many villages along the coasts, estuaries, and rivers where the food resources were richest. Even so, their collective ecological footprint over some 10,000 years was exceptionally modest by 21st-century standards.

Native Californians utilized many calorically desirable and easy-to-acquire resources and may have at times driven local animal populations to precarious levels. Some paleontologists argue that early hunters precipitated the extinction of Ice Age fauna (such as mammoths), but others disagree. In some periods, sea mammals vulnerable due to sustained, land-based breeding seasons at local rookeries were likely overhunted, forcing villagers to pursue other species. For the most part, however, precolonial people were effective stewards of the sea and land.

Virtually all plant and animal species present at the start of the Holocene were still around when the missions were built. Many plants important for basketry or food were regularly pruned and tended (although the people were not farmers), and there was a long precolonial history of controlled burns to stimulate the production of seed-rich native shrubs and grasses. Plant species adapted to fire thrived under these land management practices, attracting deer and elk. The era must not be romanticized, but the archaeological record suggests that people did not wastefully use most resources.

Although communities across ancient southern California were judiciously spaced and rarely reached 300 people (most had 75–150 residents), the cumulative effect of thousands of years of food and toolmaking waste at settled villages is impressive. Before highways and other construction destroyed so much unwritten history, the LA–Santa Barbara coast was a necklace of shell midden sites as deep as 5 meters, each with the barest remains of circular thatch houses surrounded by discarded shells; bones of fish, seals, rabbits, and deer; acorns; stone tools; soapstone bowls; and metates. In these societies, food and manufacturing trash was tossed near houses—there were no toxins to concern them. The most physically dangerous waste was sharp-edged stone from making projectile points, but these too were absorbed into middens. Other resources consumed in the LA region include asphaltum from the La Brea tarpits, which was widely used as an adhesive. The distribution of native villages affected where important nodes of colonial activity took place, such as where missions were positioned, and still deeply impacts where urban construction happens in the 21st century, since the remaining sites are protected by local and federal laws.

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