Ohlone/Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today
Milliken R, Shoup LH, Ortiz BR. 2009. Ohlone/Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today. National Park Service. San Francisco, CA
This study responds to a complex historical and anthropological questionposed by the staff of the National Park Service’s Golden Gate National RecreationArea (GGNRA): Analyze and synthesize sources identifying the Ohlone/Costanoantribal groups that inhabited [federal] parklands in San Franciscoand San Mateo Counties prior to Spanish colonization, and…document the cultural ties among these earlier native people andmembers of the present-day community of Ohlone/Costanoans(Scolari 2002:4). Today’s Ohlone/Costanoan people are the descendants of speakers of six related Costanoan languages that were spoken in west central California, from San Francisco Bay to Monterey Bay, when Spanish missionaries and settlers arrived in the 1770s. The San Francisco Peninsula lands of the Golden Gate Recreation Area (GGNRA) are within the territory of one of those six languages, San Francisco Bay Costanoan. In this study we describe the prehistoric and contact-period culture of the San Francisco Bay Costanoans and compare their culture to the cultures of surrounding language groups (other Costanoan language groups and non-Costanoan language groups of adjacent west-Central California areas). We then trace the Mission Period history and modern history of the San Francisco Bay Costanoan descendants, as well as of the descendants of the other Costanoan language speakers. Finally, we assess the degree of historic cultural affinity among today’s separate descendant groups, people variously called Ohlone/Costanoans, Ohlones, or Costanoans.