Retired OC Parks Ranger Tom Maloney discusses Native American artifacts and history in what is now Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park in south Orange County's San Joaquin Hills. Excerpted from full interview, available from the Moulton Museum. Recorded at Moulton Museum, Laguna Hills, California. Full interview is available from the Moulton Museum.
Transcript
The Native America history, because of the park and of where we were, was, you know, a great location to interpret natural history and archaeological history of the area. The park unfortunately became a drainage channel for Lake Forest, Mission Viejo all parts upstream of Aliso Creek. So we get a lot of runoff water and the runoff water is very erosive and of, what it did was expose several unknown Indian habitations along the creek. And the erosion just didn't stop for many, many, years and kept eroding deeper and wider, deeper and wider and so more and more artifacts would wash into Aliso creek.
And so I talked to different experts in archeology and they said, well that's great that you see them but they offer really no value to us because they are out of context. They are not really in the village where they were originally buried.
So, I said, What do we do with them?
Nothing.
I said, Well, how about if I use them for interpretive purposes for the public?
And he says, You wanna haul them?
And these were big chunks of grinding bowls, mortars, pestles, and things like that. They were heavy not too many of them in perfect condition because they were tumbling down the creek, and some of them were broken. And some of them you've actually see they were broken ceremony. They were, I guess they call it kill. When the owner of the bowl uh died they would pop a hole through the bottom of the grinding stone. Kill the stone so it couldn't be used again. And so we have a collection of those at Aliso and Wood Canyon park. We salvaged out of Aliso creek primarily. We found some in Wood Creek as well and these were from the Acjachemen Indian tribe, who were later given the name of the Juaneo and everything I heard was that Aliso creek was the dividing line between the Juaneos and the Gabrielinos which were farther west. But then you talk to different people and I said you know like a wandering stream that's a fluid lines, you know the boundary change I guess depending on things. And that's about the only time the native Americans would fight would be when some other tribe would poach on their acorn, oak grove for their acorns and things like that to their hunting grounds.
So, we learned about the Juaneo Indians and the different um tribe travel villages and a lot of the caves in the park were natural features but they were also what they were termed as rock shelters for archeologists the Native Americans would use these overhangs in the sandstone and rock shelter says kind of a temporary shelter they would have a campfire at the beginning at the front and you'd see you know mounds of grace and remnants of food items shells fish bones small animal bones and things like that and I like to describe it as well it was their motel 6 they go down to the beach at Aliso Beach harvest basketfuls of food and they would bring it back up Aliso Creek to rendezvous with the looting village the transitional village that would follow the water source up into the Santa Ana Mountains and so they would spend the night and they'd take off so we found lots of Indian projectile points in the park as well someone would just show up washes and the creeks up at the base of Cholla Trail it was unknown like a place where Native Americans would just nap heads and we'd find flakes and things like that up there that was unknown archaeological site at the time.
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