User:DiegoShakaaa/sandbox

From Jana: This looks like you are on the right track--excellent.

Stoney Point was occupied by Gabrieliño Indians beginning in 6000 BC. The Gabrieliño homeland offers an area rich in natural resources as well as an effective system of trade. This tribe was widely known as skilled hunter-gatherers. Faunal and floral resources were abundant and offered a wide variety based on location and season. Food sources were available year round, including rabbits, roots/bulbs, and shellfish. Some crops sprung up only once a year, such as acorns, and were collected in large numbers. Winter was the only time of the year that brought up food stresses in inland communities due to lack of fresh vegetation. The communities closer to the coast, however, fared just fine with the marine food resources.

The diversity of resources for the Gabrieliño Indians was mainly due to the wide range of biotic zones in their territory. These included beach and coastal regions, fresh and salt water regions, chaparral and grassland zones, and even woodland and mountain regions. Faunal resources included land mammals, fish, insects, reptiles, and sea-mammals. Floral resources included trees, plants, seeds, bulbs, and sea grasses. Mineral resources included obsidian, cherts, and other types of stones to make tools and caulking or adhesive compounds. These three resource categories satisfied all the material needs of the Gabrieliño Indians.

The Gabrieliños developed sustainable diets by using the resources available to them at different times of the year. They were excellent hunters that effectively used their weapons and technology to develop strategies to utilize available resources. Meat hunting was prominent during the winter when fresh plant food wasn’t available. Fishing and sea-mammal hunting took place in the spring and summer seasons and was avoided during the fall and winter when the fish retreated to the south. At a ritual called the Mourning Ceremony, food and manufactured items were destroyed to restrict the amount of goods available. This Ceremony took place in hopes to maintain the demand for the services as well as skills of the craftsmen of the village.

Gabrieliño Indians believed that greediness and food hoarding were reprehensible traits and thus the proper management of food resources was evident in their culture. Fishermen and hunters were prohibited from consuming their own kill in order to discourage hoarding. At certain times of the year, large populations of people would get together to collect seasonal crops or collaborate in large-scale hunts. It was important to the Gabrieliño Indians that the entire village population participated in harvesting seeds in the plain.

The Gabrieliños made sure to minimize their environmental footprint as much as possible to follow their beliefs. These Indians were very interested in the spiritual world, and members of the communities called shamans would interpret the environment. They believed that the universe was always in a state of flux, which explains their desire to maintain the preservation of the environment and the resources it provides them with. They turned to these shamans to continue the proper alignment of forces in the universe as well as tap into heavenly bodies to perform sacred rituals. The only main way they left a significant impact on the land was through rock art, which was harmless to the environment. They used two different techniques: petroglyphs (rock carving) and pictographs (rock paintings). Most art was created during ceremonies as elaborate rituals. Following generations have preserved the remaining artwork in museums around the region, but some ancient rock art sites of the Gabrieliño Indians can still be visited in the area throughout Stoney Point.

It wasn’t until the creation of the California Missions, built by the Spaniards beginning in 1769, stripped the Indians of their land and turned it into an urban dwellers’ area. By 1834, ranchos were also being created on Indian land. It was actually the construction of railroads and other forms of industrialization by settlers other than the Indians that created the greatest amount of harmful change to the land around Stoney Point.