User talk:Theoradich

Syukhtun
The name Syukhtun is a modern spelling of an ancient Chumash town on the south central coast of California. This important town was inhabited for eight thousand years by the Chumash. Today this site is located at West Beach in Santa Barbara. Syukhtun is first mentioned in Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo's logbook for his epic voyage in 1542. The voyage was meant to assess the northernmost portions of "New Spain". Cabrillo and his men became the first Europeans to see Alta (upper) California. When the two ships anchored in the calm Santa Barbara channel, it was called “la costa segura de buena gente”, the safe coast with good people. Cabrillo observed very much maritime activity of the local Chumash communities. The logbook reveals that the coastal Chumash province of which Syukhtun was part was called Xexu, and extended from the village Las Canoas ("the canoes" - modern day Ventura), to the windy point now called Point Conception.

Among the villages recorded in the logbook is mentioned Ciucut: "The ruler of these pueblos is an old Indian woman, who came to the ships and slept two nights on the captain's ship, as did many Indians. The pueblo of Ciucut appeared to be the capital of the rest, for they came there from other pueblos at the call of this ruler." Ciucut has over time become Syukhtun, said to mean "it forks", perhaps referring to the "fork" visible in the Milky Way. The major settlement in this ancient realm was Syukhtun. In one myth recorded by John Peabody Harrington, "Coyote Visits the Swordfish People" we read: "Once Coyote was walking along the beach near syuxtun, feeling happy and half-drunk, dancing and singing to himself and feeling like one who has drunk toloache [datura]."

December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives, collected by J.P. Harrington, edited and with an introduction by Thomas C. Blackburn, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1975.

Relation of the Voyage of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, 1542-1543, from Original Narratives of Early American History: Spanish Exploration in the Southwest 1542-1706, edited by Herbert Eugene Bolton, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1916.