060: Reservation Archaeology with Richard Carrico (Part 1)

In Part 1 of this interview, I speak with archeologist Richard Carrico, a prominent expert on the Native peoples of California, especially those in the San Diego area. Carrico shares his intriguing journey into archaeology, beginning with his service in the U.S. Army and a twist of fate that led him to discover his passion for archaeological studies.

Richard details his educational path and various pivotal excavations, including working on the Presidio of San Diego and the Bancroft Ranch House. Carrico emphasizes the importance of understanding Native cultures, highlighting his ethnographic studies and collaboration with the Kumeyaay people of Southern California.

This episode is a rich exploration of historical archaeology and the stories that shape our understanding of Native Californian history.

Richard's book: Strangers in a Stolen Land: Indians of San Diego County from Prehistory to the New Deal

00:29 Introduction to Richard Carrico
01:18 Richard's Journey into Archaeology
02:35 Early Career and Mentorship
05:01 Professional Growth and Historic Archaeology
07:25 Transition to Commercial Archaeology
09:45 Balancing Academic and Commercial Work
17:59 Focus on Kumeyaay People and Ethnography
26:02 Challenges and Diplomatic Skills

Transcript

Richard Carrico 0:00

You save some sites, but you have not mitigated the impacts to our culture. There's not a lot about our culture in that document. It's about arrow point types. It's about T zone brownware. It's about chipping. Where's our cosmology? Where's our death beliefs? Where's our songs?

Damian Bacich 0:28

I'm here with Richard Carrico, who is, to my mind, one of the go to people we're talking about, Native peoples of California, especially Southern California, the San Diego area. I, uh, I've really wanted to talk to him for a long time and to, to hear about his expertise. So, so Richard, welcome to the California Frontier podcast, and I appreciate your taking the time to do this.

Richard Carrico 1:00

Thank you for the invitation.

Damian Bacich 1:02

You're quite welcome. So we mentioned before we hit record, maybe if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about your background and, uh, and then we can, we can talk about some really interesting topics.

Richard Carrico 1:17

sure. Um, almost a Southern California grown boy. My family moved out here, had the good sense to move out here, when I was nine years old from Indiana. So I went through all the grade schools and middle schools and high school out here. And, If you go back to the late sixties with the Vietnam war going on and such, um, they were doing a lot of drafting of people into the army. And because I had dropped a couple of classes at a community college, I lost my educational deferment, drafted into the U S army, and I ended up serving in South Korea and made sergeant. And while I was over there, took some classes through the university of Maryland in South Korea and came home. And I was going to be a medieval Renaissance historian, uh, thinking I might go into teaching, uh, with that. That was my, my focal point. And, you know, life has lots of twists and turns in it. And the twist and turn that got me into archaeology was I got a transcript. Of course, back then they were paper. It wasn't on computer. And it came in the mail and it said, yeah, you thought you were going to graduate, but you're not. You need three more units, uh, besides the six that you were going to take. And the only class that was open was a Saturday class in archaeology. I'm not sure I could spell it, but it was open and I took it and it was with a professor that became my mentor, Dr. Paul Wiesel from San Diego State, who was mainly known for historic archaeology and his work in the southwest in Arizona. And it was a prehistoric contact site out in Spring Valley, east of San Diego State. And it was a village, Kumeyaay village called Nete, or Mete. And that was my beginning. And the first four or five weeks, I really got into it because I had some mapping skills and I was pretty meticulous and took good notes and really got along with the professor. He kind of liked me cause I was a couple of years older than most of the students at the time. He did not like my ponytail. He was a very conservative Republican. And that's, that's, that just wasn't. Didn't fit his, uh, his, his pattern of life, if you will. But by about the sixth week, uh, I was digging and I was about a meter, meter and a half down. And I found a very large sherd of a Kumeyaay Orya, so the side of a pot, basically a Tizon brown ware pot. And he came by and asked me about it and said, you know, did you measure it and weigh it and look for temper and do all these things? And I said, yep. And then. He kind of shocked me. He said, well, did you close your eyes and rub the inside of it? And I thought that's kind of fuzzy, was he? But okay. I said, no, no, I didn't. He said, we need to do that. So I did. And he said, what do you feel? And I feel, I said, well, I'm feeling some really nice little indentations. And he says, well, Richard, those indentations were made by the woman that made that pot 900 years ago or so. She used it. It broke, and you're the next person who talked, who touched it. So, Monday I went back and changed my major. I finished up my Renaissance degree in History, and then took my degree in Anthropology. So, the lack of a class, and then finding that shirt, and then Dr. Rizzo encouraging me, changed my life. Here I am.

Damian Bacich 4:49

Well, and so that started a, a long career in archaeology. What, what happened after that? How did you become a professional archaeologist?

Richard Carrico 5:01

Well, timing sometimes is everything also, and I was, I was staying at the Bancroft ranch house and finished my BA in anthropology after my BA in history, and I ultimately was the director at the, at the Bancroft ranch house, um, contact site. And at some point, Paul came to me and said. As you go on to the graduate program, you cannot stay here at the site. You have to go change sites. So Paul was also running at the same time, which I can't imagine now having run field schools, two field schools at the same time, the Bancroft Ranch House, and then the Presidio of San Diego above Old Town. So he forced me to go to the Presidio of San Diego and excavate there. And again, sort of the serendipity side of it, I really got into that because we were excavating the chapel, which was actually the first mission and out to California. Here in San Diego, if you take a tour, they take you to Mission Valley to where the mission is today. And it's very photogenic and postcard like and all that. And they'll tell you that's the first mission. And there's a half truth there. The first mission was on Presidio Hill. So again, under his guidance, I really got into historic archaeology and got Mayolica because of Ron May and doing research and the pottery of the Spanish period. We excavated a lot of burials, a lot being about 120 out of the 220 people buried there, and I started doing research, and this was before everything was digitized. I started doing research on the mission records for the deaths and the baptisms at the Presidio. Specific to the Presidio. So, as you kind of mentioned, I got into this field and it grew and grew. And 30, 40 years later, I'm able now to reconstruct the men and the women and the children who lived at the Presidio. Lived there, died there. You had soldiers, you had merchants, you had Native Americans, women who moved in and married soldiers. So I spent the next three years there and became ultimately the director of the Presidio right before we closed it in 1976. Just about that time, 1976, the California Environmental Quality Act had been passed a few years before, and an environmental consulting firm, a private commercial firm, called up the school. and said we'd like to hire an archaeologist or interview some archaeologists to come into the commercial side rather than the purely academic side. I interviewed and got the job and we took a company from nine people to about 80 people, built it up and ultimately sold it off. So for the next 14, 15, 18 years most of my work except for writing some articles was in the commercial side, the cultural resource management side. rather than the academic side, except I did keep researching and writing articles. And in about 1990, 1989, San Diego State contacted me where I'd taken my, uh, my two BAs and said, would you come and teach in the Department of American Indian Studies? Because we think you have that, that ability to both do Native Americans and, and also, um, historic archaeology and tie all that in. So, from 1991 until about 2010, 2015, I taught part time and kept running environmental consulting firms and kept building them up and they would be sold and then, On and on and on. So I had that great opportunity to archaeologically excavate literally hundreds of sites in San Diego County and deal with some really interesting people. And part of my bent was on prehistoric, pre contact site, was to contact the Native Americans before it was legally required. And I'm not tooting my own horn, other people were doing this as well. And then in about 2015. Uh, I sold the last business along with my business partner, Brian Mooney and retired from doing cultural resource management on a big scale. San Diego State brought me on full time and I just retired last December. So that's, that's a condensed version of Richard with a foot in the CRM world, which some people kind of think of as prostitution. You're out there being paid instead of doing academic research and blah blah blah. And another foot in the academic world teaching through the Department of American Indian History. And it's been a good ride. Been a great ride. And then Over the years, my focus switched away from pre contact or prehistoric archaeology, in part because there were a lot of good people doing very good work, but I thought it was too materialistic, meaning they were studying material culture a lot and getting into ceramic wares and arrowpoint types, but they weren't seeing the people. They didn't understand that, to my view, this man made this point, this woman made this Orya, or to tell you about them. Historic archaeology and mission archaeology, presidio archaeology, allowed me more of a chance to do that because I have written records that went with it and my ability to read 18th century Spanish was reasonably good. So my career academically went that way and that's, that's my focus right now. And I've got a contract to write a book for the pop, a popular book for the lay public on the history of the presidio and its focus is who was there. And what were they doing?

Damian Bacich 10:58

Oh, that'll be really great. I'll look forward to that and I'm sure a lot of people will. You know that it caught my attention that you mentioned that these CRM companies you work for, you built them up and sold them as businesses. I don't, I don't know if, if I've heard that a lot from other people, but that's really interesting. Was that something that you you kind of fell into or did you have that in your mind? And you know, there's a little bit of a detour, but did you have that idea that, okay, this is going to be a business that later, uh, becomes an asset that I can sell and start another

Richard Carrico 11:39

No, not at all. Um, my, my colleagues would tell you that I've always had sort of a business side to me, if you will. And so when, when CRM was first starting, San Diego State, like, like some other universities actually did cultural resource work, like Sonoma State's pretty famous for that, actually. And San Diego State started doing that through Pauly Zell as a. As a sidelight of anthropology and most anthropologists archaeologists doing that for the school wanted to go excavate, they wanted to go survey, maybe write a report. I love writing, and I love giving presentations. And so that that drug me into making presentations to city councils and to boards of supervisors and at the state level, trying to represent archaeology is something that needed to be studied and saved. Thank you very much. So the people I worked with that were above me in the company said, you have a business side to you. You know, you have that ability to go out there and to the lay public and talk to them about why these things should be saved and developers need to pay for it and all that. And as a result of that, I think. I got promoted a lot at the first company and became essentially a vice president, although I never had a card that said that. It said director of cultural resources. I didn't want to be a vice president because you had to wear a suit and a yellow tie, right? Um, so I think a whole, whole series of things led to me. helping develop the companies and seeing a bigger view and kind of going out in the public and and recruiting people to join the firm. So I certainly didn't sit down and say, I think I'm going to grow this to X numbers and then be part of selling the company. I, it never dawned on me until many years later about selling a company. I was just going to do my job and hire a good archaeologist and do good archaeology. And then when one of my bosses came to me and said, Hey, we're about to sell the company. What do you think about that? And I said, well, I've got stock in the company that should be good for me, but it is a, is it a company that's going to do good environmental work? Or is this going to be some equity company that's just going to gobble us up? Turned out it was a very good company. We got along, they promoted me and it just kept going on like that. So for years, I never left my office. It's just the name on the door outside kept changing in terms of who owned us and all of that. So I. You know, I have invested in the stock market over the years and I do follow business. So maybe that was part of it too. I wasn't just a, you know, a dig bum or a person who was just focused on a very narrow channel. And I think it paid off over the years. Yeah. Yeah.

Damian Bacich 14:28

Well, that's sort of a tangent that I get off on. Um, I was, I was in between college and graduate school. You know, I worked for several years in a company, uh, doing marketing and import export, et cetera. And then when I went back to graduate school, I, I had, uh, this mentality, I think that that also helped me in dealing with my professors, for example, that I saw them from a certain standpoint as clients that I didn't tend to get too drawn into the personalities or the personality conflicts of conflicts, etc. It was more sort of, okay, this person. wants this from me. I've got to deliver it on time. And in the end, they will give me what I'm looking for. So, uh, I, I think that, that idea of also going back to, you know, your studies after having been out in the world a little while also, also helps give you a different, a different perspective on things, maybe a broader perspective. So that's very interesting.

Richard Carrico 15:38

Yeah, I think it does. And I felt for years until about 15 years ago, maybe 10, I felt, and some of my colleagues felt that I wasn't, I wasn't writing enough academic articles. I was giving papers all over the place because I like to do that. And, you know, you may have noticed, I rarely write a paper like the old school and then read the paper. In fact, I don't like to read papers and I generally don't like people who do read papers because I don't think they bring it to life, but if that's their That's fine. So for years, you know, I kept writing papers and putting them aside and publishing occasionally, but it was more about going to the AAAs or the SCAs or Historic Archaeology Conferences and giving the paper. And so when it came time to actually now start publishing more of them, I already had the paper somewhere or pieces of the paper, right? And so that's more what i've devoted my attention to so I have probably published more In the last 10 years than I did in the previous 20 Because I wasn't writing crm reports and managing 80 people and and the last company We had six companies all over America, including in Hawaii. And so I was all over the place, which I enjoyed. And I really liked working for instance, with Hawaiian people or Chamorro people or Zuni or whoever. Cause again, it brought a bigger scope to, to my view. And there's a tendency to be provincial. I some, I think sometimes for all of us, we kind of get locked into what we're comfortable with and that's what you see. But if you go see another culture or a different mission in Arizona, that brings a different, when you come back to San Diego and look at what you're doing here, you go, Oh, well, San Javier de Bach was like this, or this culture did this. So that's, that's, I'm kind of a sponge that way. And then I think it's helped me in my research. Yeah.

Damian Bacich 17:39

I feel the same way. I'm glad. It gives me hope. I have a ton of, um, conference papers, uh, piled up that, um, that now that I'm no longer department chair, I'm hoping I'll have more time to, to, you know, shape into publishable, uh, articles and, and get them out there. But I was wondering, so you, you know, transitioning into the topic we were going to discuss, you really have, at least I, I know you from your work with the Kumeyaay people in, in San Diego. Um, can you talk a little bit about how that, uh, developed? I mean, you, you mentioned working on the Presidio and, um, and the different people there. So how did that evolve?

Richard Carrico 18:28

With working with the native people. Yeah. Um, it's a little embarrassing, not for me, but when I was starting my master's thesis, which turned into my book, Strangers in a Stolen Land, um, there were some artifacts from the Bancroft Ranch House site that were very unusual. Very unusual. It turned out they were effigies.

Damian Bacich 18:56

to interrupt, can you just give a little background on the Bancroft Ranch House, what it is, um, and what that site is?

Richard Carrico 19:03

Sure. Sure. It's, it's, it was a village, uh, occupied by the Kumeyaay people, the local people. So the people here in San Diego County, south of Carlsbad, south of Escondido, are the Kumeyaay, all the way down into Baja California to Santo Tomas and arguably to the Colorado River. And this village was occupied for at least 4, 500 years. That's the earliest date we got out of it. It may not have been a village 4, 500 years ago, but it was a major settlement. Had a big spring, which was still flowing, still flows. And by 2, 000 years ago, 1, 000 years ago, probably had 300 or 400 people living there in a sheltered valley. And a person built a house on it. Um, a guy named Porter, back in the 1850s, an adobe house, and used a lot of native workers to build his house, but also to farm his extensive farmland. He had 160 acres, a quarter of a square mile. And the beauty of Mr. Porter was that he kept diaries and wrote things in the San Diego newspaper in the 1850s and 60s about his Kumeyaay workers. They were called Digenio at the time, but his Dieguiño workers. So it's sort of a one off ethnographic study in that sense. He's talking about the people around him. And then later in time, H. H. Bancroft of the Bancroft Library and the Bancroft Histories of California,

Damian Bacich 20:35

Bancroft, okay.

Richard Carrico 20:38

That's why it's called the Bancroft Ranch House and the Bancroft Homestead, and he didn't live there permanently. He had very nice houses in San Francisco and Berkeley, but he did come down there and write. So actually some of the series that we're all familiar with, those multi volumes of the Bancroft Histories of California were actually written in Spring Valley at the Bancroft Ranch House. So, ultimately, things got developed around it, Bancroft moved on, but it got preserved, the house, and some of the acreage, about 20 acres, because the Historical Society took it over. It got registered on the National Register of Historic Places, for both prehistoric and historic, because of the house, because of Mr. Bancroft, and In about 1968, I believe it was, 1970, San Diego State College, at the time San Diego State College, started a field school there and it ran all the way into the 70s and 80s. So, a lot of excavation was done there and, and my involvement started in probably 74. Uh, when I needed those units to graduate. And at one point, I found a clay, some clay pieces that were neither a pot, a vessel, nor a smoking pipe, because the Kumeyaay made what we call bow, human bow pipes out of clay, it wasn't shaped right for any of those things. And. I went to a professor, Paul, Paul Ezell was on sabbatical, I think. So I went to another professor in the anthropology department at San Diego state, and this was not his specialty, this area, but he was a good archeologist. And I said, maybe I should, you know, go up to the reservation and talk to some of the native people about this. And his answer was, well, Richard, I don't think that's of any value because the Indians on the reservation are just Mexicans with feathers. Exactly. So I said, yeah, thanks for that. So I got in my Jeep and I actually went up to one of the reservations and I, I generally knew somebody up there through someone else, through a Mexican gardener that I knew, not my gardener, but a gardener. And he was related to the Kumeyaay. So he did introduce me to one person. So I don't want you to think I just walked into a reservation and knocked on a door and said, Hey, what's, what's these pieces? But he did fix me up with an elder, um, a guy named Clarence Brown, who's kind of ornery sometimes, and we got along. And, uh, the first day I went up, I didn't take the pieces of pottery with me. I simply said, I'm an archaeologist. We're digging down in Spring Valley. I'd like to talk to you. And he says, Oh, you're one of those anthropologists and you want to come and interview me and then you're going to write some stuff up and we'll, I'll never hear back from you. And I go, no, I guarantee you, you will hear back from me. And yes, I would like to write some stuff up. So the next time I brought the little pieces with me. And he said, well, those are death effigies. Those are clay death effigies, and you shouldn't be having those. You shouldn't be touching those. I want to stress, this is back in 1974, 75, when people did not consult a lot with Native Americans in our field, my field, and And the whole thing about spiritualism or sacredness of objects was somewhat new to some anthropologists in California. So he said, you need to rebury those. And I said, well, I, I can't rebury them because it's part of San Diego State and all that. So they ultimately, by the way, did get reburied, but that was the beginning. And I got along with him. I was told, this all sounds like J. P. Harrington or, or Margaret Mead or something. I was told next time you go up, by not Clarence, but by his daughter, you should bring some cigarettes. You should bring a carton of Marlboro Reds. That's what Clarence would like. And then you'll get along better. So I did. So it was this whole exchange of gift giving. And then over the years, he would give me gifts and all that. So that was the beginning of it. And anthropologically, I learned that I could talk to Clarence Brown, I could talk to his family, I could talk to his friends and his cohorts, and they would share a lot of information. And then in return, I shared information with them, some articles that people had written. based on studies on their reservation that they'd never seen. But what I also learned was, if you were a friend of Clarence Brown, then you were not a friend of another family, because they didn't like the Clarence Brown family on the reservation. So that kind of brought the anthropology home to me, that you had clans, and you had families, and you had lineages, and just because Clarence Brown likes you and talks to you, The next time you're at a meeting and you try to talk to somebody else, they're likely to say, well, you've been hanging out with Clarence. I don't want to talk to you. Or just the opposite. Oh, Clarence Brown's been filling your head full of shit. So talk to me and I'll tell you the truth about our people. That's how I got into it.

Damian Bacich 26:03

So did you, did you have to learn, kind of diplomatic skills in order to, uh, be able to, to continue your work? Hmm.

Richard Carrico 26:16

I think I did. I think, I think I already had a set of skills having, I think being a sergeant in the army helped me. I hated the draft, right? I was not a, um, I was not one way or the other about the Vietnam War at that part, at that time. So I think that was part of it. And then being an archaeologist who was hiring and using people in the field and trying to train them at the same time more than they, Got in a field school. You have to be diplomatic about that. And even in the 70s, the role of gender and, and all of that. So I think I was kind of prepared for that. And, and, you know, having, having dealt with a lot of different people in a lot of different situations, but it was different because I didn't understand those differences quite As well as I should have. So in the business world, I knew that, you know, someone from the Bureau of Land Management might not like somebody from the Forest Service. And I could be a mediator, but that was more about policy and, and ego and all that were, is what the tribal members, some of these animosities were deep seated. They went back hundreds of years. And so it was a different approach that I had to make, and I had to back off. And not talk so much and just listen. I think a lot of anthropologists have learned that over the years. We're supposed to be listeners. And then if we can gain something from it, interpret something and give something back to the people. But our tendency is always wanting to talk, you know, and sometimes unfortunately talk over the people. So it was, it was a great learning experience for me. And over the years now, I've worked a lot with the Kumeyaay people. Um, I just finished a, uh, 350 page ethnography of the Kumeyaay Indians. So it's a standalone document and I was paid for it. Because of a wind turbine project, but it was, it was sponsored by the Native Americans. When asked, what do you want to do for mitigation for these wind turbines? All this archaeology was done, and again, I'm not knocking archaeology, all this archaeology was done. A lot of sites were recorded out in the California desert where these wind turbines went. They were largely preserved, but at a meeting to kind of close the documentation for Section 106 and the federal compliance, I went to, I was invited to go there, two of the Native American bands said, hey, good archaeology, you spent 1. 1 million dollars, this is 15 years ago, 1. 1 million dollars. You save some sites, but you have not mitigated the impacts to our culture. There's not a lot about our culture in that document. It's about arrow point types. It's about T zone brownware. It's about chipping. Where's our cosmology? Where's our death beliefs? Where's our songs? Right? And so they forced the BLM, Bureau of Land Management, to fund, through Pattern Energy, an ethnographic study. And it was supposed to be a three year project, took me seven, and that document was neat for me because I got to go and deal with all of the nine Kumeyaay reservations and go to tribal meetings and do some sweats. I had to go do some sweats, go to the sweat lodge with them. I called it, let's kill the archaeologist, you know, let's steam the archaeologist to death. But I learned a lot from that. It's one thing to read about a sweat and it's another to go to one, especially when it's not a commercial sweat. It's not some new age person burning white sage or something. So I point out the ethnographic study, even though my colleague, uh, Jerome Levy would say, well, it's not really an ethnography because you didn't, it's not based just on interviews. You also took a lot of the old ethnographies from Harrington and Du Bois and people and pulled that together. So maybe you want to call it an ethnographic overview or an ethnographic something, but not an ethnography. And I agree with him. But I point, I point that study out because I think if I hadn't been getting along with, with the native people for 30 years, certain doors wouldn't have opened up and people wouldn't have let me do video with them, but I also. Want you and your, and your viewers to know. That doesn't mean every Native American on, on every reservation in San Diego County likes me or respects me or trust me because, you know, we all make mistakes. You talk to the wrong family. Back in 1989 when I excavated part of Mission San Diego De Aala, uh, for a project and found 60 burials, almost all of whom were kumai or Native American. I was persona non grata on some of the reservations. I was desecrating graves and people still hold that against me. So it's not like I'm some white Messiah that all the Native Americans talk to. And it's not, that's not possible.

31:31

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