Dr. Jerald J. Johnson

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Professor Johnson is actively working on the Department of Anthropology Archaeological Collections and elsewhere.  Research is continuing on Virginiatown and the JRP Site (both in western Placer County, California) with excavations slated to be finished at the latter during the Fall 2007 academic semester.

Currently the collection from Pinnacle Point Cave (CA-TUO-272) is being analyzed and the monograph on the 1964 excavations is in preparation.  Recently 21 obsidian XRF determinations indicated that 18 specimens were from the Bodie Hills (13), Mono Craters (2), Lookout Mountain (2), and Mt. Hicks (1) sources on the east side of the crest of the Sierra Nevada while three specimens were from the Napa Source in the coast range north of San Francisco Bay.  The c 14 dates of approximately 1900 to 2200 years ago fit the use of Bodie Hills and Napa obsidians during that time period when the latter source was becoming reestablished in the interior.  DNA tests are in progress on two samples from the two main shafts in the cave and hopefully will help determine whose ancestors used the site. There is a mixture of both locally derived and imported lithics, bone artifacts and shell.  The cultural remains from this site have also challenged many of the assumptions that had been previously made in regard to the populations who used the Sierra Nevada burial caves.

This is the fifth year of the excavations at the JRP Site and it has been an interesting example of what you expect and what you actually get.  The JRP site was supposed to be a shallow, mostly 1850s-1860s gold rush mining site underlain by a very slightly developed recent Native American midden. The excavations were focused on the excavation of a mining camp that could be related to the Virginiatown Site that was located a half mile further down Auburn Ravine. The original goal was to study the relationship of the Chinese living at the JRP Site in regard to the large, established Chinatown at Virginiatown.  The Chinese presence at the JRP Site is represented by stoneware (Globular jars, Soy Sauce containers, and small storage vessels), Opium paraphernalia (pipe bowl and opium tin fragments), porcelain (mostly Double Happiness with small amounts of Four Seasons, Celadon, and Three Circles and Dragon Fly fragments), one brass coin, and an iron meat cleaver, and chopped pig bones.  The faunal remains consist of considerable amounts of pig remains while sawn cattle bone might represent the remains of the Euro-American diet.  An abundance of glass bottles, earthenware ceramics, large quantities of metal objects (tools, storage containers, nails), numerous clothing items (both male and female) also represent the Euro-American occupants use of the site.

The historic cultural remains were concentrated above eight inches in the supposedly shallow prehistoric midden.  This deposit helped preserve the metal artifacts because it was neutral to slightly basic in ph and was very different than the underlying decomposed granite which was highly acidic and iron rich and which heavily corroded iron objects at Virginiatown.

The prehistoric deposit had formed on a very uneven granitic surface and ranged from a few centimeters to 2.13 meters deep.  It also contained evidence of use as a temporary campsite from 2,500 to 150 years ago.  Details of tool manufacturing, plant and animal procurement and processing and other resource acquisition are emerging as the research continues.   Much of the research at Virginiatown and the JRP Site are discussed in the sixth revised edition of the Archaeological Field Manual used by the Saturday field work class (Johnson and Farncomb 2005) of which two copies are on reserve in the CSUS library.

The next research project that I hope to work on when Pinnacle Point Cave is finished is the large amount of survey and excavation data obtained through summer field schools and weekend classes over the last four decades.  The work began in 1966 and is ongoing. Currently I am working with the Nature Conservancy’s Dye Creek Preserve (Tehama County, California) to enter all of the archaeological survey data into their GIS data base.  One aspect of the research I intend to focus on is the development of a detailed chronological sequence based on carbon 14, obsidian hydration, and calcium carbonate studies.  With over 650 known archaeological sites it is hoped that the construction of a detailed chronology will allow for the development of a detailed settlement and subsistence model for this portion of the northern California landscape.