Theses and Dissertations Collection

Between 1769 and 1823, twenty-one missions located from Sonoma down to San Diego were founded in Alta California. With the creation of these missions came the transition of thousands of Native Californians from a life of seasonal rounds to one of sedentary agriculture, all within the span of just a few years’ time. While the missions closed in 1837, many remain standing to this day, providing a wealth of information about the people who lived there and about the transition from Native subsistence practices to farming and Christianity.

This thesis focuses on Mission Santa Clara de Asís, located in the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. The soil of Mission Santa Clara contains a plethora of information on the lives of the Native people who lived there, and the archaeology that continuously occurs on the site helps to illuminate that. In this thesis, I analyze the faunal remains from Feature 157, a multi-use pit feature that was excavated in the fall of 2013.

By looking at primary source documents written by the Mission Santa Clara padres and by visitors to the mission, I compare the diet of the neophytes as it is recorded in these documents to the skeletal remains present in this assemblage. While researchers have shown that mission Indians ate wild fauna at other missions, I use the Feature 157 assemblage to show the same with Mission Santa Clara.