The Brazil Mound Page 2

Local Native American groups today take an active role in many archaeological projects.

help us protect these valuable resources, not only during federal or state projects, but any projects which require federal or state funding or approval. Where harm to important sites cannot be avoided - for example, when a dam must be constructed to protect a city from flooding, and there are archaeological or historical remains at the dam site - then the agency in charge of the project must try to rescue the important scientific information and other values from the sites, before they are damaged or destroyed. Today archaeologists, historians, and Native Americans routinely work with government agencies and with private citizens to ensure that our most important cultural sites are protected.

THE BRAZIL SITE PROJECT

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for maintaining the levees along many of the nation's rivers. As part of that responsibility, the Army Corps made plans to repair portions of the levees along the lower Sacramento River, to increase flood protection for the city of Sacramento and surrounding areas. Federal regulations required that their plans include a study of the effects the project might have on the natural and cultural environment, including archaeological site CA-SAC-43¹, the Brazil Mound.

The Brazil Mound was once a prehistoric Native American village and cemetery on the banks of what we now call the Sacramento River, roughly 10 miles south of downtown Sacramento. The site was first inhabited almost 2,400 years ago, and then abandoned, for reasons unknown, about 600 years ago. Between 1939 and the 1990s, several archaeological excavations were done at the Brazil Mound. These excavations removed thousands of artifacts, animal bones, and stone chipping waste from the site, as well as many Native American burials. These archaeological remains have been stored at various universities and museums since that time, but no complete analysis or report was ever done.

Then, in December of 1991, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hired Dr. Paul Bouey and the archaeological consulting firm of Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Inc., to gather together the collections from the site, supervise laboratory studies of these collections, and prepare a research report to document the place of CA-SAC-43 in the prehistory of Central California. This publication summarizes some of the results of that work.

¹ - This "trinomial" stands for the forty-third site recorded in Sacramento County ("SAC"), California ("CA").

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