Trade items from the Brazil Site (top to bottom): marine shells, quartz crystals, obsidian

Another solution is to use the same amount of land, but use it more intensively, either by collecting resources that were ignored before, or by managing the land to make it more productive (for example, by farming). Today, farming, ranching, and other types of land and resource management are prevalent in parts of the world where populations are dense, including Europe, China, and the U.S. Where smaller populations are spread over large areas of land - in many parts of Africa and Australia, for instance - the hunter-gatherer way of life is still practiced today. Archaeologists study these modern hunter-gatherers to help us understand how our ancient ancestors may have lived.

In California, most native groups were still practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle at the time of Contact⁴, even though their populations were quite large; by some estimates, there were more than 90 different languages spoken here at that time! It may be that the natural resources were plentiful enough to support a large number of people without intensive management of the land. Also, the Native Californians had developed sophisticated ways of adapting to their environment, including food storage, semi-sedentary villages, social and political organization, and complex trade relationships with their neighbors. These trade relationships are visible in the archaeological record of Central California as exotic or imported items like marine shells from the Pacific Ocean, quartz crystals from the foothills, and obsidian from places like Bodie Hills on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, and Napa Valley to the west.

Archaeologists theorize that the Brazil Site was a village where people lived during all seasons of the year. From here they traveled out into the surrounding countryside to hunt, fish, and gather plant foods, and perhaps to trade with their neighbors for exotic goods like obsidian and shell. Because the Brazil Site inhabitants, and the people living throughout the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in prehistoric times, lived in a year-round village but still depended on wild plants and game animals for their food, they actually were somewhere inbetween sedentary farmers and mobile hunter-gatherers.

⁴ - Contact refers to the period of the first contact between Native Californians and outsiders; for Central California this would be about 1770 to 1840.