In the last few decades, the area of the Brazil Mound has changed from agricultural fields to housing tracts. Development throughout California has destroyed a great number of prehistoric villages, camps, and other sites.

The materials from the 1968 excavations were taken back to the laboratory to be washed, sorted, measured, and cataloged. Students wrote up papers and drew maps, but at the end of the school term, the collection was set aside - not just for the summer, as it turned out, but for 25 years. The collection was not completely documented until 1992, as part of the Brazil Site Project.

Meanwhile, at about the time of the U. C. Davis fieldwork, the land around the Brazil Mound began to change from open agricultural fields to suburban residential developments. At the same time, new state and federal laws were passed to protect archaeological sites, especially those on public lands, or on projects that required state or federal permits or funding. When a private development company purchased the land around the Brazil Mound, intending to build a housing subdivision, they were required by state law to consider how this would affect the ancient village and cemetery. The company hired a local, private archaeological contracting firm to conduct limited work at the site, to determine (among other things) just how big it was. Following these excavations, a portion of the site was covered with sterile fill, to protect it from further damage. While houses have been built all around it, the mound itself, or what remains of it, has been protected from development. Most of the land still belongs to the private development company, while the adjacent river levee is under the management of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. At present, the private development company proposes to leave the Brazil Mound as open space, in the form of a park.

The Brazil Site Project involved the cleaning, sorting, cataloging, and analysis of more than 9,500 prehistoric tools, ornaments, ceremonial objects, and other items collected from the site between 1939 and the 1980s. Over the years, parts of the collection had been lost, loaned out for study, or perhaps, in some cases, stolen. By the time the Brazil Site Project began in 1992, many of the burials recorded in the field were with the rest of the Berkeley collection, and many of the artifacts were missing. Some of the items from the U. C. Davis excavations still lay unwashed in the original field collection bags. One of the first tasks of the Project was to bring together all of the materials from the site and finish

Previous Page

18 Table of Contents

Next Page