The excavations at CA-SAC-43 found only a few pieces of ground or battered stone: two stone pestles (one of which came from a burial), a piece of stone that may have been used to process plant fibers, and several miscellaneous fragments, too small to identify with any certainty. This is a very small number of ground/battered stone tools, considering the size and richness of this site. If the Brazil Mound was a village, as we believe, then we would expect more evidence of the processing and consumption of plants, which we know are an important part of the human diet (just try to imagine a diet without fruits, vegetables, or grains!). It may be that the people living at the site did their plant processing somewhere else. It is also possible that their tools were made of perishable materials - wood, for example - instead of stone, which is hard to find in the alluvial soils of the Sacramento Delta. Wood decomposes much more quickly than stone, of course, and so we rarely find wooden tools in open-air archaeological sites.
Other Types of Artifacts from the Brazil Mound
The Brazil Site collection also includes other objects, perhaps used in religious or social ceremonies, or simply as decorative items. Examples of such objects in our own time might include a rosary, a judge's gavel, or a woman's necklace. Some of the artifacts from CA-SAC-43 are not recognizable to us, and we can only speculate about what their purpose may have been. Into this category would fall the long, cylindrical, polished stones, some with grooved or perforated ends, referred to by archaeologists as "charmstones." This name suggests some kind of magical or religious meaning, but this is only a theory. Charmstones are common in sites along the Sacramento River Delta.
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.
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