James Shelton’s Reviews > Chumash, a Picture of Their World > Status Update

Why we have lizard hands and not coyote hands. The upper world of the eagle and the lower world connected by snakes.

Guilds!

Round houses and Sweat Lodges!

Clothing was made from many fibers made from wood, shrubs and grasses as well as animal hides for special occasions and the chief or worn in winter. Clothing included many accessories and also body paints.

Went back a read about canoes which I had missed. I read about the brotherhood of canoes who made and used the plank canoes to go to the Channel Islands and fish for Deep Sea fish like Tuna and Sardines that migrated through the channel between the Islands and the mainland. Also read about the other canoes that could be built quickly and one that was an older type when they had large trees still.

Read how the Chumash fished with weirs nets, hooks and tridents and loved to roast fish over the fire. Also read how their collected Live Oak acorns pounded them into flour, leached out the tannins with hot water through baskets of the flour, then cooked them as porridge or sometimes cooked them as cakes over a steatite comal. They also ate mushrooms, seaweed and aphid honey as a sweetener.

Hunting. Arrows and Spears!

Just read a great chapter on steatite effigies of whales, seals and small wooden canoes to bring good luck in fishing. Nice pictures of the artifacts.

The wooden bowls from oak burls and sycamore roots looked as if turned on a lathe and were fire hardened and decorated with shell pieces.