Long before the expedition of Fray Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portolá interned them in missions, which accelerated their disappearance, the native tribes of the San Francisco Bay (California) opted for a social system based on the capacity of their women.
About 2,000 years ago, the members of the Muwekma Ohlone group who resided in Kalawwasa Rummeytak, in present-day Silicon Valley, developed a community that especially valued the contributions of its women and even opted to invite men to leave the village to find a mate. in other groups.
As researchers from the University of Utah explain in an article published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Muwekma Ohlone women stayed in the villages where they were born. “Her knowledge from her about local ecology and female ownership of important food resources seems to have incentivized even fathers to invest more in their daughters by nursing them longer,” they say.
The children, on the other hand, ended up moving from their communities of origin to join the families of their wives. This behavior may have led to wealth disparities, as older women of this ethnicity were buried with much greater wealth than men.
“The Ohlone ancestors who lived in Kalawwasa Rummeytak were highly dependent on women’s contributions to the economy, so they structured their marriage and family systems around women to keep them in their home communities,” says Dr. Alexandra Greenwald, an anthropologist at the University of Utah.
“We can also see that placing a high value on women’s contributions led to greater investment in their well-being as children and created greater opportunities for them to accumulate wealth and prestige throughout their lives,” adds the researcher.
Archaeologists have studied the remains of 24 individuals found in a cemetery located in the city of Santa Clara. In the laboratory they have used strontium isotopes incorporated into bones and teeth to assess the movement of Ohlone’s ancestors throughout their lives.
Analysis of the Kalawwasa Rummeytak weavings revealed that the group practiced a matrilocal kinship system where men marry and move to their wife’s village. In other societies that follow this method, mothers invest more resources in their daughters, who remain in their community and contribute to the local economy.
To test whether the Kalawwasa Rummeytak mothers prioritized their daughters, the authors were interested in examining how they breastfed their daughters. Breastfeeding is costly from a caloric and time perspective, so the experts considered weaning age an important measure to study parental investment.
To reconstruct the diets of infants and children of this tribe, researchers at the University of Utah measured the ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes contained in the first permanent molars, teeth that begin to form at birth and grow in layers, like rings. of the trees.
These layers incorporate isotopic signatures of the food the baby eats and can be directly related to the individual’s age when they form. “Babies who are breastfed exhibit greater nitrogen enrichment because they consume breast milk, which is synthesized from their mother’s body tissues,” says Greenwald.
“Using this method, we were able to track with monthly precision how long each individual in Kalawwasa Rummeytak was breastfed.” On average, women consumed breast milk five months longer than men. While the sons were weaned at 31 months, the daughters reached 36 months.
When comparing the weaning of people who were born on the site and those who moved there in early adulthood, the authors found a significant difference: 42 months for locals versus 32.5 months for non-locals.
The women of Kalawwasa Rummeytak were not only breastfed longer as children, but also owned a disproportionate amount of wealth. Prior to contact with the Spanish and Euro-Americans, indigenous Californians developed a form of money using shell beads.
Archaeologists surmise that people buried with large numbers of these beads achieved greater wealth and status in their lifetime. And in this San Francisco Bay tribe, only the older women were buried along with shell beads.
“This is the most definitive example in ancient California of concentrated burial wealth among women,” said Gregory Burns, an expert on the economics of shell beads and a co-author of the study. These findings confirm the flexibility of human societies to change their kinship strategies in response to the conditions they encounter.
