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Recent developments in the Ishi "saga" have generated tremendous media attention, as well as opinions offered by a number of academics. Few of these opinion pieces have been based on much empirical data or historical evidence. An examination of Ishi's stone tool technology, particularly projectile point production, his physical morphology, and regional ethnohistoric oral history suggest a very different persona and cultural history for Ishi than previously reported. Rarely in archaeological or ethnographic contexts do we have an observable relationship between ethnicity, acculturation, and prehistoric technology. In the case of Ishi's short five-year stay at the Museum of Anthropology, University of California, all of these important elements converge. The data analysis here and resulting inferences have definite ramifications for the current debate surrounding projectile point style and cultural identity, as well as the long term effects of marginalization by invading and hostile non-Yana societies. [Ishi, projectile point technology, style and information, Native California, cultural identity]
The recent "excitement" over the discovery of Ishi's preserved brain at the Smithsonian Institution, and the resultant response from some members of the Native American community, a few academics, and the media, has brought Ishi's story, yet again, into the mainstream (Bower 2000; Hinton 1999; Rockafellar and Stare 1999; Shea 2000). No other Indian in the history of North America generates more commentary, much of it based solely on assumptions and statements of the obvious, than Ishi. But there is yet much in the empirical world that may actually provide some illumination for Ishi as an individual as well as our understanding of cultural process, identity, and change in the late prehistoric and early historic Yahi world.
The following is the result of a long-term project based on Ishi's stone technology curated in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (Shackley 1991, 1994, 1996a). The project suggests a number of new possibilities for Ishi's origin, the long-term relationship of the Yahi to surrounding, often hostile, prehistoric Native Californians, as well as the following Anglo population, and our understanding of the relationship between stylistic attributes in projectile points and cultural identity.
The use of stylistic attributes in prehistoric lithic assemblages for identifying ethnic affiliation and even individual style has been hotly debated in archaeology,...