Shell-bead money and the mission period economy of Alta California

The riddle of money

Marx did not dismiss the idea that money existed in pre-capitalist societies. In the Grundrisse, for example, he noted that ‘money may exist, and did exist historically before banks existed, before wage labour existed, etc.’ (1973[1857–8]: 102), and acknowledges that merchant’s capital and usurer’s capital preceded the rise of societies rooted in the social relations of industrial capitalism and the capitalist mode of production. ¹ For classical political economists like Adam Smith, as well as for Marx, the exchange (circulation) moment of the production-circulation-distribution-consumption circuit in pre-capitalist societies was inter-societal and occurred on the boundaries separating autonomous communities. For Marx, however, circulation was not the result of some natural propensity to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’ as it was for Smith, but rather as he put it in the first part of Capital:

Things are in themselves external to man, and therefore alienable. In order that this alienation [Veräusserung] may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men to agree tacitly to each other as the private owners of those alienable things, and, precisely for that reason, as persons who are independent of each other. But this relationship of reciprocal isolation and foreignness does not exist for the members of a primitive community of natural origins, whether it takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian commune or an Inca state. The exchange of commodities begins where communities have boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities, or with members of the latter. However, as soon as the products have become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become commodities in the internal life of the community. Their quantitative exchange-relation is at first determined purely by chance. They become exchangeable through the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. In the meantime, the need for others’ objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social process. In the course of time, therefore, at least some part of the products must be produced intentionally for the purpose of exchange. From that moment the distinction between the usefulness of things for direct consumption and their usefulness in exchange becomes firmly established, their use-value becomes distinguished from their exchange-value. On the other hand, the quantitative proportion in which things are exchangeable becomes dependent on their production itself. Custom fixes their values at definite magnitudes. (Marx, 1973[1857–8]: 103, 1977[1863–7]: 182)

Let us consider Marx’s statement in more detail. First, it is a logical explanation in which history is reconstructed backwards from the mutually constituting relationship between commodities (i.e. objects produced exclusively for sale) and money as the universal equivalent of all commodities in societies manifesting the capitalist mode of production. At the same time, it argues ‘that money results from a historical process, in which each of the components of value, as it exists fully fledged in capitalism, comes into being one at a time’ (Campbell, 2004: 74). Second, while trade and money emerged where independent societies came in contact, the circulation of goods within autonomous pre-capitalist communities was shaped by the social relations of production and reproduction that prevailed in them – sharing, customary reciprocal obligations, redistribution, or exploitation. Third, what distinguishes pre-capitalist from capitalist societies is that the economy of the former is embedded in its social relations and institutions, while the economy of the latter is dominated and determined by market relations and the production of exchange-value. Fourth, the presence of money and markets does not necessarily signify that a particular society manifests the capitalist mode of production – i.e. commodity production, the appropriation of surplus value, or the creation of a class of alienated direct producers whose members are separated not only from the means of production but also increasingly from one another as their skills and labor time mutate into another commodity that is exchanged in the market. Fifth, in pre-capitalist societies, money was ‘a social phenomenon that was largely marginal to the essential processes of social reproduction’ (Itoh and Lapavitsas, 1999: 57); however, the penetration or linkage of capitalist social relations with pre-capitalist societies distorted, eroded, and dissolved the customary relations and social hierarchies of the latter, replacing them with social ties that were articulated through the market. Sixth, as capitalist social relations become dominant, money, which is essential to the reproduction of capitalism, becomes a new and increasingly independent form of value that serves a multiplicity of functions (1999: 55–58).

Marx ‘ … does not derive money as a device to overcome the limitations of barter. He derives money as the form necessary to constitute value objectively’ (Arthur, 2004: 37, emphasis in the original). In the first chapter of Capital, he argues that, in commodity-producing societies, commodities are useful to someone, because they satisfy needs. They also have a dual character, in that they can either be consumed directly to satisfy a need or they can be exchanged for another item that fulfills a need. In his view, as well as that of Adam Smith, commodities simultaneously possess use-value (they satisfy needs) and exchange-value (they can be exchanged). ‘This characteristic of exchangeability Marx calls value’ (Foley, 1986: 13, emphasis in the original). In Section 3 of the chapter, Marx draws a distinction between the relative and equivalent forms of value: 20 yards of linen equals one coat, where the use-value of one commodity (the linen or relative form) is expressed or measured in terms of the use-value of a second commodity (the coat or equivalent form). He calls this the (1) elementary or simple form of value. He developed this into an (2) expanded form of value in which a commodity (the linen – the relative value in this case) can be expressed relative to given quantities of an unlimited number of other equivalent commodities equated (e.g. coats, tea, coffee, iron, or gold). He notes that the list of relative forms of value is incomplete, and that the various equivalent commodities in the expanded form of value may be incommensurate with one another. Marx then describes a new (3) general form of value in which a series of commodities (the relative form: tea, coffee, coats, iron, etc.) can be expressed in terms of a single equivalent form of value (e.g. 20 yards of linen); in a phrase, one commodity becomes the general or universal equivalent of all other commodities. ‘By this form,’ he writes, ‘commodities are, for the first time, brought into relation with each other as values, or permitted to appear to each other as exchange-values’ (Marx, 1977[1863–7]: 158). What distinguishes (4) the money form of value from the universal commodity in the general form of value is ‘the peculiar status of immediate exchangeability it has as money’ (Arthur, 2004: 57). In other words, the universal equivalent in the general form of value becomes active as money, and money shows its use-value and value-in-itself by its immediate exchangeability in the money form of value. Thus, value only appears as a sum of money in the form of exchange value or at the moment of exchange (Mohun, 1991: 504; Saad-Filho, 2002: 21–34). ‘The value of a unit of money [let us say a dollar] is determined historically, by the pricing decisions of commodity producers themselves’ (Foley, 1986: 24).

The value of a commodity in an industrial capitalist society is reduced to its exchange value. This is the socially necessary labor time required to produce a use-value under the average conditions of production for that society by workers with average degrees of skill toiling with normal intensity for normal amounts of time; this socially necessary labor is measured in units of time. However, as the commodity begins to circulate, the socially necessary labor time comes to be viewed not in terms of the concrete labor associated with the production of a particular commodity but rather in terms of abstract labor, which is considered apart from the specific characteristics associated with the article but is considered with reference to the particular social relations and form in which production occurs. At the moment of exchange, the expression of its value and the value of all other commodities has been transformed and is now measured in terms of money; this reflects a division of labor within or between the societies involved in the exchange process (Marx, 1977[1863–7]: 123–138).

Seven points are worth mentioning here. First, money is necessary in the exchange process of commodity production. Second, in commodity-producing, capitalist societies, value is abstracted or removed from the person or persons who make the articles as well as from the articles themselves and their biographies. This is not always the case in pre-capitalist societies where the social identity of the maker can be integral to the value of the particular articles they have produced. In other words, value is embodied in the maker rather than in the object itself (Gailey, 1987: 107–122). For example, a shell bead made by one bead maker may have more value than one produced by another, because the identities or reputations of the producers are embodied in their creations. The differences between them may not be apparent to an outsider who lacks knowledge of their history. Third, some articles may move into and out of the commodity form at different stages in their history (Kopytoff, 1986). Fourth, the value of an object may be embodied in the history or biography of the object itself – like Marilyn Monroe’s dress or Elizabeth Taylor’s diamond ring. Fifth, in any given society, different articles may circulate in different spheres (valuable articles, food, etc.) that reflect the gender, rank, or status of the maker – such as mats made by Tongan women and fish caught by men; these spheres may be internally graded according to the identity of the persons who made the articles. Moreover, spheres of exchange often cross-cut one another. Sixth, while analyzing value solely from the perspective of the exchange process allows us to grasp the significance of money, it misses important features of commodity-producing societies – most notably the social relations that prevail during the production process, the ways in which value is extracted from the direct producers of use-values, or the magnitude of value itself (which, as mentioned earlier, is measured in units of time). Seventh, as Marx noted on various occasions, the labor process involves people working to transform the raw materials of the natural world; while it is a condition of human existence, the labor process itself is shaped by the social relations that prevail in the circumstances in which it takes place.

Thus, money is a measure of value, a means of purchase, and a means of payment in commodity-producing societies. It is hoarded, as David Harvey (2010: 74) observes:

The hoarded money constitutes a reserve that can be put into circulation if there is a surge in commodity production and can be retracted when the quantity of money needed for circulation shrinks … In this way, the formation of a hoard becomes crucial to moderating ‘the ebbs and flows’ of the money in circulation.

Shell beads, money, and economic relations

For most of the last 8000 years, the Indian peoples of coastal Southern California and the Channel Islands manufactured various kinds of beads and ornaments from the shells of marine mollusks and gastropods. Shell objects made from these species have been found four to five hundred miles away in the Great Basin (southeastern Oregon, Nevada, and Utah) and the American Southwest (Arizona). While the circulation of shell objects was seemingly continuous, the volume or frequency of the exchanges, as well as the types of beads that circulated and their spatial distributions, changed through time (Bennyhoff and Hughes, 1987: 87). By the 1770s, when the first missions and presidios were established in Alta California, Chumash peoples residing in the northern Channel Islands were switching or had already switched from producing large numbers of beads made from the callus (lip) of Olivella shells to manufacturing a variety of new tubular bead types – some quite time-consuming (c.80 hours), and large quantities of others, like thin Olivella wall beads, that were less time-consuming (c.20 minutes) to make (Arnold, 2010, 2011; Arnold and Graesch, 2001; Arnold and Munns, 1994; Graesch, 2004).

In the late 1970s, Chester King (1976, 1981) – using archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic data – proposed that the Chumash of the Santa Barbara Channel participated in a monetized economy and had used shell beads as a medium of exchange and payment since the early second millennium AD (c.1150). ² By 2000, his thought-provoking hypothesis was widely accepted and being fine-tuned by archaeologists (e.g. Arnold, 2001; Arnold and Graesch, 2004; Gamble, 2008). King’s (1974: 8–27, 1976: 250–253, 1981: 323–331) conception of Chumash society builds on the societal evolutionary theory of Herbert Spencer (2002[1898]: 362–393; Turner, 1985: 142–151). For King, the ecological variability of the Santa Barbara Channel and its environs and the unpredictable availability of its raw materials were stimuli ‘ … for increased economic activities in the region, and that the use of shell bead money enabled the Chumash to efficiently take advantage of and redistribute the plentiful resources of the different ecological zones’ (Gamble, 2008: 227). In this view, exchange, expanded production, and internal differentiation of the political and economic systems were the interrelated motors of societal development. The increased differentiation of the economic from the political system was facilitated by the appearance of money or capital accumulation, new ways of organizing labor around the means of production (i.e. craft specialization), and the emergence of a group of individuals (i.e. village chiefs) who controlled the exchange of certain goods or organized the events at which inter-village or inter-group exchanges took place. He argued that competition was the way that Chumash communities maintained their fitness vis-à-vis neighboring groups and other villages: ‘The growth of the economic system was probably associated with increased economic competition in which different communities and families vied to sell their manufactured foods or collected food’ (King, 1976). The increasing importance of the economic system relative to the political system was underwritten not only by the continued flow of goods (the expansion of trade) but also by their removal from circulation (hoarding or burial goods) and by their periodic destruction. These created growing demands for continued or even expanded production. As the importance of the economic system grew, village chiefs, who organized ceremonies and fiestas when Chumash society was dominated by the political system, increasingly became intermediaries (traders) between producers and consumers at the ritual fairs they organized on behalf of their kin, neighbors, and surrounding groups. That historic accounts mention that fish-bone beads moved between the islands and the mainland in 1542 and that coral beads produced in the islands were traded to mainland communities in 1770 are seen as evidence that market exchange and the economic system had already gained dominance before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1769. That is, the partial separation of community members from their means of production, the appearance of distributors who controlled the exchange of some goods between producers and consumers, and the emergence of a monetized, market economy were autochthonous developments.

In my view, there are three weaknesses with this formulation. First, it seemingly presumes that the Chumash economy was driven by the same laws of motion as a modern commodity-producing, capitalist economy. Second, the explanation is theory laden, and neither its presuppositions nor their implications are adequately considered. This is particularly true with regard to concepts such as money and its functions, value and its different forms, market exchange, and the interconnection of value, price, and cost. Third, after the Spaniards entered Alta California in 1769, the economies of the Chumash and other native peoples were no longer autonomous as they were drawn into social and economic relations with the local representatives of New Spain – especially along the coast where the missions, presidios, and first towns were established. Statements in historical documents, as well as archaeological data, are ambiguous about how shell beads functioned in the 1770s and earlier. One reason for this is a consequence of an academic division of labor in which anthropological archaeologists have focused their attention on native peoples, whereas historians of the mission period have dealt with the institutions and practices of the settlers who emigrated from New Spain. Both the archaeologists and the historians are well aware that the native peoples and settlers interacted but are only beginning to explore how the economies of the various communities articulated with one another.

Shell beads, articulation, and the expanded form of value during the transition

Settlement of the coastal strip of Alta California between San Diego and San Francisco was launched in 1769 by the government of New Spain to protect the northern frontier of lands claimed by Spain against incursions by foreign states, most immediately Russia (Weber, 1992: 236–265). By 1781, the 80 soldiers and their 20 helpers had built four presidios between San Diego and San Francisco to guard the coast against foreign intrusions; the 20 or so Franciscan missionaries had established eight missions (ultimately there would be 21, the northernmost and last of which, Solano, was founded in 1823); and newly arrived settlers from the northern frontier of New Spain founded two pueblos – San José (1777) and Los Angeles (1781). The footprint of the Spanish colonial enterprise was small and largely limited to the coast. It can be viewed as a series of islands in a vast sea of traditional lifeways and forms of social reproduction (Mason, 1998; Phillips, 1980, 2010). What was most striking about this frontier society, especially in Southern California, was that it was cash strapped into the 1860s, even after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. As a consequence, the missions, presidios, and pueblos used an elaborate credit-debit system where they conducted economic transactions with one another and with the government of New Spain (Archibald, 1978). As Robert Jackson (1992: 389–390) writes, ‘in the first years of the colonization of California, all such transactions were on paper, and the funds for both the military and Franciscan missionaries came from the same branch of the treasury in Mexico City’.

The missions played a dual role: (1) an institution of social control concerned with transforming the native Californians into Christian farmers who would till the arable land claimed by the King of Spain; and (2) the economic base of this frontier society. They assembled portions of the native population into reducciones or congregaciones for surveillance; this practice also provided an environment in which the missionaries could teach them the labor processes and skills deemed necessary to support the missions and presidios and eventually to provide a labor force for the pueblos (Phillips, 1980, 2010). The missions quickly became the economic engine of Alta California. By 1780, many of the missions were self-sufficient food-producers. They supplied food, clothing, and other necessities at prices below those that existed in Mexico City – which would remain the source of manufactured goods, like needles, for many years. The baptized native peoples also produced many of the goods that connected Alta California with the outside world (Archibald, 1978: ix–x). Thus, the goods they produced flowed through a number of distinct circuits: within the neophyte community; between the missions and the presidios and pueblos; between the baptized neophytes on the missions and their unbaptized kin; and across boundaries to the members of other communities.

From the perspective of the missionaries, soldiers, and settlers, labor was scarce, especially since they themselves were averse to physical labor. This meant incorporating Indians into the work force in various ways. From the 1770s onwards, the native peoples at the missions acquired a variety of skills that had not been part of their work regimes earlier: farming, herding, shearing sheep, making adobes and tiles, and weaving textiles to name only a few (Phillips, 1980, 2010). Age and gender played important roles in structuring and organizing the labor processes and in determining forms of cooperation (Jackson and Castillo, 1995: 50). Robert Jackson and Edward Castillo (1995: 47) have argued that ‘Indians living in the mission communities exchanged labor for food, clothing, and housing in a nonmarket economy, and mission labor can be conceptualized as a form of tribute paid to the state and administered by the missionaries’. One might also argue that it was a form of unfree labor. However, a wage-labor market also emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was a split labor market in that Indians convicted of crimes, unbaptized Indians, and converts were paid at different rates, often for performing the same tasks (Archibald, 1978: 74–114, 142–158; Bonacich, 1972). For example:

For one month’s work, the military paid an unbaptized laborer one blanket, valued at between five and nine reales; by comparison, the military paid the mission thirty-six reales a month for each mission laborer. Thus, in June 1790, Governor Fages was justified when he boasted to his superiors that employment of gentile Indians had saved ‘the major expense of paying the daily wages of the Indians from the missions’. Unbaptized Indians, most likely, agreed to work for the military to obtain European goods without becoming entangled in the Franciscans’ confining web. Labor at the presidio also guaranteed a daily ration of food … (Hackel, 1998: 126)

While it is clear that shell beads were interchangeable with other commodities in the early California economy, it is not clear that they were ‘money’ in the same sense that we use the word today. For example, New England merchants regularly entered from the late 1780s onward and engaged in an illegal trade for sea otter pelts; the merchants bartered for the pelts with priests, soldiers, settlers, and native Californians. We can draw a number of conclusions about the use of beads and other measures of value in the colony during the late eighteenth century. First, beads and other measures of value were used to pay both baptized and unbaptized Indian workers at the missions and presidios. As Steven Hackel (2005: 317) describes it:

In addition to obtaining food and blankets – both of which could be used or exchanged – gentile [unbaptized] contract laborers who came to Monterey also gained access to two scarce and valuable commodities: trade beads and sea shells. Indian captains routinely received from [Governor] Fages four to six strings of beads upon completion of the crew’s work, and they also gathered heaps of shells from the shoreline. Indians, in fact, collected so many shells that two mules were required to transport them back to the Santa Clara Valley. These shells and the beads made from them were among the most important forms of wealth and economic exchange in native California.

The Mission Santa Barbara created a demand for shell beads toward the end of the missions. By that time, most of the mainland Chumash people had been baptized. In 1814, Padre Antonio Ripoll arrived at the mission and saw as his calling the conversion of Island Chumash peoples who had come to the mainland after the earthquakes of 1812. Ripoll, who was familiar with the dialects and customs of several Chumash communities, put this knowledge to use. Unlike most of his predecessors and contemporaries in the mission system, he promoted and sponsored traditional ceremonies in order to attract neophytes and potential converts to the mission. He also encouraged gift exchange within communities and between themselves and outsiders, like the Yokuts of the Tulare (San Joaquin) Valley. However, toward the end of the decade, Chumash chiefs began to complain about the cost of traditional ceremonies sponsored by the mission; the ceremonies were depriving the communities of the foodstuffs they had procured and the objects they had made. In response, Ripoll brought islanders who could manufacture shell beads into the mission, creating, in effect, a guild or gremio of shell-bead makers, composed of older men and women. Their products were used in place of the food and other items that the Chumash gave to the sponsor of the fiestas. By creating a mint at Santa Barbara in the late 1810s, the demand for beads increased at the same time that the quality of the workmanship and the number in circulation declined (Gamble and Zepeda, 2002). James Sandos (1991: 80) remarked that Ripoll had ‘inadvertently promoted inflation’. In the 1850s, the Gabrielino of the Los Angeles basin were still using strings of shell beads as a form of currency (Heizer, 1968: 43–44). To reiterate, shell beads circulated and were used in a variety of ways by native communities during the first half of the nineteenth century. The shell-bead money seems to have had limited spheres of circulation, mostly in Indian communities, where it promoted gift giving, underwrote ceremonies, facilitated trade, and sustained the social reproduction of the communities.

Since money was almost non-existent during the mission period (and in fact to the mid-1850s in Southern California), an economy developed based on the expanded form of value in which paper accounts, blankets, cow hides, and shell-beads were merely four of many forms of equivalent value that facilitated the circulation of goods (Archibald, 1978: 63; Hackel, 1998: 122). This is perhaps best illustrated by the circulation of sea otter pelts between c.1780 and 1830. New England merchants, eager to penetrate the Chinese market for sea otter furs, regularly entered California waters after the early 1780s in search of pelts. From the perspective of the Spanish government, this was an illegal activity since trade of any kind with foreign merchants was prohibited. Nonetheless, this did not deter the ships who bartered for pelts with priests, soldiers, settlers, and native Californians. Historians mention that the merchants exchanged more than 40 items ranging from knives to silk hose for the furs; cash payments seem to have been rare (Archibald, 1978: 133–134; Coughlin, 1970: 153–155; Ogden, 1941: 48–50). In Marx’s (1977[1863–7]: 156) terms, the relative expression of value embodied in sea otter pelts was realized in a number of other equivalent commodities. This is the expanded form of value. He pointed out one of the implications of the expanded form of value: assuming that one sea otter pelt equaled six knives or two pair of silk hose, it does not follow that the knives and hose would exchange at the same ratio; for example, six knives might be equivalent to six pair of silk hose. Marx also pointed out that the value of sea otter pelts could be expressed in terms of an unlimited number of equivalents. He pointed out that new objects could be injected into the list of equivalencies at any moment, and that these provided objects with yet another expression of value. Thus, as a measure of value, neither sea otter pelts nor shell beads were expressions of the general form or the money form of value during the mission period. ³

Sea otter furs were a commodity that circulated in at least two different but related spheres: the political economy dominated by the missions and the other involving contraband. The value of sea otter pelts was expressed in terms of a long list of equivalent commodities or forms of value. As Marx (1977[1863–7]: 190) put it:

If … two different commodities, such as gold and silver, serve simultaneously as measures of value, all commodities will have two separate price-expressions. The price in gold and the price in silver, which will quietly co-exist as long as the ratio of the value of silver to that of gold remains unchanged. … However, every alteration in this ratio disturbs the ratio between the gold-prices and the silver-prices of commodities, and thus proves in fact that a duplication of the measure of value contradicts the function of that measure [since gold and silver are not the same commodity].

Money is a measure of value – the social incarnation of human labor whose magnitude is gauged in units of time. As a measure of value, it also converts the value of all commodities into prices, which are expressed in terms of quantities of a particular commodity – i.e. the money form regardless of whether it is gold or shell beads. Marx (1977[1863–7]: 195) described price as the money form of labor objectified in a commodity and, hence, as an expression of the magnitude of its value. Marx also points out that a change in the value of the money form does not impede its function as a standard of price. As he put it:

A general rise in the price of commodities can result either from a rise in their values, which happens when the values of money remains constant, or from a fall in the value of money, which happens when the value of commodities remain constant. The process also occurs in reverse: a general fall in prices can result either from a fall in the values of commodities, if the value of money remains constant, or from a rise in the value of money, if the values of commodities remain constant. An increase in the prices of commodities [like sea otter pelts] can result either from an increase in their value (whose magnitude is measured in units of time) or when the values of commodities remain unchanged. A decline in prices can result from a decline in the value of the commodities. It therefore by no means follows that a rise in the value of money necessarily implies a proportional fall in the price of commodities, or that a fall in the value of money implies a proportional rise in prices. This would hold only for commodities whose value remains constant. (Marx, 1977[1863–7]: 193)

In the cash-strapped society of Alta California during the mission period and, in fact, into the 1850s, commodity money underwrote the existence and daily functioning of an elaborate credit advance and repayment system. As a result, many exchanges were paper transactions that involved no circulation of the money-form itself. By 1833, cow hides had become an important negotiable instrument, but not the only one, since beaver pelts also functioned in the same manner. Two decades later, in the 1850s, there are reports that the Gabrielino of the Los Angeles basin were using shell beads as ‘ … a circulating medium and legal tender to transact business, when barter could not be employed’, and that ‘articles were exchanged for a species of [shell-bead] money from the Indian mint of the Santa Barbara rancherias’ (Hudson and Blackburn, 1986: 268–269). This suggests that an expanded form of value still prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century. It also raises questions of whether or not some money forms served to articulate different communities into the wider political economy, while other money forms – shell beads, cow hides, beaver pelts, credit, and cash, to name a few – were predominantly used by different social classes or class fractions to conduct business. I suspect the answers to these questions may be yes.

What is not immediately apparent from the use of money to facilitate exchange transactions during the mission period is the complex articulation of the different forms of surplus extraction that co-existed: tributary forms of extraction or slavery at the missions; sharing, reciprocity, and redistribution in the kin-communal societies of the unbaptized native Californians and probably their neophyte kin as well; waged labor often paid in kind rather than cash; and the appropriation of surplus value in the presidios and pueblos.

Conclusion

In the preceding pages I have used Marx’s arguments about the conceptualization of money to examine claims that Chumash used shell-bead money to regulate exchange before and during the mission period in Southern California. At one level, the commentary on the Chumash points to the complexity of the economic continuities and changes of frontier societies and to those of early states. At another level, the article is a critique of cultural evolutionist arguments that tend to view the functioning of pre-capitalist societies in terms of capitalist economic models. My method involved examining simultaneously the archaeological and historical records in light of the economic categories – exchange, value, and money – that underlie the presuppositions of the foundational theories we deploy. It implies that we might want to conceptualize the praxis of archaeology in new ways – ways that integrate and give equal credence to different kinds of evidence and that underpin the inferences we draw. I was attracted to the Santa Barbara Channel data because they are rich, diverse, and have been examined in thought-provoking ways by the archaeologists and ethnohistorians who have used them for at least 50 years. While I do not necessarily agree with all of their conclusions, their collective contributions are massive and worthy of careful thought by those who work in other parts of the world. A second reason for turning to the Chumash information is that other scholars have occasionally viewed the cultural practices of other groups in coastal Southern California as being identical with their neighbors to the north. I do not think this is the case. Also, I do not want to fall victim to the tyranny of the ethnographic and ethnohistorical historical records assembled by John Peabody Harrington among the Chumash in the early twentieth century. Some of the information garnered from Harrington’s research has been appropriated and seemingly incorporated uncritically into accounts of the cultural and social practices of peoples living elsewhere in the region.

In this account, I have examined economic categories – money, value, and exchange – that archaeologists and ethnohistorians have used to describe and explain the continuities and changes during the mission period in Southern California.