Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California

This edited collection comprises exciting recent work on colonial California in the fields of ethnohistory and historical archaeology. The nine chapters in this volume explore the many facets of community building among Indigenous Californians, paying specific attention to how Indigenous people formed copresent and imagined communities around shared religious beliefs, political and economic ties, and the practices of locality. The authors propose that communities are not natural, distinct, or static, but constructed, “dynamic, overlapping, and perhaps above all else, conditional” (21). The authors, individually and collectively, pursue five goals in their exploration of colonial California community building: considering how Indigenous Californians formed new communities and redefined existing communities, exploring how traditional and innovative community-building practices worked, assessing the impact of shared physical proximity on community building, and pinpointing when, where, and how communities intersected. The book as a whole and the individual chapters succeed beautifully. The result is a diverse...