“By the Aid of His Indians”: Native Negotiations of Settler Colonialism in Marin County, California, 1840–70

As archaeology turns to the study of sustained colonialism, researchers are reassessing sites occupied by Native people from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In California, this was a particularly crucial time, with many Indigenous people creating social and economic ties with newcomers in order to maintain connections to their ancestral homelands. One such locale was Toms Point, a landform on Tomales Bay, where Coast Miwok people worked at a trading post run by an American entrepreneur. This article explores the material evidence for their engagement with a broad array of social and economic connections, including the California coastal trade, the salvage of a local shipwreck, and persistent Indigenous exchange networks.