He believes it’s important to open up the mortars to the air instead of allowing them to fill with detritus and eventually disappear. To Benney, merely placing his hands where native peoples once put theirs is an innately spiritual act. “I still get thrilled by every one of them,” he says with a sense of awe in his voice.Īt one large rock, he pauses to demonstrate a practice he calls “daylighting.” Reaching his hand deep into a mortar - enough to fit his outstretched fingers and wrist - he scoops out a handful of accumulated leaves, branches, and dirt. Though he has no formal training in archaeology or cultural anthropology, he speculates on the location of retreat routes, lookout points, defensive positions, and even a major trading ground nearby. Their high concentration suggests to Benney that this must have been an active village site for thousands of years. Soon he is standing at the center of a football-field-size plain, nearly surrounded by small sandstone boulders with mortars of myriad sizes and arrangements. “This could’ve been a house pit,” he continues. Then Benney hikes toward a flat, clear area ten feet across encircled by a partial ring of rocks and more mortars of various depths. He is pointing toward a two-foot-tall sandstone rock that contains two or three shallow bedrock mortars - softball-size depressions in which natives ground acorns and other foods using stone pestles. “I continued on over this way, and then I saw this,” he says. He has visited this location in the East Bay hills on more than twenty occasions since 2001, but still recalls with enthusiasm his first trip here. So why do all the experts wish he hadn’t?ĮAST BAY EXPRESS article, by Nate Seltenrich October 3, 2007Īs James Benney approaches the site of what he believes was once a year-round Native American village, he can hardly contain his excitement. James Benney is so inspired by the East Bay’s dozens of Native American sites that he published his own guidebook about them. James Benney believes that the benefits of increased awareness are too important to be overlooked.
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