A PAINTED IDOL

Pedro Fages, Gaspar de Portola’s second in command, while describing their 1769 trip down the Santa Clara River Valley, wrote about idols being placed near villages. Those idols were sometimes sticks or stone figurines painted with colors and surmounted with plumage. They are described as being three hands high. Since those idols were made of ephemeral materials, except for the stones, and since they were placed in the open, rather than in caves, it is unlikely that any of them have lasted into this century to be found and identified. They were numerous, and they are gone. So much so that late-Nineteenth Century and later archaeologists do not report them at all, nor do any of their informants.

Some paintings in caves have lasted. Occasionally, a small mortar (or “paint pot”) with pigment still in it turns up in an archaeological excavation or as a surface find. The first “archaeologists” of the late-Nineteenth Century basically robbed graves for marketable grave goods and human skulls (also marketable because of the focus of science at the time on race through the measurements of skulls). The notes of those early excavators of cemeteries often describe inverted metates and mortars with their basins painted red.

One painted stone, about 8 1/2 inches in height, was found on the top of a hill in the late 1970s in the Sunset Hills area of the City of Thousand Oaks. The stone is quartzite. It is a somewhat rounded cobble that was fracture perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, with subsequent rounding of the broken edges. The stone shows no effort to shape it. It is capped with red pigment on both ends and has three red pigment bands. Of particular interest are a series of chisel-like marks perpendicular to the edges of each of the three bands of pigment. It is difficult to imagine how they would have been created because the rock has a Moho hardness of 7, similiar to steel. Perhaps a quartz or quartzite chisel was employee. It is also possible that it was manufactured during the historic period when an iron or steel chisel could have been used.

The persistence of the pigment, given its exposure to the weather, is hard to understand unless it is a mineral pigment. If it were a commercial paint from the modern period, it probably would be seriously degraded. Still, we cannot be certain that it is of Chumash origin. However, the pigment and the nature of the artifact suggests that it well might be an example of a painted stone of the type described by Pedro Fages.

                                                                                    Mike Kuhn

10-27-04