Living Room Lecture - Looking Down the Rabbit Hole: Santee Greens Revisited

The site of Santee Greens aka Michagua, a Late Holocene village over 29,000 square meters, was originally radiocarbon dated in 1980 and 1981. It showed two occupation periods, AD 760 to AD 1030 and AD 1735 to AD 1890. With the help of the San Diego Archaeological Center, Dr. Stan Berryman was able to use modern C14 dating techniques on 23 charcoal samples. We now know the original dates leave something to be desired. With these “new” dates Dr. Berryman is revising our understanding of the work conducted by 40 archaeologists over a nearly three-year period. This is the story of 270 excavation units and 223,236 artifacts.

Dr. Berryman hopes that ultimately this work will aid in a better understanding of the people who lived at this site. In this presentation, he will discuss a project that was conducted before there was a sub discipline of archaeology called cultural resource management, then take a look at the wide range of artifacts recovered and how they relate to and are explained by the C14 dates. He will also present a couple of projectile point styles, in particular the Dos Cabezas double side notch, that are found throughout the Western U.S. under the name Temporal. Finally, C14 dates and changes within the site will be examined. Join us for a look down this rabbit hole that has been waiting 40 years for its story to be told.

Proceeds from our Living Room Lecture series help provide critical support for the care of Center collections and programs for all ages.

About the Presenter
Dr. Stan Berryman received a BA Anthropology at San Diego State University June 1970 and a PhD Archaeology from the University of Leicester July 2014. His career in archaeology has been primarily in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) with the first 23 years spent in the private sector. For the next 20 years, he worked in the government sector, managing resources and archaeological studies at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Cleveland National Forest, and ended the CRM part of his career in early 2016 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. During these 40 years, he had the pleasure of working with legends of California, especially his friend, mentor and sometime tormentor Emma Lou Davis. Dr. Berryman has retired from CRM and has most recently been working at New Mexico State University (NMSU) as Affiliated Faculty assisting at the Cottonwood Spring Pueblo, South Diamond Pueblo, and Twin Pines Pueblo field schools. Currently, he is working on a NAGPRA grant from the Park Service with the NMSU Museum.

About the San Diego Archaeological Center
The San Diego Archaeological Center is a nonprofit curation facility and museum where visitors can learn the story of how people have lived in San Diego County for the past 12,000 years. In addition to its role as a museum, the Center serves as an education and research facility and is the only local organization dedicated to the collection, study, curation and exhibition of San Diego County’s archaeological artifacts.