The Aboriginal Population of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, California

This is what remains. In the mid-20th century, anthropologist Sherburne Friend Cook undertook the meticulous work of reconstructing a world that was already vanishing: the Costanoan-speaking peoples who had inhabited the hills and shores of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties for thousands of years. Drawing on Spanish expedition records, mission archives, and early ethnographic accounts, Cook reconstructs the villages, population sizes, ecological relationships, and daily lives of communities that had been devastated by colonization and missionization. The book documents expeditions by Fages, Anza, and Cañizares, preserving their observations of native villages at a moment just before catastrophic decline. This is demographic archaeology: numbers and names pulled from fading records to restore humanity to a people reduced to footnotes in colonial history. For anyone researching California's indigenous past, the Costanoan peoples, or the deep history of the Bay Area, this volume remains an indispensable foundation.