Old and Older in the Bodie Hills

Although the mountains of the Sierra to the west here in Bridgeport are beautiful, David and I have both really come to appreciate the small canyons, streams and peaks of the Bodie Hills, which are directly out our back door to the east. Their rolling hills, scale, solitude and beauty is a perfect storm for exploring. Oh, and it doesn't hurt they they contain some of the best archaeology in the region. All the cool old stuff back there is the result of two different times and cultures, although a similar reason.

Bodie Hills with the Sierra in the background

Sunset over Bodie Hills

First, the Bodie Hills are jam packed with natural obsidian deposits. Obsidian, or dragonglass for you Game of Thrones nerds, is the best stone to make tools out of on earth (and probably in the solar system). It is super sharp, and in fact is still used for surgeries. So for the last 10,000+ years, people have been coming to the Bodie Hills from what is now California and Nevada to quarry obsidian. Not only are the natural obsidian deposits fun the look around for and very interesting, but there is just gobs of obsidian flakes and artifacts that people have been leaving here for millennia.

One of the Bodie Hills obsidian sources

Second, the Bodie Hills were extensively mined for gold and other minerals from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. In fact, at the height of the gold boom, there were about ten times more people living in this area than there are now! In the 1860s book Roughing It, Mark Twain wrote about the mining towns in this area. These people left behind standing structures in cities, the largest of which was Bodie, which had a population of about 10,000 at its peak, and more brothels and saloons than you could shake a stick at. Bodie is now preserved as a state historic park, but there other ghost mines and town sprinkled throughout the hills. There are also smaller settlements of just a few houses to stumble upon.

One of the stone structures in the Bodie Hills

One of these little spots is in a little side canyon not too far from our house. I checked it out the other day, and found some really interesting artifacts. The historical sites I am used to are mainly campsites from dudes who were ranching or cutting down trees in the 1920s and 1930s. They usually leave behind things like milk cans, tobacco tins, beer bottles and coffee cans. The little area in this canyon didn't have any of those things, but had really thick bottles, lots of cans with interesting modifications, and some pieces of kinda fancy ceramics that made me think of some pictures of Chinese artifacts I've seen. I looked up information about this stuff back at the house, and it turns out the bottles are from the 1880s, and the ceramics were part of a porcelain rice bowl. My previous conception was that the Chinese-Americans living in this area were usually low-wage workers under close surveillance by their employers. So it is neat to think that some Chinese people could have been making a go of it in a relatively remote canyon.

Piece of the Chinese bowl