Calaveras Heritage Council

The first large-scale contact between native people and outsiders (not counting the occasional trapper or explorer) took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Spanish explorers and

Regardless of when the Mi-Wuk arrived in central California, the first non-natives entering the area found a well-established society of hunters, fishermen, and plant-food gatherers whose territory st

The proto-historic is the period of European-Native American contact—the time between the prehistoric period with no written records, and the historic period when written records became common.

The beginning of the Prehistoric Period coincides with a region-wide interval of reduced precipitation known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly.

Early Archaic deposits are quite rare in the Sierra Nevada foothills, identified locally at two sites, both discovered in buried stratigraphic contexts.

Until quite recently, archaeological researchers developed culture-histories for the Sierran foothill region based on the more studied areas of the western Great Basin and California Central Valley.

Recent archaeological studies have identified the presence of people in Calaveras County as long as 12,000 years ago.