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.

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