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Mission San Gabriel. The name the native population used to <br />identify itself is not known Wroeber 19251. <br />The date of the earliest human occupation of the study area <br />is disputad, but most scholars would agree that a human presence <br />was established along the southern California coast by 7500 H.C. <br />The artifactual record left by these early people indicates <br />that they subsisted primarily by hunting. The tools they left <br />are generally quite large and the bulk of them are chipped <br />lithic tools, such as projectile points and scrapers, or the <br />remains of chipped tool manufacture, such as flakes and cores. <br />Many of the projectile points are finely made, while most of the <br />other tools are crude. This era is known locally as the Early <br />Man Pervad. <br />The millennium centered around 5500 B.C. reveals a major <br />shift in the artifactual record_ The large, finely made <br />projectile paints of the earlier period give way to somewhat <br />smaller and more crudely made points. Grinding tools for the <br />processing of hard seeds become the predominant artifact types. <br />These grinding implements are known as manes, the smaller hand <br />held stone, and metates, the larger tools against which the <br />seeds were ground. The metates often display deep basins. <br />The appearance of manos and metates is generally interpreted <br />as a major shift in subsistence strategy, with a decreased <br />dependence on animal resources and an increased dependence on <br />the gathering of wild seeds. However, this shift may not be as <br />pronounced as originally thought. Recent work indicates that <br />hunting continued to be relatively important (Drover, Koerper <br />and Langenwalter 1983). This second era of the local <br />archaeological sequence is known as the Milling Stone Period. <br />Locally, the Milling Stone Period persisted until about 1000 <br />B.C., when a npw tool combination, the mortar and pestle, was <br />introduced. These new tools ushered in the Intermediate <br />Cultures Period. <br />The mortar and pestle is generally related to the processing <br />of the acorn as a fond resource. However, the use of manes and <br />metates continued unabated, so the introduction of the mortar <br />11 <br />75C -759 <br />