ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the results of a research project that focused on a single small-scale world-system that existed in northern California before the Gold Rush of 1849: a local and regional interaction system peopled by sedentary foragers— hunter-gatherers—who lived in permanent villages. It examines the nature of the interaction system in precontact northern California to determine whether or not "essential" interactions were carried out autonomously within cultural entities. The chapter focuses on the northern end of the Sacramento Valley and its surrounding foothills and mountains, an area for which there is a large corpus of both ethnographic and archaeological evidence. The Wintu project went beyond general characterizations of interaction in the ethnographic and documentary record by coding reported events or actual instances that indicate interaction. In the greater scope of comparison among small-scale, middle-sized, and global world-systems it might be easy to conclude that the intersocietal system in northern California did not evince either core/periphery differentiation or core/periphery hierarchy.
