ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses diverse types of boundaries found within native California and the ways archaeologists deal with them. Ethno historical research in the 1980s within Chumash regions of the Santa Barbara backcountry emphasized that polities operated via network connections between villages by intermarriage rather than neatly defined territories. These types of social networks across indigenous landscapes underpinned economic and political alliances that made up the varying degrees of complexity for much of terrestrial California. After the establishment of Spanish missions on the Pacific Coast in California, the importance of the Sierra borderlands is further exemplified in horse and cattle rustling from Spanish and Mexican missions by Native American raiders who took their captured animals through many of these passes. Geographic information systems (GIS) provides a methodology to move beyond constructed boundaries and look closer at the potentially blurred or fuzzy borders within indigenous landscapes and geographies.
