This article investigates Indigenous persistence within Mission Santa Clara de Asís in central California through the analysis of animal food remains. The Spanish colonial mission system within Alta California had a profound social and ecological impact on Indigenous peoples, altering traditional subsistence strategies and foodway patterns. Past research has highlighted the continued use of precolonial foods within the Alta California mission system alongside the daily consumption of colonial-style beef stews. This article expands on that literature to consider how Indigenous and colonial residents differentially acquired ingredients and prepared daily meals within the Alta California colonial mission system. This assessment demonstrates a sharp divergence between Indigenous and colonists’ daily diet, manifested in the continued use of wild food resources by Indigenous people as well as the maintenance of precolonial culinary practices in the preparation of cattle meat for daily stews. These findings complicate our understanding of foodways within the Spanish mission system and expand our understanding of Indigenous autonomy within conditions of colonialism.

For tribes whose preservation values and mitigation strategies for managing cultural heritage are built on an ethic of avoidance and minimal disturbance, geophysical technologies can be key components of the research design. These technologies, most notably ground-penetrating radar, have been used with great success in identifying and evaluating the depth, extent, and composition of some of those resources for heritage research and management purposes, easing tensions when working with sensitive ancestral places. Additionally, research in archaeological geophysics has shifted from feature finding in order to excavate targets of interest to the recognition that geophysical survey can provide data and interpretations for whole sites and landscapes complementary to or beyond that of excavation, especially regarding the intactness and sensitivity of cultural heritage sites. This use of geophysics as a primary method for research rather than a precursor to archaeological research has empowered tribes with another tool to advocate for low-impact investigation of ancestral sites and landscapes that position tribes as pro-science. Geophysical technologies provide scientifically rigorous yet minimally impactful strategies for investigating heritage while satisfying the requirements of academic and compliance archaeology in ways that can also be culturally appropriate for a much broader spectrum of tribal cultural heritage under consideration.