San Francisco Presidio archaeologist Kari Jones hovered over a table crammed with bits and pieces of ceramics, bones, shards of metal — the garbage of another era — now treasure to Jones and others seeking to understand the Presidio’s first settlers. “One of the things we say about archae ology: in small things forgotten there are big stories,” Jones said. Jones and her archaeology team have spent years seeking stories big and small in the Presidio, from as far back as 250 years when the Anza Expedition arrived in future San Francisco and built a village in the Presidio. A dozen years ago on a field in front of the Presidio Officer’s Club, Jones and her team began digging a rectangular plot to try and find the adobe walls of the original fort. In a city that would later explode with the discovery of gold, Jones was more excited to dig into its muddy origins. “We started looking for walls,” Jones said. “And it’s kind of like a puzzle where you get an outline of the corners, or where the walls are, and then you start looking for the more interesting stuff.” Presidio archaeologist Kari Jones, left, digs in the Presidio excavation site, searching for the walls of the original Spanish fort. The team uncovered swaths of walls, and the places where they intersected, giving Jones a perspective on the entire layout. But they also made another vital discovery that shed even more light on life in the original settlement — garbage pits. Inside those pits were the real details of life in the early San Francisco — shards of ceramic dishes from Mexico, gun flints and cow bones with cuts indicative of how the Spanish would cleave their meat. “We can tell that this is Spanish colonial because of the butchering mark,” Jones said, holding up a bone in the Presidio’s archaeology lab. Day after day, the archaeology team would squat at the edge of the rectangular pit, slowly scraping away layers of dirt — excavating down beyond the more recent years of the Presidio’s military history, edging deeper and deeper into the past. June 29 marked the 250th anniversary of a mass the newly-arrived colonists held near present Mission Dolores, which historians consider as the unofficial founding of San Francisco. In the Presidio, that story of the years after their arrival is told through the dirt and mud. “So this really is 250 years ago, the beginning of what would become San Francisco,” Jones said. “It’s a very small, humble beginning. It’s a colonial beginning. It’s beginning of the end of a way of life.” The end that began with the colonists arrival was the way of life of Indigenous tribes who had lived on the land for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, especially Ramaytush Ohlone. The colonists brought their religion, their customs and their ambitions of converting the locals into a Catholic labor force through its new mission. Shards of ceramic pottery excavated by archaeologists in San Francisco’s Presidio tell the story of the original colonists. “The Spaniards was obviously a groundbreaking, ground shaking, ground disturbing event for us,” said Gregg Castro, a descendant of Ramaytush Ohlone, the area’s original people. “They built fortifications, they built the Presidio that we’re in, they built the mission and began bringing in the local native people. We were treated as probably worse than their own cattle” With its perch above the bay, the Presidio was an ideal vantage point to monitor the Golden Gate Strait and defend against the potential arrival of Russian and British explorers, who also had designs on the area. It’s why the Presidio, mostly covered in sand dunes at the time, was chosen for the original settlement. “Father Font, who was the diarist of the Anza Expedition, waxed eloquent when he stood at the edge of the Golden Gate Strait and he said this could be the harbor of harbors,” said historian Gary Kamiya. The Presidio National Trust manages 30 archaeological sites around the Presidio. Those sites have so far yielded 1 million artifacts. Presidio archaeologists maintained the dig site for about 10 years before covering it up, but not before extracting bits and stories of the Spanish settlers. “One of the things we say about archaeology is that archaeologists tell unremembered stories,” Jones said. ...read more read less