Photo: Nancy Heiner
A Conversation with Peter Banks – California Archeologist
This is the first formal discussion I’ve had with my uncle, Peter
Banks, regarding his extensive work as an archeologist in California and abroad
in the 1960’s through the 1980’s. His adventures, profession,
and character have always been a subject of pride for our family, and the
objects of much conversation and storytelling over the years. Peter was a
great traveler and bohemian – and a loving, colorful, and inspiring
father figure to my three older siblings. He left behind a small town upbringing
in the Hudson River Valley of upstate New York for a degree in geology at
Cornell University, followed by a zig-zag pilgrimage west, bouncing between
the States and Europe and North Africa and Mexico – shedding one profession
along the way, and finding adventure, a new inspiration, and finally a family
as he headed west and eventually settled in California.
As a student of archeology Peter dove into the world of the Neanderthal
and other prehistoric humans, living in the field and working extensively
on cave, rock shelter and ancient village sites across Europe and into Egypt.
In California he learned the field and became intimate with the varied terrain
of its early inhabitants. He eventually founded a well respected archeological
firm in Berkeley, and became an expert in the shellmound sites of the San
Francisco Bay Area:
Peter Banks:
I graduated from Cornell in 1960 with a degree in geology, and headed west,
because there really wasn’t any action for geology work for a new-comer
back east. I ended up working on oil fields in rural Wyoming, analyzing the
substrate that came up in the wells as they were drilling down. It was a hard
lifestyle – Wyoming in the winter, and a long journey from where we
were staying in a tiny town, out to the fields. I was sort of thrown into
it, and didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. I didn’t last
long at those jobs, and I went on to eventually work for the USGS in the summer
in Wyoming and Colorado mapping and analyzing Tertiary geologic formations
for uranium content. As we were doing these surveys, I became more interested
in the upper layers we were looking at, in the Pleistocene layers where there
were often remains of early human activity: stone flakes, evidence of fire,
etc. That was much more interesting to me than analyzing the lower layers
for geologic evidence.
So, I decided to chuck geology and to become an archeologist. I went to New
York City and took a series of temp jobs to save money for my big-time trip
to Europe where I could do field work on Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon sites.
I bought a ticket on the cheap-o Icelandic Air – featuring a prop plane
that took several stops to hop its way over to my final destination of France.
It wasn’t until I actually arrived in Paris that I realized I had no
money, nowhere to stay, and no way to communicate. So I floundered around
in France for a while then went to England, volunteered with the British Museum
on an Early Man site, made a few more contacts, bought a bicycle, and rode
it to my next job in the south of France. It took me about a week, and I showed
up at the job site of Combe Grenal with my bike and a knapsack. Professor
Francois Bordes generously welcomed me into his small crew. We all lived/camped
on his property in the small village of Carsac, and he arranged for all of
our meals to be provided for us at a nearby restaurant in town with wonderful
French country cooking. Combe Grenal was a very important site with pre-Neanderthal
and Neanderthal deposits. During one of the long, post-prandial afternoons
I was sleepily digesting my wonderful lunch and was jolted awake when I found
a pre-Neanderthal hand axe. Combe Grenal is still considered a classic Paleolithic
site and Life magazine came to the site and wrote an article about our work
there. Professor Bordes arranged to take the crew on a tour of the famous
prehistoric cave painting site of Lascaux, but just before the day of our
tour it was discovered that a fungus resulting from the change in the cave’s
atmosphere due to the large numbers of human visitors was starting to destroy
the paintings, so the site was closed to all visitors just days before we
could get there.
I next had the good fortune to head to work in Egypt for six months spanning
1964-1965. I worked along the upper Nile River Valley before much of it was
lost, inundated by the newly created Aswan Dam. Many crews were working up
and down the Valley surveying and removing any archeological sites that would
soon be lost below the water line. Teams worked on all eras, and we met people
surveying early Christian, Medieval, prehistoric, and Dynastic sites. We were
surveying for any prehistoric sites and found many open air sites and several
cave sites. The most interesting sites were out in the open, fully exposed,
in areas where the desert winds had blown away all the soil and what was left
was a pavement of artifacts. You could pick up a prehistoric tool and find
close by the core it had been struck from. We did extensive surveying and
mapped the artifacts before the flooding. In the construction of the Aswan
Dam the entire territory of the Nubian people in Egypt was inundated and lost,
as well as prehistoric, Egyptian Dynastic and many later sites.
In the next few years I worked on several archeological digs and surveys across
France and Yugoslavia, including the famous Cro-Magnon rock shelter in Les
Eyzies in France, an early Neolithic village site in Macedonia, and middle
to late Paleolithic open air sites in central and southern France.
I also started anthropology and archeology classes at San Francisco State
during the winter months, and began volunteering on digs, and becoming familiar
with field sites in the Bay Area. I then moved on to jobs on digs throughout
California as well as Nevada and Arizona, including a Clovis site -- one of
the earliest human cultures in North America -- with mammoth remains that
had the distinctive Clovis points still embedded in them. The excavations
were directed by Dr. Vance Haynes, who was a proponent of the theory that
big game in North America was primarily wiped out by these Clovis hunters.
National Geographic came to the site to photograph our work and wrote up an
article on it.
I returned to California to work on a site in the Sierra foothills but instead
caught a nasty case of the archeologist’s occupational disease -- Valley
Fever, and had to take six months off to recuperate. I holed up in a bungalow
in Bolinas next to my sister’s house. In the mid-1960’s, I could
easily live on the $200.00 a month Workmen’s Comp stipend I got, including
covering my $40.00 a month rent to live in a cabin by the beach! Earlier on
in my travels I had also injured my back, which turned out to be a blessing
in disguise: I had stopped in the Midwest to visit my sister, and my back
went out. Her husband, Milt, was a medical intern and took me in for a diagnosis.
I was told I had a slipped disc in my spine and needed several months of bed
rest. This turned out to be a piece of luck, since while I was down and out
the Vietnam War draft board caught up with me and asked me to show up for
a physical. Milt got his doctor friend to provide me with an excuse, and the
army re-categorized me as 1-Y, or temporarily unqualified. The Vietnamese
War was just starting to heat up, and we had begun to send military personnel
over as "observers". If I had been drafted I would have been prime
cannon fodder. I learned my lesson from this near miss, though, and stopped
telling the draft board where I was. They tried several more times to get
me in the next few years, but I had either moved to another state, or was
overseas on digs.
When I came back to California, planning to attend UC Davis, and also was
offered a year-long job in Puebla, Mexico working on prehistoric sites, which
sounded like more fun, so off I went. There I worked for a German professor
I met in Egypt, and we excavated an early Classic site. Pottery was prevalent
at these sites, and I learned a bit about working with pottery -- a great
tool to establish chronologies, trade patterns and functionality.
Once I was finally back in California, I did more field work, including a
job in Indian Valley, a beautiful oak woodland valley in the north Coast Range
west of Covelo. It was so full of birds I couldn’t believe it: including
such northern California woodpeckers as Lewis’s, Pileated, Acorn…This
got me turned-on to birding. Here I also met Sari Fredrickson, a beautiful,
young field archeologist who would become my wife, who also is the daughter
of Dave Fredrickson - a well known professor of California archeology at Sonoma
State. Unfortunately, this was also a dam recovery project, and that lovely
valley is now under water.
Sari and I settled in Berkeley. A local archeologist who I also worked with
in Egypt named Bob Orlins and I formed California Archeology Consultants.
We focused on sites around the greater Bay Area, and particularly investigated
the Indian shellmounds of San Francisco Bay. We often referenced the maps
made by pioneering Bay Area archeologist N.C. Nelson in the early 1900’s,
as he surveyed indigenous sites around the Bay by horseback, including the
famous and immense Emeryville and Candlestick Point shellmounds. Our firm
did alright, especially during the huge development boom in the East Bay in
the 1970’s, but as development slowed, so did the requirement for archeological
site surveys, and business really slowed for us.
During those years we acted as consultants, conducted site surveys, and directed
digs. A large amount of our work was in the East Bay, but one really interesting
job was conducting a survey of prehistoric sites in the Mission Bay area of
San Francisco. For this we used N. C. Nelson’s field notes and superimposed
historic maps of the San Francisco peninsula onto modern City maps. We drilled
down through the concrete, and recovered the soil from the drill bit to note
if we hit archeological deposits or bay mud. By this method, we were able
to locate a number of shellmounds - including the big one near the stadium
at Candlestick Point. During our survey years we were also able to re-locate
the Stege Mounds, which are a famous grouping of shellmounds along a historic
slough near the Richmond-Albany border, originally mapped by N.C. Nelson.
Some sites have been lost, including sites we surveyed, due to erosion and
development. But my hope is that our work will serve to preserve most or all
of the sites that we found, described and mapped. The good thing is that development
has slowed, and there are strict laws in place which help prevent further
destruction of archeological sites. The exciting thing is that there is enough
known now about the shellmounds and other habitation sites of the Bay Area
– especially Berkeley – Richmond – Contra Costa –
that a good use pattern analysis could be performed. This is something I had
hoped to do, but didn’t get around to it before my career moved-on.
CZ: What did you learn from the shellmounds of the Bay
Area?
PB: The most important fact is that they are still there,
underneath pavement, backyards and parks. Although the tops of these shellmounds
have been leveled off, the lower deposits are still intact -- at least that
proved to be the case in all those that we investigated. The manner in which
the shell mounds have survived -- with older and middle deposits still intact
and more recent deposits in the upper levels destroyed -- can lead to the
odd result that we can learn more about the early periods of human habitation
in the Bay Area than in the later periods and historic contact times.
I also learned that the Bay was not a barrier to people trading and mixing.
It was not a barrier to relationships -- for example, marriage between tribes
in Marin County and the East Bay seem to have been as common as marriage between
adjacent East Bay tribes. In most periods, there was not a lot of overt inter-tribal
strife, and relationships between groups were generally good. Language did
not appear to be a barrier.
