Oakland Geology

Here’s the story behind this photo. I just got back from five days in Fresno at the annual meeting of my regional section of the Geological Society of America, the Cordilleran Section. The first order of business was a field trip to see the Pleistocene fossils of the Fairmead Landfill, near Chowchilla. The guy whose hand this is is Blake Bufford, director of the Fossil Discovery Center just across the road from the site. His job is to follow around the giant scrapers at the landfill when they dig new pits and watch for fossils, so he’s the most important pair of eyes in the entire project. Blake showed our group the latest pit and then accompanied us to the Center for a tour and a reception by the FDC’s owners, the San Joaquin Valley Paleontology Foundation. Some nice Madera County wine, local cheese, “mammoth” meat balls and so on.

Blake and I got to talking, and the topic of Oakland came up. He asked if I knew anything about the traditional ocher diggings he had visited there. I told him about the Holy Names site, but that’s not the one he meant. No, he said, this was another place that was in the process of being wiped out to build a supermarket, where both red and yellow ocher were produced. “Let me show it to you.”

The Center is full of fossils, but it also has a little display cabinet dedicated to the people who once had the area to themselves, the Chowchilla tribe. There was an antique woven reed basket, of course, but everything else was a modern replica made with traditional techniques: arrows with interchangeable arrowheads, various kinds of twine, deerbone trowels and scrapers, a tiny wooden flute, necklaces, a soapstone bowl and trade beads, and balls of red and yellow ocher. Blake made all of it. He unlocked the case and showed me everything in it. He made the ocher balls, the size of a small egg, by grinding the stone to powder, then mixing it with boiled soaproot to hold it together. “We don’t know exactly what they used, but this worked.” There were a couple of raw ocher specimens lying next to them. “I collected this one from Oakland,” he said, and I said, “Please let me photograph that.”

This entry was posted on 24 May 2013 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Oakland boulders, Other topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.