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in the Santa Barbara region. It is seldom, indeed, in California that
what seems to have been an intact mass of ceremonial objects is encoun-
tered in a situation which suggests that they refer to a specific and
limited time period, This time period is implied by the nature of the
artifacts themselves, but another circumstance has added interest and
information concerning the time of placement of the collection in the
cave.

About twelve years ago, the late Richard van Valkenburgh was
engaged in archaeological .field work in Los Angeles County, An old
local resident, while looking at van Valkenburgh's collection, recalled
that a friend of his had found in a cave, many years before, a number
of storage baskets which contained feathered robes and some clubs, Van
Valkenburgh evidently surmised that this might be a reference to the
Bowers Cave collection, and when he finally interviewed the old man,
who was named Everett Pyle, van Valkenburgh learned that a cave had been
discovered in the San Martin Mountains in 1884 and Pyle and his brother
had removed a great number of Indian relics from the place. Subsequently,
these relics were sold to Bowers, who in turn sold part of them to the
Peabody Museum (van Valkenburgh 1952:7).

Bowers stated in his 1885 article that he himself had visited the
cave and excavated there, finding several artifacts. It is not known
whether he meant to represent himself as the original collector of the
entire lot of material. In any case, Pyle, supposedly the original dis-
coverer, gave van Valkenburgh specific directions on how to get to the
cave, which was situated in extremely difficult terrain far off any
well-traveled trails in the San Martin range.

When the cave was revisited in 1951 or thereabouts, evidence was
found which indicated that Pyle's story was true. Additional'digging
brought to light fragments of basketry which are apparently similar to
some specimens in the original Bowers collection. The finding of some
blue and rose-colored glass trade beads near the spot where the.original
cache was probably located suggests, but does not prove, that the time
of placing the material in the cave was around 1800 A.D. The glass beads
found in 1951 are not, however, associated with certainty with the Bowers
material since the two lots were collected by different persons working
sixty-five years or so apart. If glass trade beads had been contained in
the baskets acquired by Bowers, they would presumably have been saved and
thus be part of the collection. We assume, therefore, that two temporally
separate events account for the lack of association of the glass beads and
the deposition of the baskets in the cave. The baskets themselves and
their placement in the cave may date from the post-Spanish or mission
period (i.e. 1770 or later), but we cannot affirm or deny this with the