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This site is on the National Register of Historic Properties and is also a National Historic
Landmark. The historic Rancho los Cerritos was the headquarters of an ranching operation that
began as the result of the Nieto Grant of 1784 (Evans 1969). Archaeologically, the deposit at
CA-LAN-696 contains evidence of pre-contact and historic occupations. Artifacts associated
with the deposit include manos, stone discs, cogstones, glass, china ceramics, fragments of nine
Tizon Brown Ware vessels, clay pipes, scrapers, knives, and metal. Evans (1969) described the
Brown Ware ceramics as being made of micaceous clay, with feldspar and/or quartz inclusions.
The pottery shows evidence of coiling and smoothing using paddle and anvil techniques (Evans
1969). The ceramics are polished on the exterior and most of the rim sherds were recurved with
flattened lips (Evans 1969). The shapes of the vessels included a spherical jar or olla, bowl, and a
globular jar. For my analyses, I sampled eight ceramics from this collection (N=8).
4.1.4 CA-LAN-2630
CA-LAN-2630 is located on the banks of the prehistoric Bouton Creek and on California
State University Long Beach campus. Construction workers discovered the deposit during the
construction of a parking structure in May of 1994, Matthew Boxt excavated CA-LAN-2630
during a subsequent salvage project. During these excavations, archaeologists recovered a total
of 642 (713g) pottery sherds from stratum 4, a layer that was approximately 70cm thick and
consisted of sandy silts, loams, and marine shell (Boxt and Dillon 2013). The pottery sherds are
associated with only definitively prehistoric artifacts (Boxt and Dillon 2013). These include
groundstone items such as hammerstones. These artifacts are stratigraphically below historic
artifacts that were found at depths of 0 to 50cm (Boxt and Dillon 2013). The large majority of
the sherds are body fragments (N=240), and less than 1 percent of the sample contains rim sherds
(N=7). The ceramics were formed from a variety of manufacturing techniques including
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