What are the things around us that impact our experience of life and the world, but do so in a way that is typically unacknowledged?

@splangster’s post (still in draft at the moment, but can’t help but comment on it anyway) about the archaeology of homeplaces has set my mind a-buzz… connecting some dots that have been lying around without knowing how they are relevant, and adding new dots as well that should’ve been there all along.

My own house in Berkeley, California, is about 100 years old, though the land is obviously much older than that. The history is completely obscured to me, for all I know the land came into existence when my Thousand Oaks neighborhood was incorporated into Berkeley around 1910. But even a cursory glance at Wikipedia hints at a whole lot of history underneath that:

When the neighboring city of Albany was incorporated in 1908, its borders were drawn to exclude the area north of Solano Avenue and east of Curtis Street that would become the Thousand Oaks area, then the site of a refugee camp that had formed after the 1906 earthquake. Its residents were employed in the construction of the surrounding subdivisions and were likely to vote against incorporation as a separate city. The neighborhood was first subdivided in 1909 and 1917 after a failed proposal to move the state capital to Berkeley, in which the area would have become a large public park near the capitol building. Originally an unincorporated area north of Berkeley, it was built as a commuter suburb at the northern terminus of three interurban rail lines. It includes the Thousand Oaks Knoll, a rocky extension of the Berkeley hills in the northeastern part of the neighborhood. Several large rock outcroppings in the eastern edge of the neighborhood were turned into public parks, or incorporated into private yards. – Wikipedia

The above is still very “woe to the conquered” to me. Digging a little deeper I find:

Prior to European contact in 1769, the Ohlone/Costanoan people occupied the Bay Area for more than 8,500 years. 5 In addition to this group, the Bay was also home to the Huichin, or Chochenyo-speaking people, who lived in twelve major villages in the East Bay, including what is now the city of Berkeley. Characterized by dense population, large sedentary villages, and complex political and social structures, these indigenous groups thrived. The fertile landscape and marine coast provided an abundance of easily collected and highly diverse food resources, supporting a dense population year round without the need to resort to labor-intensive agriculture. This highly sophisticated cultural landscape experienced an abrupt shift with the arrival of the Spanish, who introduced ravaging epidemics, the Mission system, and boarding schools. The labor required to build and maintain the missions was acquired by force as California Indians were compelled to give up their lifestyle of thirteen millennia. They were enslaved, beaten and “saved” into submission by their Spanish colonizers.

The Spanish influence is captured here by the fact that we have Peralta Ave, named after the Peralta Grant that “bought” 44K acres of land from the indigenous people who had been living here for over 15,000 years.

The grant, issued on August 3, 1820, embraced the sites of the cities of San Leandro, Oakland, Alameda, Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley, and Albany. – Incidents in California History

That’s a pretty terrible start to this land. The fact that locally so much responsibility is placed on the Spanish, and not inherited by the U.S., is really unfortunate (drastic understatement).

All this to say, I have no idea what this space I’m living on has lived through, beyond this high level narrative. 15,000 years is a very long time. I’m curious to see if there are any physical visual clues of this history that are in around me but just hidden. Consider the search commenced.