[3 articles] Former commune is site of archaeological dig
http://www.allbusiness.com/science-technology/anthropology-archaeology/12851130-1.html By By SUSAN FERRISS Publication: Monterey County Herald (California) September 8 2009 NOVATO - The '60s aren't dead. They're in an archaeological site north of San Francisco. An old commune where the Grateful Dead and other bands used to romp is being excavated and items catalogued by state park archaeologists at Olompali State Historic Park. Among the artifacts: the classic hippie beads, a marijuana "roach clip," fragments of tie-dyed clothes and a reel-to-reel tape a Marin County studio technician has promised to try to restore. They are the stuff of memories for Noelle Olompali-Barton, who was 16 when she and her showbiz mom plunged into California's new counterculture, retreating to this once-private ranch north of San Francisco to establish one of the first hippie communes. The teenager baked bread to give away in Golden Gate Park. She sat with the Grateful Dead under an oak tree for a famous 1969 album photo. For two intense, often drug-laced years, the commune nourished utopian dreams and some bad trips, too, she said. But never in her wildest hallucinations did the teen imagine that more than 40 years later, she would assist an archaeologist in identifying macrame headbands, old records and other commune artifacts retrieved from the abandoned ruins of her former home. "You know you're old when you're pictured in Archaeology magazine," chuckled Olompali-Barton, now 58, who was profiled in that journal in July along with California State Parks archaeologist E. Breck Parkman. Sitting under oaks outside the park's visitor center, Parkman laughed along with Olompali-Barton, who has been using the ranch's name as her own since she lived here. Reaction to Vietnam War The state of California bought Olompali in 1977, and opened a park on its 700 acres of oak-studded rolling hills. Parkman knows some might scoff at his project to catalog and display the artifacts of an era many alive remember well or not so well if they were especially indulgent. But the commune, he said, is as much a part of Olompali as the rest of its history, stretching back thousands of years. "I see the commune as part of the Cold War," he said. "If we hadn't had the Cold War, we wouldn't have had Vietnam, and if we hadn't had Vietnam, we wouldn't have had the commune. It was one of the reactions to the war." The years the commune existed, late 1967 to 1969, were some of the most tumultuous and divisive in modern American history, Parkman said. Prominent figures of the '60s visited the site the Grateful Dead rented the ranch the year before the commune moved in and hippie culture went on to have an indelible impact, for better or worse, on global culture, he said. Miwok Indian settlement The commune members lived, Parkman noted, in a historic 1911 stucco mansion that was built on and attached to an 1828 adobe of a Miwok Indian chief. The adobe, now fully visible, is the oldest standing structure in the state north of San Francisco and a national registered historical site. Olompali is also historically rich, Parkman said, because native Miwok Indians developed major settlements here. The park's name is Miwok, and it means "southern village" or "southern people." After the commune members were gone, Parkman said, the land was controlled by a Jesuit order. Archaeologists excavating here in 1976 unearthed a startling find at a Miwok site: an Elizabethan silver sixpence minted in England in 1567 that could have arrived by way of Sir Francis Drake. The commune members were generally aware of some of the ranch's heritage, including the Miwok, Olompali-Barton said. Their ethos was "get back to the land," and live simply with nature. But acid rock was their soundtrack. And in 1969, while many in the commune were working at a rock concert light show in San Francisco, an electrical fire broke out at the mansion and gutted it. The fire was part of a downward spiral Olompali-Barton blames on a decision to open the commune up to more than a closely knit circle of families. "There were the freeloaders who came," she said, "who sat in the living room playing music and not helping at all." Police raided the commune twice and busted members for drugs. And after the fire, two toddlers drowned in the ranch's pool when a woman who was supposed to be watching them failed in her responsibility, Olompali-Barton said. The tragedy led to the commune's final collapse. "I think there were some dark moments at Olompali," Parkman said. But some of the commune's counterculture ideals, he said, such as organic food and environmentalism, have become mainstream. 'Marin Rocks' exhibit Over the years, state park workers have gradually sorted through the burned mansion, where 19th-century artifacts have been retrieved. This year, Parkman, Olompali-Barton and other volunteers sorted through drums of debris collected years ago and stored at the park. Some pieces are already on display at the park visitor center, and others will be included next year in a Marin History Museum exhibit called "Marin Rocks." Old jazz records dating from the 1940s and '50s belonged to the older commune members rather than the Woodstock generation, he said. The find underscored that many who wanted to drop out and join the counterculture were not youths. Olompali-Barton's mother, Sandra, was in her late 40s when she founded the commune, along with other older people with kids and several Vietnam War combat veterans in their 20s. Sandra Barton kept a foot in the "straight" world, performing as a singer at San Francisco hotels and clubs. Don McCoy, then 37, a local businessman with three children, bankrolled the experiment with a fortune he inherited and earned developing the Sausalito houseboat marina. And one of the commune women, Olompali-Barton recalled, married an Air Force man and used to shop at the commissary of a Marin County base, hauling along a gaggle of home-schooled kids in hippie garb. Parkman said some commune kids grew up to be angry at their parents, especially those who gave the kids drugs or felt unprotected with strangers wandering nude. But others cherish memories of freedom and fun, and believe they witnessed history. "Anything groovy that's created can exist, and then can dissolve," Olompali-Barton said. -------- Adobe home found under Marin hippie commune http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/14/BAOH159AN9.DTL Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, January 14, 2009 The artifacts from the Age of Aquarius were laid out Tuesday on a plastic sheet in an old barn in Marin County's Olompali State Historic Park. There, stiff and rumpled from being in storage so long, was a leather jacket with a rainbow colored flower motif, some old boots, dozens of melted records, burned-out speakers, charred beads, monopoly pieces, soot-covered reel-to-reel tapes, pieces of a porcelain toilet and beer cans - lots of beer cans. It was, let's face it, junk. But to archaeologists, it was groovy junk. Senior State Archaeologist E. Breck Parkman and representatives of the California Department of Parks and Recreation began sorting this week through artifacts left 40 years ago by the infamous hippie commune known as the "Chosen Family." The midden from which they dug everything up was actually inside the burned-out ruins of the 22-room Burdell Mansion, where the group once lived. The historic mansion was known in the 1960s as "the White House of hippiedom." "The '60s were a very interesting and tumultuous decade, and in 50 to 100 years it will be a very important decade for historians to talk about and study," Parkman said as he leafed through the debris in the park, which overlooks the Petaluma River and San Pablo Bay. "During the two years the commune was here, they witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and we put a man on the moon." It all started in 1967 when houseboat developer Don McCoy decided to drop out during the Summer of Love and used inheritance money to lease the 700-acre estate at Rancho Olompali, just north of Novato. He recruited a dozen friends and their children to join him at Olompali, where they set about creating a hippie utopia. The members started calling themselves "the Chosen Family," to the delight of the mirthful press. Pretty soon the ranks of the band grew to 50, and their exploits were recorded with zeal in the newspapers. McCoy, with his long, dark beard and flowing locks, was labeled the "hippie benefactor," the "bearded patriarch" and the "rich guru." The children attended a "Not School" school run by a pot-smoking nun. Two of the students, it was gleefully reported, were the sons of Richard (Sgt. Sunshine) Bergess, a San Francisco police sergeant convicted of smoking pot on the Hall of Justice steps. People came from all over to visit, including actors, spiritual leaders, astrologers, numerologists and musicians, including Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and the Grateful Dead. The picture on one of the Grateful Dead's album covers was taken under an oak tree at the commune. The members did carpentry work, baked communal bread and lived in hippie bliss. Then things took a turn for the worse. Two children drowned when they fell into the swimming pool. The driver of a big-rig truck was killed in a grisly accident after one of the rancho's 40 horses escaped and ran onto Highway 101. There were two renowned drug busts in 1969. In one of them, narcotics agents demanded to know who owned all the pot they found. McCoy responded famously, "It belongs to God. I just smoke it." The coup de grâce came when the historic two-story mansion burned down on Feb. 2, 1969, the victim, apparently, of an electrical problem. But some good came out of it. The fire exposed an adobe structure built before 1834 that subsequent generations had simply built structures over. It was the home of Camillo Ynitia, the last leader of the Miwok Indian village at Olompali, Parkman said. The Chosen Family is long gone, but the detritus of their lives sat until 1997 in what Parkman called "a hippie midden" on the floor of the gutted mansion. The debris was placed in sealed barrels after asbestos was discovered. Crews in hazmat suits began cleaning the debris this week so that archaeologists could sort through it. No bongs have been found, but one thing is certainly clear from the Chosen Family artifacts. The members liked Budweiser, Coors, Olympia and Busch beer with old-fashioned pull tops. The idea of going through the stuff, said Victor Bjelajac, the park maintenance supervisor who is assisting Parkman, is not only to find items from the 1960s but also to search for artifacts from the pioneers. He said pearl doorknobs and other decorative artifacts found amid the debris probably date back a century or more. "If you look at any archaeological dig in any kind of midden, you are looking at someone's trash," Bjelajac said. "We are trying to interpret what all the trash means." Parkman said most of the sorting should be completed by the 40th anniversary of the Burdell Mansion fire. Once he is done with the hippies, he said, he would like to get permission to excavate the ruins of the adobe, under which lie the remains of Coast Miwok settlements dating back 8,000 years. -- E-mail Peter Fimrite at [email protected]. -------- Digging the Age of Aquarius http://www.archaeology.org/0907/abstracts/hippies.html Why trash from a hippie commune is worth preserving Volume 62 Number 4, July/August 2009 by Matthew Brunwasser Melted sneakers, scorched fabric, broken plates, a tube of 40-year-old face cream, red plastic Monopoly hotels, and other chunks of debris fill cardboard cartons on a conference table at the Olompali State Historic Park Visitors Center in northern California. Some might call these artifacts--the remains of a hippie commune that called the park its home between 1967 and 1969--junk. But California state archaeologist E. Breck Parkman disagrees. Believing that his job managing the state's historical resources gives him a responsibility not only to interpret the past, but also to plan for the future, Parkman is working to make sure that these seemingly mundane items aren't just thrown away. He's convinced that sorting, identifying, and storing some of these artifacts will enable future generations of archaeologists to create their own interpretations of the years between the Summer of Love and Woodstock--a period of political turbulence, generational conflict, and cultural experimentation that shaped modern America. On a rainy day in February, I listen as Parkman explains his vision of how to preserve the history of the commune that existed here before a fire destroyed its rented home, a 22-room, 19th-century house called the Burdell Mansion, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. In the face of resistance to using the funds of a state with a $42-billion budget deficit to go through "hippie trash," Parkman has enlisted several museum curators and two former commune residents to help him figure out what to keep and what to throw away. "Are we honoring the hippie period [by keeping these artifacts]?" asks 56-year-old Parkman with the slight southern accent he brought with him from his native Georgia. "No. We are saying that it's significant. What's important is that we want to curate the artifacts so that 50, 100, or 200 years in the future, people will be able to pull them out and do scientific study." . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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