PAINT CUPS, (LOT OF FOUR CUPS) Third Offering, GOLETA, CALIFORNIA

Description

PAINT CUPS, (LOT OF FOUR CUPS) Third Offering, GOLETA, CALIFORNIA
4 Paint Cups
Heights: ¼” – ½”
Diameters:  1 ¼” - 1 ¾”
Combined Weight:  2.4 oz
Tiny Pestle
Length:  1 ¼”
Base Diameter:  ½”
Weight:  .2 oz
This lot of FOUR Paint Cups and associated Pestle are the third series of outstanding artifacts that came from an area nearby the current Santa Barbara Airport, well before it was constructed as a war time landing spot.  Many stone artifacts were tossed aside and picked up by these WWII construction diggers and kept, being brought out only for special occasions.
A local, Santa Barbara collector is divesting his decades old collection as he has done with previous lots.
The artifacts are well-made stone paint cups—tools used to body paint faces and the bodies of the ancient Chumash.
In fact, the shape of the small upj
stone pestle was suggests it was an application tool used to apply the ground up pigment within the cups.
Long before the Spanish sailed into the ocean-slough near today’s Goleta, a massive CHUMASH village existed on a large island within the brackish water.
For thousands of years CHUMASH natives built homes on the inner island and within the surrounding, moistened soil.  A major village existed there where the inhabitants fished, hunted water fowl and built their ocean going canoes.
Years of systematic plunder, sea-level rise and complete reconstruction of the area by WWII airport engineers rendered any visible remnant of these people moot.  It is important to remember that an entire VILLAGE was once here populated by people getting on with their daily life.
During the construction of the wartime airport, army engineers plowed through thousands of years of CHUMASH history uncovering in the process the stone tools of these early people.
As this was a MAJOR Chumash village, over the years many small stone items have either washed ashore or have poked through sand banks or gardens.  These small application tools give an intimate picture of the coastal people who lived there thousands of years ago.
Aerial view of Goleta Slough and remnants of original island. (Archive photo of excavation of inland Goleta Island).