Classless people estimated to have arrived in San Mateo County over two thousand years ago
By Rober Diaz / Peninsula 360 Press
Redwood City. The Ohlone, also known as "costanos", occupied a considerable part of the coast where they established a district called Aramai, although experts disagree and place their arrival in the area 2,000 years ago.
They were divided into autonomous villages, led by individual chiefs who guaranteed cohesion within each of the villages. Each group had its own language and their existence was put at risk once the Spanish missionaries penetrated their communities and established their villages.
The Ohlone settled around a seasonal swamp that the Spanish called Lake Mathilde. They fed on acorns, seeds from grasses they cultivated and on molluscs, salmon, marine mammals and seaweed. In addition, they fed on rodents, skunks and deer, establishing a peculiar relationship with the animals, which approached the settlers apparently without fear. They did not prey on them unchecked. That is why the English captain wrote upon his arrival, Frederick William Beechey: "The animals seem to have lost their fear and have become familiar with man".
They did not perform ceremonies to celebrate their marriage or divorce and maintained 20 months of sexual abstinence after childbirth.
Their dwellings were sticks covered with tow. The men walked around naked and the women wore an apron that covered them on both sides. They protected themselves from the cold with mud and with tattoos that were made, they differentiated the clan to which they belonged.
They cohabited peacefully with other tribes and developed marriages with them to avoid inbreeding. They counted by means of the decimal system, worshipped the sun and the sequoias (giant trees). If they fought with another people, the enemy's body was mutilated and the one who had done the deed had to eat a portion of the body in order to appropriate its strength.
It is estimated that the tribe was made up of more than 300,000 members. Such was the wealth of the region that it was not necessary for them to domesticate animals and for this and other reasons it was so surprising to the first settlers that there was so much wild vegetation.
Studies have revealed that they did not practice agriculture as such, however, their system of controlled burning yielded a good crop of vegetables.
Their form of social interaction attracted the attention of the colonists who wrote that: "In their heathen state no superiority of any kind is recognized. What they had they gave to their visitors, which also led the missionaries to claim that the Ohlone peoples lived in anarchy.
After the arrival of the Spaniards, the population dropped from 310,000 to 100,000. There were many cases in which the Ohlone preferred to remain in the forest rather than join the missions. By 1840 the American settlers began to arrive en masse, which only increased the derogatory practices against the natives and maintained their segregation and had the same genocidal attitudes against them. By 1846 they were peacefully incorporated into the United States.
The Ohlones, San Mateo County residents who worshipped the redwoods
