When the Europeans first started to explore and settle the New World they saw themselves as heroes and saviors who would be bringing the savages of the Americas to civilization. In their arrogance they were blinded to the fact that those so called savages they sought to civilize were already developed into a complex and structured societies that excelled in many elements of social workings. One keen example of a civilized native society was that of the Chumash who inhabited the coast of the Santa Barbara County, of what was then called Alta California, for the better part of one or more millennia; this longstanding influence on the land can be seen in the names of places in California such as: Malibu, Lompoc, Pismo Beach, and Point Mugu. Being rooted near or on the coast developed the Chumash to be a hunter-gatherer type of people that took advantage of the numerous resources the ocean ecology provided them. This type of sustainment provided for a comfortable existence without the need of agriculture, allowing them to pinpoint their focus elsewhere. The Chumash people had developed one of the most complex societies in the region which enabled them to take a central role in the politics of the native people of Alta California. The complexity of the Chumash at the time of contact with Europeans astonished many of those explorers and settlers such as Father Juan Crespi who accompanied Captain Gaspar de Portola on what was the first European land voyage to California. “Ever since we first began meeting with houses laid out like towns, which was at Santa Catalina de Bononia, the villages have all been continuing to be this way, and the ones encountered are much more populous every day, with the inhabitants living in regular towns with very good sized grass houses, round like half oranges, some of which are so large within that they must be able to lodge without hindrance sixty persons and more. . . They have their own kind of government, two, three, or four chiefs, and one of these chiefs is the headman, who gives orders to everyone.” Taking this into account the true question to be analyzed is to what extent did the Chumash control and/or facilitate the trade that occurred in Alta California. Although the Chumash were viewed as a primitive people in the eyes of the European explorers and missionaries, the Chumash proved to be a highly developed society capable of developing an economic system which can be argued to be the first presence of capitalism in America. It was through their technology, resources, and geographical location that they were able to construct the foundation for their economy to exist.
When it comes to the historiography of not only the Chumash but of most indigenous people in the Americas there is a thin red line between the acceptance of their self-histories in a field dominated by western interpretation. A key component learned in the study of the methodology of history is objectivity and how it is crucial to analyzing and interpreting historical sources, particularly those that are primary. Unfortunately as previously stated the primary sources that the Chumash utilized existed as self-histories that often took the form of mythological narratives. The problem with this format of recording history is that according to western interpretation the style in which history should be recorded is centered on the facts of the given subject, facts that are relative to the real physical world. In the minds of those that wrote the mythologies “a dream-like ‘other world’ is considered to be just as real as the predictable, everyday world.” The Chumash believed that those myths, while often supernatural in nature, held the same historical value as the archived documents that was popular for the western world. Therefore, the inability for the self-histories of the Chumash to be properly recognized from a historical standpoint has greatly hindered the likelihood for objectivity in the history of the region and of the Chumash themselves. This is because the only histories that will be recognized as part of the historiography of California are those that are written by westerners as it is they who have biased the general interpretation of sources.
When one analyzes a civilization it is often in its technological advances that an approximation can be made as to how much the civilization in question has developed. In the case of the Chumash one of their greatest technological innovations was their long range canoe called the Tomol. The Tomol was an expertly engineered watercraft “constructed of rare and expensive materials, including drift redwood 300 to 500 kilometers south on the California Coast and high grade asphaltum from mainland tar seeps” which “Represented a significant innovation” that led to a new stage in the Chumash’s development. While the average Chumash individual had access to the resources to build simple canoes for fishing, the Tomols were reserved for those of high social stature. Almost in likeness to the limos of today the Tomols often revealed the status of individuals such as chiefs, religious figures, and successful merchants.
An often coined phrase that one might here in their everyday life is “Location, Location, Location” which can be applied to a variety of situation. When it comes to commerce one of the major reasons why a civilization may hold prominence in trade may simply be because of “location, locations, location”. Trade centers give away their key characteristic in their own name; the reason why it is called a center is more often than not because their location is centralized for the region making it the most viable option for where trade should converge.
One thing that became prominent in many of the secondary sources on the Chumash were the development and utilization of beads, manufactured from seashells, as a form of currency. “Chumash had a highly developed economic system in which shell beads were used as money.” When we look at many other indigenous cultures that practiced trade, it is commonly understood that they did so through bartering: trading one good for the other. Among the different sub-cultures within the Chumash Tribe there wasn’t a huge variety to barter with since a lot of the resources they had were shared, with the exclusion of those in the Channel Islands. It is because of this that the currency system was implemented. “Production of shell beads as a standardized portable medium of exchange was a complex specialized industry…centered primarily on the offshore Channel Islands.” What is so great about the seashell currency besides the fact that it demonstrated a high level of progress, is that the previous knowledge of these shells revealed the expanse of the Chumash trade network; when they were “found in the southwest and great basin” the information that the “Shell beads were also exchanged outside the Chumash Region” means that there was established trade beyond their borders as well.

--------------------------------------------
[ 1 ]. Lyndle H. Gamble, The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers (Berkeley: University of California Press 2008), 1
[ 2 ]. Michael K. Ward, "Timoloqinash: Incorporating Chumash Cultural Self-History into the History of California."
[ 3 ]. (Arnold 1995)
[ 4 ]. (Arnold 1995)