How an unlikely Visigothic city rose in Spain amid
the chaotic aftermath of Rome’s final collapse
By JASON URBANUS
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Most historians and archaeologists agree: The sixth century A.D. was not an easy time to be alive. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed in the previous century, plunging much of the continent into economic, political, and social upheaval. On top of this, the first outbreak and frequent recurrence of bubonic plague resulted in the estimated deaths of millions. Making matters even worse, a series of volcanic eruptions caused climatic changes from Britain to China, ushering in a cooling period known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age. Recent studies have indicated that this caused drought, crop failure, breakdown in food supply chains, and famine. Harvard University medieval historian Michael McCormick has gone so far as to characterize the period following a particularly intense volcanic eruption in A.D. 536 as one of the single worst eras in recorded human history.
One consequence of this turmoil was that, across most of Europe, many urban centers deteriorated, a process that had begun a few centuries earlier when the Roman state first started to weaken. Cities and towns, once hallmarks of the Roman world and essential instruments of the Roman administrative system, were increasingly abandoned. Masses fled to the countryside seeking survival. Western civilization was irrevocably transformed.
However, recent archaeological work in Iberia, on the periphery of the former Roman Empire, conveys a different story. It is revealing how, against this backdrop of chaos, a people emerged who succeeded in founding perhaps the strongest kingdom in the post-Roman world. These were the Visigoths, who had first arrived in Iberia in the A.D. 410s, when Roman rule was crumbling. Over the next two centuries the Visigoths unified a politically fractured landscape, bringing a semblance of stability to a region racked by centuries of violence and uncertainty. They implemented new taxation and legal systems and reestablished trade with the broader Mediterranean world. The Visigoths also did the seemingly impossible—in a largely deurbanized world, they began to build cities. Written sources suggest that the Visigoths founded at least four new urban centers, but only one of them, Reccopolis, can be identified with certainty. It was one of the crowning achievements of King Leovigild (r. A.D. 568–586), perhaps the Visigoths’ greatest ruler. Today, Reccopolis is an unlikely example of a post-Roman urban settlement that arose amid the disorder and uncertainty of sixth-century Europe. “One does not see many new towns founded during this period elsewhere in the Mediterranean,” says McCormick. “It is quite surprising.”
One Visigothic chronicler, John of Biclaro, records that Leovigild founded Reccopolis in A.D. 578 and furnished it with “splendid buildings.” Today, the remains of these buildings sit atop a plateau that rises above the banks of the Tagus River in the central Spanish province of Guadalajara. Although Reccopolis is less than a two-hour drive from Madrid, parts of this province have in recent years become some of the most desolate in all of Europe due to financial crises and a dearth of economic opportunities for its rural population. However, 1,400 years ago, the opposite process was underway. The establishment of a Visigothic settlement in the region attracted throngs of people who settled within the new town and formed satellite communities in its vicinity.
The walls and roofs of Reccopolis’ enormous palatine complex once towered high above the countryside, a ubiquitously visible symbol of the rising Visigothic state. Built on the city’s highest ground, this urban district served as the seat of the new Visigothic monarchy and administration. A church, one of the largest in Iberia at the time, was located across a large open plaza. A monumental gateway would have ushered people out of this district and onto a street full of shops and houses. Reccopolis was, by all accounts, a wealthy and vibrant city that was bustling in a way that very few others in Europe were. Yet, less than 250 years later, Reccopolis was nearly empty. Its building materials were hauled away to construct a new settlement, and over the subsequent centuries the once-great Visigothic city disappeared from view, receding into the surrounding agricultural fields.
The ruins of Reccopolis were located in the 1890s, but archaeological excavations did not begin until the mid-twentieth century. Work continued sporadically for decades, until interest began to intensify in the 1990s under the leadership of University of Alcalá archaeologist Lauro Olmo-Enciso. For more than two decades, Olmo-Enciso’s projects have continued to uncover parts of the ancient settlement that are not only leading to a new understanding of Visigothic cities, but also to a clearer picture of the physical and political landscape of post-Roman Iberia. “Reccopolis now stands as an exceptional example of early medieval urbanism that challenges our perceptions of urban development in sixth-century Europe,” Olmo-Enciso says. He and his team have learned just how integral urban centers such as Reccopolis were to the rulers of the Visigothic Kingdom, and especially to Leovigild. As it happens, the construction of Reccopolis was a strategic play that the king borrowed from the political handbook used by Roman emperors—the Visigoths’ old rivals—for centuries.
Who the Visigoths were and how they became kings of Iberia is a complicated story, the culmination of a journey that took place over hundreds of years and across thousands of miles. The group of people known today as the Visigoths, along with the culturally similar, but geographically separate Ostrogoths, were descended from the nomadic eastern Germanic Gothic tribes who, by the fourth century, had settled on the outskirts of the Roman Empire in modern-day Romania. In A.D. 376, migrations of Huns from the Eurasian steppes drove the Gothic communities across the Danube River and into Roman territory. Initially, the Romans granted them permission to seek refuge within the empire’s borders, but there was little trust on either side as the two groups had clashed regularly for decades along the Danube.
The Visigoths and Romans were at times allies, and at other times enemies. Inevitably, their tenuous relationship boiled over, leading to the Visigothic sack of Rome itself in A.D. 410, the first time the city had fallen to a foreign army in 800 years. Although by this time Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire, was the empire’s most important city, the Visigothic conquest of the Eternal City was a devastating blow, symbolizing the fragility of Roman rule in Western Europe.
In need of a homeland, the Visigoths soon settled in southern Gaul, in what is now France, and established a capital in modern-day Toulouse. By the early fifth century, they followed other marauding bands of Germanic barbarian tribes, including the Vandals and Suevi, over the Pyrenees into Iberia, where the Romans had almost completely lost control. After Rome’s final fall in A.D. 476, the Iberian Peninsula descended into a political free-for-all. “Historians and archaeologists imagine it as a welter of more or less autonomous, competing, and sometimes conflicting power centers and city-states,” says McCormick.
Out of this power vacuum, the Visigoths emerged to seize control. In the early sixth century, they lost most of their territory in Gaul to the Franks, but they began to expand and strengthen their hold on the former Roman province of Hispania, fighting a constant string of battles against other Germanic tribes, Hispano-Romano independent city-states, and Byzantine Roman armies who had managed to regain territory in southern Spain. By the final decades of the century, Visigothic forces, led by Leovigild, had proved themselves the dominant regional power. The king now needed a grand gesture to legitimize himself as the sole ruler of a unified Iberia. He also needed a reorganized administrative system to maintain authority over his now-vast territory. Like the Romans before him, he needed cities. So, like the Romans, he dared to build one.
In the more than six centuries during which the Romans ruled in Iberia, they transformed the peninsula into one of the most urbanized territories in the empire. But by the late sixth century only a handful of functioning cities remained. As Visigothic monarchs became more powerful, they began to revitalize cities and towns. Some effort was put into renovating and expanding already established centers such as Toledo, which became the capital of the new Visigothic Kingdom, but Leovigild and his successors also set out to build brand-new cities, an ambitious enterprise given the crisis conditions in most of Europe. “In the later sixth century, there were a startling number of developments which occurred that might seem unfavorable to creating new cities,” McCormick says.
If it was difficult and costly to rebuild existing cities, it was nearly unimaginable to attempt to build one ex novo, from the ground up. However, stone by stone, Reccopolis gradually began to rise above the plains of the Tagus River. “Reccopolis is the only example of state-sponsored urban development during the sixth and seventh centuries, not only in the Visigothic Kingdom but in all of Western Europe,” says Olmo-Enciso. “It is unparalleled.”
Although Visigothic craftsmanship, technological knowledge, and engineering skills were not as advanced as those of the Roman builders before them, the monumentality of Reccopolis is nonetheless impressive. “The founding of Reccopolis is surprising because of the scale of the project,” says University of Cambridge archaeologist Javier Martínez Jiménez, who has also taken part in the archaeological research there. The city was protected by a six-foot-thick defensive wall, which is preserved in some places to a height of 16 feet. This encloses an area of about 53 acres that safeguarded a population of as many as 2,000. Excavation within the walls has afforded archaeologists a glimpse of how Visigothic cities were conceived and designed. “Reccopolis is important because, as a new foundation, it reflects the urban ideals of the late sixth century,” says Martínez Jiménez. “It displays what cities might have been without a preexisting Roman skeleton.”
Reccopolis’ planners dispensed with many of the archetypal features of the classical Roman city. Reccopolis had no forum, no bath complex, no theaters, no circuses, nor any arenas for public spectacles. At the heart of the new Visigothic city lay the imposing palatine complex. This enormous compound was the center of civic, administrative, fiscal, and religious activities, and likely housed Reccopolis’ ruling aristocrats. It included a vast paved courtyard, a number of huge multistory buildings—the largest of which is more than 450 feet long—and a finely decorated Christian basilica. This quarter was separated from the rest of the city by the monumental arched gateway, one of the only examples of its kind in Western Europe, which led to the neighboring commercial district. Olmo-Enciso sees this aspect of Reccopolis’ topography as having been influenced by Byzantine urban models of the time. He believes that the combination of public square, civic and administrative buildings, elite housing, church, gateway, and adjacent shopping streets is a modest imitation of parts of some Byzantine cities, particularly of the area around the basilica of Hagia Sophia in the empire’s capital. “The planning and hierarchy of the urban design of Reccopolis refers to a conceptual model based on Constantinople,” Olmo-Enciso says.
Excavations outside the palatine complex have uncovered parts of the city featuring houses and industrial properties belonging to Reccopolis’ residents, artisans, and workers that underscore the city’s important role as a major fiscal and production center. Reccopolis was one of the few places in the Visigothic Kingdom that had its own mint, which issued gold coins on the crown’s behalf. Its main street was lined with shops, warehouses, and commercial establishments. There were two glass-blowing studios as well as a goldsmith’s workshop where archaeologists found scales and molds for crafting rings and earrings. Vendors sold imported luxury items, indicating that Reccopolis’ merchants were once again connected to broader Mediterranean trade markets, which had been largely closed off after Rome’s withdrawal from Iberia. “It is the richest collection of imports in the center of the Iberian Peninsula,” Olmo-Enciso says. “This shows that aristocrats and elites in Reccopolis had access to Mediterranean consumer goods.”
Reccopolis even had an aqueduct that brought water into the city from a source a few miles outside town. It is the only aqueduct built in Iberia during the Visigothic period. These constructed watercourses were essential to some Roman towns in Hispania, but most of them had fallen into disrepair in the post-Roman era and the technology appeared to have been lost. The Visigoths’ ability to construct a new aqueduct at Reccopolis is a testament to their wealth, determination, and engineering capabilities. “Very few cities in that period could claim to have an aqueduct,” says Martínez Jiménez. “There were no more than five other functioning aqueducts at that moment in Iberia, so it was a display of royal power and an element of civic pride for the inhabitants.”
First and foremost, Leovigild needed Reccopolis to help him maintain control over rural parts of the kingdom. “New urban foundations were established in areas where the monarchy had direct political interest and where there were no functional cities,” says Martínez Jiménez. “For the monarchy, cities were essential to the administration of the territory.” City building was also a huge financial, technological, and logistical undertaking and, as such, was extremely useful for benefactors’ self-promotion. A ruler had to secure the finances, the building materials, the labor force, the engineers, and a checklist of other items in order to pull off constructing and successfully maintaining a new city. “In the context of Central and Western Europe, the Visigothic Kingdom was the only one capable of undertaking operations of great importance such as the founding of a city,” Olmo-Enciso says. Leovigild also wanted something extraordinary to celebrate his tenth anniversary as ruler and his nascent and increasingly powerful Visigothic Kingdom. “If the monarchy needed to make a statement, it needed to have a city,” says Martínez Jiménez. “In addition to imposing control in a key territory in the core of the kingdom, there is a very important propagandistic component to Reccopolis.”
For Leovigild, there was an additional reason he needed to build a new city—it was what Roman emperors did. Although the Romans were their rivals, the Visigoths were nevertheless heavily influenced by the empire’s culture and symbols. After his rise to power, Leovigild began to portray himself in the manner of Byzantine emperors, adopting the clothing and royal vestments of his eastern counterparts. On coins that he had minted, he depicted himself wearing a diadem and a mantle, in the fashion of Byzantine rulers. For centuries, Roman emperors had built new cities or renamed existing ones after themselves or members of the imperial family as a way of advertising their authority and stamping their name on their territory.
Thus, as part of a deliberate program to emulate the behavior of Roman emperors, which scholars refer to as aemulatio imperii, Leovigild named his new city Reccopolis after his son and heir, Reccared. The message was clear. Leovigild was announcing himself as the founder of a new dynasty set to rule Hispania as an equal to the great Byzantines. “The founding of Reccopolis was a part of the monarchy’s display of power,” says Martínez Jiménez. “Founding a city is an imperial prerogative, so by building Reccopolis, Leovigild is ending the fiction that the emperor still had claims over Spain.”
Even though Reccopolis’ excavated ruins are impressive, some archaeologists remain skeptical about just how extensive the Visigothic settlement truly was. Excavations have been carried out for decades, but only around 8 percent of the total area within the city walls has been uncovered. The remainder, which is privately owned, has been inaccessible to archaeologists. Because large, well-developed urban settlements were such a rarity at this time, there have been questions about whether the rest of the site could actually have been as densely built up as the excavated areas have proved to be, and whether the grand descriptions of early medieval written sources were exaggerated. “We don’t really know whether the contemporary chronicler was describing Reccopolis in flattering terms as a city,” says McCormick, “when perhaps in reality, it was something more akin to a Potemkin village.”
McCormick and Olmo-Enciso recently used noninvasive geophysical methods to investigate what might be buried beneath the rest of the site. To their surprise, the images revealed additional streets, clusters of buildings, houses, terrace walls, and water channels, all of which are evidence of Reccopolis’ urban sprawl. They even identified a new sector of buildings belonging to the palatine complex. “We were all stunned to discover this completely unknown new quarter,” McCormick says. “Most of the area inside the walls had buildings, showing that this was a built-up town of significant dimensions for this period.”
The survey not only revealed that the settlement extended throughout the walled area, but also showed that small communities had been established outside the walls. “We had hoped there might be a suburban zone, but who knew?” remarks McCormick. “And there it was.”
Despite its prosperity under Leovigild and his successors, Reccopolis began to decline just a century after it was founded. By the late seventh century, internal conflicts plagued the Visigothic Kingdom’s leadership, and Iberia was overrun by the North African forces of the Umayyad Caliphate in A.D. 711, effectively ending Visigothic rule. In the immediate aftermath, Reccopolis continued to be an important town, but that was short-lived. The recent geophysical survey detected the outlines of a mysterious building that seems to resemble contemporaneous Umayyad mosques. Further exploration is needed, but it’s possible that these remains represent one of the first mosques ever built in Iberia.
In the early ninth century, a new Muslim administrative center was founded less than a mile upstream from Reccopolis at Zorita de los Canes, condemning the former Visigothic city to obsolescence. Reccopolis’ buildings were gradually dismantled and the stones reused to build the new Umayyad citadel. Although excavations have barely begun to reveal the ancient city’s whole story, Reccopolis is a unique archaeological site that has the potential to produce invaluable information about a flourishing city during a still little-understood period of the European Dark Ages. “It is to date the only Roman-style town founded by a Germanic successor society on Roman soil that has been identified and excavated,” says McCormick. “In many respects, Visigothic urban archaeology is in its early stages, but Reccopolis offers a whole new chapter in the understanding of Romano-barbarian kingdoms after the fall of Rome.”
Jason Urbanus is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.
Excavations of a mountain cabin uncover the
hidden life of a formerly enslaved man who
became a California legend
By DANIEL WEISS
Thursday, February 11, 2021
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Palomar Mountain became a popular destination for tourists from San Diego. Though the mountain lies just 60 miles northeast of the city, at the time, the arduous trip to its summit took several days via horse, horse-drawn carriage, or automobile. The final six miles to its 6,140-foot peak, up a winding grade from the mountain’s base, known as Tin Can Flat, took a full day. The single-lane, unpaved track ran alongside sheer drop-offs and was so steep that drivers would often tie trees to their bumpers for the descent in an attempt to spare their brakes. On the dry, dusty way up, it wasn’t long before the horses were panting for water and the Model T radiators were bone dry. So it was with great relief that, two-thirds of the way up the slope, travelers would come upon a spring attended by an aged African American man named Nathan Harrison.
Harrison greeted the travelers with a wide grin and a plentiful supply of water to slake the thirst of man, woman, horse, and car. Then, speaking in a thick accent that nodded to his origins in Southern slavery, he would regale visitors with tales of his life on the mountain. This was a world of grizzly bears that could chew wooden traps to pieces. “When I first came to the mountain, bear were thick,” Harrison once recalled to Robert Asher, one of his neighbors on Palomar. “You could just hear them poppin’ their teeth.” There were mountain lions that leapt upwards of 35 feet—including one Harrison claimed to have taken down that measured “fourteen feet seven inches from tip to tip.” In addition to harrowing run-ins with these wild predators, Harrison told of his confrontations with rustlers who aimed to poach his ample stock of horses, cattle, and sheep.
Many of Harrison’s stories had the air of embellishment—he even told a few children he’d come to California in 1849 by boat, braving the treacherous waters around Cape Horn. Despite the improbability of his tales, or perhaps because of it, Harrison’s audience of white San Diegans exploring the wilderness just outside their city lapped it up. When they returned home, they told others of their encounters with Harrison, and before long, he was one of the highlights of a trip up Palomar Mountain. (See “The Birth of Western Tourism.”) “Visiting Harrison was like stepping into a time machine and going back to the Old South,” says Seth Mallios, an archaeologist at San Diego State University. “People were magically transported back fifty years and three thousand miles away.”
Harrison would often invite travelers to his cabin for further entertainment. Allan Kelly, who trekked up the mountain with his family in 1908 when he was seven years old, later recalled, “He had a lovely spot: a far distant view to the ocean…about an acre of good soil for a garden and a few apple and pear trees.” In exchange for Harrison’s hospitality, the visiting city folk came bearing gifts—typically tins of meat, bottles of alcohol, and clothing. Many also brought along early Kodak Brownie cameras to capture snapshots of their host. Although he lived in a relatively remote location, Harrison was likely the most frequently photographed person of his time in the San Diego area, suggests Mallios, who has extensively researched Harrison’s life and leads excavations of the site where his cabin once stood. “There was nothing convenient about taking his photograph,” says Mallios. “People were aware that he was someone they wanted to take a photo of, whether it was to show that they had made it to the top of this very perilous mountain, or to capture something that you just didn’t see anywhere else.”
In these photographs, and when entertaining visitors, Harrison came across as exceedingly humble. A scraggly white beard hung from his chin, and he wore tattered clothes—his friend Robert Asher reported that he once deliberately changed into his most ragged pair of overalls before being photographed. Whereas a typical rancher of his time would carry a rifle and warily approach visitors on horseback, Harrison greeted tourists unarmed and on foot, aided by a walking stick. “He was very charismatic, smiling,” says Mallios. “He made fun of himself and couldn’t have been less threatening.” However, as he continued to learn about Harrison, Mallios found that there was far more to the mountain man—and the ways in which he managed to prosper—than first met the eye.
Sidebar:
The Birth of Western Tourism
Many accounts of Harrison’s life and adventures have been written, beginning when he was still alive and continuing long after he died in 1920. They tend to agree that he was born into slavery and eventually made his way to the San Diego area, becoming the region’s first African American homesteader. Between these two events, various tellers have claimed, apocryphally, that he daringly escaped slavery by floating down the Mississippi River on a raft in the 1840s, à la Huckleberry Finn and Jim; that he helped win California from Mexico by fighting in the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt; and that he drove the first wagon train over Tejon Pass in 1854, opening the route that connected California’s Central Valley with Southern California.
Mallios has determined that Harrison was most likely born in Kentucky in the 1830s, and that during the Gold Rush his owner brought him to Northern California, where he toiled as a miner in the 1850s and 1860s. He appears to have gained his freedom when his owner died, and then migrated south, where he worked at a variety of occupations and, in 1879, homesteaded land in Rincon, near the base of Palomar Mountain. Harrison was briefly married twice, both times to Luiseño Indian women who were part of a community that lived on the mountain. By the late 1880s, he had settled on the slopes of Palomar as one of its first non-Native residents. According to the 1880 census, Harrison was one of just 55 African Americans in all of San Diego County. In 1892, he successfully filed a water claim for the spring associated with his property. This meant it was within his rights to charge for the spring’s use. But Harrison always provided water gratis to the visitors who arrived in increasing numbers after 1900, when the roadway was widened somewhat and a regular car service was established to shuttle tourists to a mountaintop hotel.
Exactly what drew Harrison to make his home some 4,000 feet up Palomar Mountain is unknown. It may have been his connections to the Luiseño, who gave him the land where he built his cabin. Harrison’s desire to tend sheep, which thrive at higher elevations, may also have been a factor. But Mallios suggests that the security afforded by such an isolated spot was likely a strong enticement as well. Many of Southern California’s white settlers came from the South and brought fiercely racist, segregationist attitudes with them. Los Angeles, which Harrison visited occasionally, was commonly known as “The Hell-Hole of the West.” According to Louis Salmons, another neighbor on the mountain, “He never slept in Los Angeles overnight. He’d saddle his horse and go out on the hills. He said they was killing people every night.” Dangerous for all, the city was particularly hazardous for African Americans. Likewise, Escondido, one of the closest settlements to Palomar Mountain, was a “sundown town,” where white men patrolled the streets at night and attacked any African Americans they came across. “For Harrison, I think living on the mountain was in part a safety issue,” says Mallios. “When you venture up to the site, you just feel removed from everything. You are high above the valley, you can see people coming from miles and miles away, and no one is going to sneak up on you.” Indeed, Harrison was known to spend hours sitting on a boulder at an overlook called Billy Goat Point—likely named after him, for the hair on his chin—from which he could keep watch on anyone making their way up the mountain.
In excavations of the site of Harrison’s cabin launched in 2004, a team led by Mallios has uncovered plentiful evidence of his interactions with tourists. “In multiple records from the 1900s, they talk about the standard kit that you bring to Harrison: a pair of pants, a tin of food, and a bottle of alcohol,” he says. The excavations, in fact, have turned up more than 200 mismatched clothing buttons, a large number of meat tins, and liquor bottles from all over the world. The sheer number of buttons is particularly impressive. “If this were some other site,” Mallios says, “we might have concluded that there were a dozen people living here with how many buttons were there.”
Sidebar:
The Birth of Western Tourism
The archaeologists also unearthed a small piece of convex glass with a ridged nickel edge that puzzled them at first, until they realized it was the lens from a Kodak Brownie camera. And, buried under the patio of Harrison’s cabin were a number of extremely deteriorated automobile inner tubes dating to the 1910s. He had apparently stowed supplies that might prove useful for those attempting the challenging drive up the mountain. In a sense, Mallios points out, Harrison was analogous to the proprietor of a modern-day service station, ready to provide water to keep one’s conveyance running—be it horse or car—and supplies such as spare inner tubes in case of equipment failure. The items at the site relating to tourism all date to after 1890, whereas earlier material, such as tools, horseshoes, horseshoe nails, and buckles, reflects Harrison’s work as a rancher. This matches accounts suggesting that, as he grew older and less physically able, Harrison shifted his energies from tending his flock to entertaining his visitors.
A range of other artifacts, however, presents an image of Harrison very different from the one known to the public. Most numerous among these are more than 200 fired rifle cartridges discovered in the vicinity of his cabin. This evidence suggests that Harrison not only owned rifles, but also that he was far from shy about firing them in his own backyard. He was never armed when he went to greet visitors, though, and a rifle appears in only one of the 31 known photographs of him. Even in that image, the firearm is off to Harrison’s side, barely visible against a wooden platform. By contrast, white men who settled on the mountain in the years after Harrison arrived invariably had a rifle in hand when they were photographed. Ryan Anderson, an anthropologist at Santa Clara University who has studied how Harrison appears in photographs, suggests that he made an intentional choice in how he presented himself. “He’s not portraying himself as an armed homesteader, and considering the situation, I don’t think that’s accidental,” Anderson says. “If a rumor starts going around that there’s this African American with a bunch of rifles, he probably doesn’t want to draw that kind of attention.” Mallios points out that, according to an 1854 California law that forbade the sale of firearms and ammunition to Native Americans or anyone associated with them, Harrison’s rifles and bullets were likely acquired illegally.
A number of artifacts unearthed in the excavations illustrate how closely connected Harrison was to the local Luiseño community. These include a small iron cross that helps corroborate historical accounts that Harrison was baptized by a Luiseño chief in Rincon who had converted to Catholicism. There were also two projectile points that had never been fired, suggesting to Mallios that they were likely given as gifts to Harrison by the Luiseño, as was a small pierced cylindrical greenstone pendant. Richard Carrico, an archaeologist and expert on Native Americans of Southern California at San Diego State University, notes that the Luiseño traditionally placed an arrow point in each corner of a house to induce good fortune.
Perhaps even more significant than the projectile points is the discovery just outside Harrison’s cabin of a portable granite metate, or grinding stone, that had been snapped in half. Carrico explains that metates deliberately broken in this manner were used by the Luiseño to mark the passing of tribal members, particularly women. “The Luiseño believe that the spirit of the woman is in that stone,” he says. “She spends days over her lifetime grinding seeds and plants, and some of her sweat and her oil and her spirit gets into that rock, so when she dies, it needs to be released.” Mallios acknowledges that it’s impossible to determine the true meaning of the broken metate, but suggests it may have commemorated the death of one of the Luiseño women to whom Harrison was married.
Sidebar:
The Birth of Western Tourism
Yet another potentially hidden facet of Harrison’s story was revealed over a number of years, as the archaeologists recovered a series of implements associated with writing from his cabin: first a sharpened graphite pencil lead, then a pen cap and clip, and finally a number of eraser pieces. This accumulation of evidence hints that Harrison knew how to read and write, despite the fact that throughout his life, he signed many documents with an X, and every census record but one indicates that he was illiterate. The only exception is his final census, in 1920, when he was gravely ill in a hospital in San Diego. Mallios concedes it’s possible Harrison only learned to read and write in the last years of his life, but believes it’s more likely he was only comfortable revealing that he was literate once he had left the mountain. “I was intrigued by the idea that, what if all these years he had kept his literacy a secret and then only on his deathbed in the hospital does he let out that secret,” Mallios says. Like his decision to live on the mountain, Harrison’s motivation to conceal his literacy may have been self-preservation, points out Chuck Ambers, the founder and curator of the African Diaspora Museum and Research Center in San Diego, which was formerly known as the African Museum Casa del Rey Moro. “Reading and writing could be threatening,” says Ambers. “You have certain ex-Confederates in the area and there was always a thing about not teaching African Americans to read and write. I think Harrison hiding that he could read and write was part of his ability to appear nonthreatening.”
The realization that Harrison may have hidden his literacy until the very end of his life was just one of many instances in which Mallios was struck that Harrison had developed a carefully sculpted public persona that obscured or omitted key aspects of his identity. When entertaining travelers, Harrison came across as poorly educated, self-mocking, and folksy. “When I first came here dere was nobody but Injuns,” he would announce, according to tourist Allan Kelly. Harrison would then add, to his audience’s great amusement, “I was de fust white man on dis mountain.” But Mallios found a reference in Robert Asher’s account to a conversation in which Harrison, speaking confidently with no sign of his customary stylized vernacular, explained how to start a fire in damp conditions. “It was as if he had dropped the act,” says Mallios. Reflecting on another lengthy conversation with Harrison, Asher writes, “His language was such as I had been accustomed to all my life, that of a cultivated man.”
Although Harrison met his visitors unarmed and unmounted, the excavations have turned up hundreds of fired rifle cartridges and extensive horse tack. Among his neighbors, Harrison was known to ride a white horse, though there are no known photographs of him on horseback. Many personal items unearthed from his cabin—a meerschaum pipe, pocket watches and fobs, President-brand suspender clips—are visible in the photographs, but the greenstone pendant that was likely a gift from the Luiseño and the iron cross associated with his conversion to Catholicism are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps Harrison wore them under the clothing he received from his visitors.
Sidebar:
The Birth of Western Tourism
Again and again, the explanation for these omissions seems to be self-protection. An unarmed, smiling African American man approaching on foot with an afternoon’s worth of tall tales about the backcountry was what people trekked up the mountain to see. A rifle-toting, clear-speaking African American homesteader glowering down from horseback, by contrast, was not. If Harrison were known to have been associated with Native Americans and Catholics at a time when the latter were being persecuted and the former removed from their land in the area, his position would have been even less tenable. “He presented the image he thought people wanted to see,” says Carrico. “You get the impression that he made them laugh and disarmed them, so when they left, they went, ‘That was fun. That was a good trip. He’s quite the guy.’”
Mallios points out that an African American man named John Ballard—a contemporary of Harrison who lived around 150 miles up the coast in Malibu—was received very differently by the white community. Like Harrison, Ballard was formerly enslaved. He too was brought west from Kentucky during the Gold Rush and made his way to Southern California, where he became a homesteader. “Ballard doesn’t put on the act the way Harrison does,” says Mallios. “He’s not deferential, he doesn’t make people comfortable—and they burn him off his property. This is the exact same time period when Harrison is at the height of his popularity. I don’t know if he was aware of Ballard, but he would have been so aware of the racial climate that he just developed this survival strategy.”
As far as anyone knows, Harrison never spoke of his time in slavery to the tourists who visited him or to his neighbors on the mountain, yet Mallios uncovered telling evidence that he carried memories of his origins with him to his California homestead. As the archaeologists excavated the remains of his cabin’s stone foundation, they found that the walls formed a square measuring just 11 feet on each side, an architectural style unknown in the area. Square structures of this size were, however, extremely common among slave quarters in the antebellum South. As at such slave quarters, the overwhelming majority of artifacts uncovered by archaeologists at the site of Harrison’s cabin came from the patio area, whereas the few items found in the cabin itself—including the writing implements, the unused arrow points, and the iron cross—tended to have greater personal importance. While Harrison could have built a much larger rectangular structure similar to those raised by other homesteaders on the mountain, he chose instead to replicate the sort of structure he likely knew as a child. “Maybe he carried with him the idea of what a house should look like, and that’s what he built there,” says Mallios. “But then again, maybe this was just part of his act.”
Daniel Weiss is executive editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.
To read more about Nathan Harrison, see Born a Slave, Died a Pioneer by Seth Mallios.