In 1933 he discovered, in the Trabuco Hills, in Orange County, near Los Angeles, the skeleton of a mastodon, one of the few uncovered in Southern California. Paleontologists at the Los Angeles Museum made varying estimates of the age of the bones, ranging from ten thousand to a million years.
In 1937, when the author was a junior geologist at the Santa Ana Museum, he deciphered the hieroglyphics inscribed on some rocks found on the Indian prayer grounds at the peak of a volcanic vent in La Piomosa range in Arizona, which have been instrumental in providing historical information about the life of the early Indians in the Southwest. The inscriptions revealed the location of food and water in the surrounding country and primitive conceptions of the supernatural.
--Retained copyright information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.
--Silently corrected a few palpable typos.
--In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Botanical Lore of the California Indians, by John Bruno Romero and Ha-Ha-St of Tawee