At Avalons newest boutique hotel we have designed an environment of understated elegance, where luxurious bedding, unique artwork and hand-crafted hardwoods and tile combine to create an experience ...more
Warm hospitality and cool style have become the hallmarks of Auroura, Catalina Islands newest boutique hotel. After undergoing extensive renovations, Auroura greets Avalons visitors with dramatic ocean views ...more
Welcome to Avalon! Santa Catalina Hotels offers the best rates on hotels near Avalon, Catalina Island. All of our hotels have been inspected and rated by AAA and the Mobile Travel Guide, the authorities in hotel inspection. Book securely online for great rates on hotels near Avalon, Catalina Island!
People have been living on Santa Catalina Island for at least 7,000 years. Archaeologists excavating on a limited scale at Little Harbor on the seaward side of the Island for the past 40 years keep coming up with earlier and earlier dates. They find evidence of increasingly complex material cultures with a strong maritime adaptation. These earlier groups of peoples exploited the rich resources of the sea--from abalone and other mollusks, to small and large fish, and marine mammals such as sea lions.
The semi-arid Island offered limited plant resources, so the Islanders traded sea products and, in later years, steatite for their other needs. The Islanders made the 20-mile voyage to the mainland (and to the other Channel Islands) in well-crafted plank canoes. Steatite (an easily carvable rock that does not crack when put in the fire) from Santa Catalina has been found in both mainland and Island sites throughout Southern California.
Over the millennia, as peoples migrated through California, different groups of Native Americans would have made their homes on the Island. For several thousand years before European contact, the Los Angeles basin and the Southern Channel Islands (Santa Catalina, San Clemente, and San Nicholas) appear to have been inhabited by peoples of linguistic affinity--the Takic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Various areas would have had their own dialects (more or less mutually unintelligible) of the same language family and would have shared other cultural traits.
The material culture of these hunter-gatherer peoples would have varied with the environment throughout the basin, but the maritime adaptations on the Islands and the immediate coast had much in common. In fact, the material culture on the Northern Channel Islands (Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel) and adjacent mainland coast showed many similarities as well, although the peoples were of a different linguistic stock and physical type.
At the time of first European contact, it is thought that the people living on Santa Catalina Island called their island Pimu and themselves Pimungans (or Pimuvit). They were excellent seamen and paddled their plank canoes skillfully across the sometimes treacherous channel to trade. After Spanish colonization, their apparently flourishing population declined drastically with the introduction of new diseases to which they had little immunity. As the mission system altered the economic landscape of Southern California, the Pimungans' trade and social networks were disrupted.
In the aftermath of this enormous culture shock, their society could no longer sustain itself. By the mid-1820s, the few Pimungans left had migrated or were moved to the mainland. The Pimungans, along with other Native American groups that were in the sphere of influence of Mission San Gabriel, came to be referred to in the European community as Gabrielinos. There are people living in the Southern California area today who have Gabrielinos among their ancestors. Some are actively involved in researching and preserving their traditional culture.
