Which of the following periods saw people develop a more communal form of living | Course Hero

Reading 2

The Native Americans of northern California were highly skilled at basketry,

using the reeds, grasses, bards, and roots they found around them to fashion articles

of all sorts and sizes – not only trays, containers, and cooking pots, but hats, boats,

fish traps, baby carriers, and ceremonial objects.

Of all these experts, none excelled the Pomo – a group who lived on or near

the coast during the 1800’s, and whose descendants continue to live in parts of the

same region to this day. They made baskets three feet in diameter and others no

bigger than a thimble. The Pomo people were masters of decoration. Some of their

baskets were completely covered with shell pendants; others with feathers that

made the baskets’ surfaces as soft as the breasts of birds. Moreover, the Pomo

people made use of more weaving techniques than did their neighbors. Most groups

made all their basketwork by twining – the twisting of a flexible horizontal material,

called a weft, around stiffer vertical strands of material, the warp. Others depended

primarily on coiling – a process in which a continuous coil of stiff material is held in

the desired shaped by a tight wrapping of flexible strands. Only the Pomo people

used both processes with equal case and frequency. In addition, they made use of