"Tucked away in the extreme northwestern corner of California lies a land of stunning beauty composed of a craggy coastline, deep forests, and roughhewn mountains. At its heart flows the Smith River, one of the last undammed rivers in California. Arising from its headwaters in the Klamath Mountains and emptying into the ocean some ten miles north of Crescent City, the sinuous aquamarine-colored Smith River is the ancestral home of the Tolowa people. This volume, Number 30 in our series of Publications in Cultural Heritage, is about the Tolowa, their deep past, their more recent history, and their rich cultural heritage as viewed from a single locality within Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park named Chvnsu'lh-dvn (TcuncuLtun), or Red Elderberry Place. Presented within is a unique blend of rigorous archaeological investigation, local history, and ethnography. This volume is the result of three years’ worth of research conducted by California State Parks, National Park Service, University of California, Davis, private cultural resource management firms, and local historical societies in cooperation with the Elk Valley and Smith River Rancherias and the general Tolowa community. The unique and ongoing partnership between all these parties has led to the discovery and documentation of an extremely long occupational history spanning about 8,500 years. Among other discoveries, this project has revealed the earliest plank houses, the only semi-subterranean sweathouse recorded to date in northwestern California, and the earliest evidence of tobacco smoking on the Pacific Northwest Coast."--Preface.