Breck Parkman to speak at Community Center on May 14

The Sonoma Valley Historical Society is presenting a “structural” look at North Bay history, with a focus that spans California Indian ideology, the history of local Indians at Sonoma Mission, and the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

Historian Breck Parkman will look thematically at what is meant by “wild and tame” when it comes to animals, rivers and culture. He will discuss his work with local hippie communes, and his analysis of flower children, war resisters, and others of the counterculture who were perceived by the dominant society as being outside culture (the norms), and thus “wild” and a threat to cultural stability.

The talk will take place at 2 p.m. on Saturday May 14 at the Sonoma Community Center. Admission is free to Historical Society members and docents and $5 for the public.

Parkman is a senior state archaeologist with California State Parks, assigned to the Bay Area and Sonoma/Mendocino Coast districts. He helps manage the cultural resources of the approximately three dozen state parks in the greater San Francisco Bay and North Coast areas, including Sonoma State Historic Park. He was the state’s first regional archaeologist and, in that role, he helped manage the cultural resources of about 70 State Parks in northern California. In 1993, he became the first district archaeologist when he transferred to the Silverado District Office in Sonoma.

Parkman’s research interests have taken him around the world, especially to the countries of the Pacific Rim. He is particularly interested in rock art studies, symbolism and shamanism. Many of his publications concern these subjects. Other interests of his include such topics as Rancholabrean megafauna, paleoecology, Paleoindians, bedrock mortars, antlered dragons in New World mythology, Elizabethan California, the Russian American Company, antique silverware, the archaeology of the 1960s, the history and influence of the Beats, the life and craft of Bauhaus master potter Marguerite Wildenhain, and the sculptures of modernist Benny Bufano. Currently, Breck is involved in a multi-year research effort to identify what he believes to be mammoth rubbing rocks of the late Pleistocene. He is also working to record the archaeological history of a 1967 to 1969 hippie commune at Olompali State Historic Park and a 1961 to 1969 U.S. Marine Corps Reserve war games training site at Annadel State Park.

Currently, he lives with his son in the hills in Sonoma Valley. He appeared on PBS with the late Huell Howser in five episodes of California’s Gold and he has appeared in numerous documentaries, including the BBC’s 2013 mini-series, “Ice Age Giants.” He appears in a Grateful Dead film set to be released in 2016 and he will also appear in an episode of PBS’s “Family Ingredients” in 2016.