Carpinteria: Where the Chumash Built Boats
Near Santa Barbara, California
When the Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá arrived here on August seventeenth, seventeen sixty-nine, he found the Chumash people at work building their plank canoes, the wooden boats they called tomols, sealed against the sea with tar from natural seeps nearby. The Spanish named the place La Carpinteria, meaning the carpentry shop, and the name stuck.
Those same tar seeps are the Carpinteria Tar Pits, a Pleistocene-era site that trapped hundreds of ice age mammals and birds, much like the more famous La Brea pits in Los Angeles. The Chumash had used the asphalt for thousands of years to waterproof baskets and seal their boats. Early in the twentieth century, asphalt from Carpinteria was mined and used to build a coastal highway. The town was incorporated in nineteen sixty-five and today sits between the mountains and the ocean as one of the smaller cities along the Santa Barbara coast.
