About

Pa'ashi, or Tulare Lake, was once the largest freshwater sea West of the Mississippi, the most lush and populous landscape in California. But, it was transformed into industrial agricultural fields during American Westward Expansion in the 1800s, and it is now suffering from prolonged droughts and severe floods as a result of our changing climate. The Pa'ashi Archaeological Collaboration is a research project aimed at telling a more complete story of Tulare Lake, complete with indigenous people, small-scale farmers, and the modern consequences of an often-forgotten past. A Team of UCLA researchers and Tachi Yokuts Tribe representatives are combining cutting-edge science with indigenous perspectives to help the public better understand California's history and prepare for its future.

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Support

The Pa'ashi Archaeological Collaboration is supported by an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Seed Grant (2025–2026) and a Digital Justice Development Grant (2026–2027), made possible by the generous assistance of the Mellon Foundation. The project has also received support from an Institute of American Cultures research grant administered by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. The project is hosted by the UCLA Digital Archaeology Lab.

Data, Code, and Licensing

Project data and code are permanently archived with persistent DOIs in the UCLA Dataverse: https://dataverse.ucla.edu/dataverse/paashiarchaeology 

• Pa'ashi (Tulare Lake) Basin Survey and Archival Data (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0): https://doi.org/10.25346/S6HW3IQD
• Replication Data for: "Bayesian Modeling Validates Archaeological and Paleoenvironmental Evidence for Pleistocene-Holocene Water Levels, Tulare Lake, California" (MIT for Code; see dataset documentation for input data citations): https://doi.org/10.25346/S66YI6KV

Unless otherwise noted, content on this website is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Culturally sensitive materials are not published on this site or in project repositories; they remain the property of the Tachi Yokuts Tribe and are governed by existing non-disclosure and intellectual property agreements.