On a sunny morning in late September, Breck Parkman sat at a picnic table in the historic Sonoma Plaza, across the street from the city’s 1823 mission, the barracks that once housed Mexican troops and the office where he was based during some of his 36 years as a senior California State Parks archaeologist.
In that job, the 73-year-old Parkman used artifacts found in old ruins or the chemistry of rocks and layers of soil to piece together possible narratives about life in the Bay Area – as far back as tens of thousands of years ago or as recently as the late 20th century. More than being a scientist or historian, Parkman has always seen himself as a storyteller with an innate curiosity about other worlds and a desire to imagine the people who lived in them.
True to that vision of himself, Parkman began to paint scenes and characters as he sat at the table, including how the plaza once didn’t have trees or grass and certainly wasn’t surrounded by upscale wine country boutiques and restaurants. The sounds would have been different, too, he said — no cars rumbling past or children laughing in a playground.
“There’s layers of life that we don’t see, you know, and layers upon layers. So for me, I’m looking at when Vallejo was here,” Parkman said in a faint lilt of his native Georgia. General Mariano Vallejo was the Mexican commander who established the eight-acre plaza in 1835.
Parkman said he could imagine the plaza “as it if was just yesterday,” when Vallejo’s soldiers used it as a parade ground. “You can see San Francisco Bay from here,” he said. “And as I go back earlier, 15,000 years ago, you would see mammoths and sabertooths.”
One of Parkman’s favorite research interests has been the Ice Age Columbian mammoths that roamed the Bay Area for thousands of years, across coastal plains that he calls the “California Serengeti.” Although Parkman retired in 2017, he continues to write, lecture and post YouTube videos about a variety of topics inspired by his extensive fieldwork and personal experiences as a husband and father.
Parkman knows that when people hear about his job, they might think of an Indiana Jones type, swooping in to recover an idol from an ancient tomb Or a dust-covered scientist, digging through ruins to find artifacts to catalog for a museum. To Parkman, the job has always been so much more.
“You’re looking at the bigger picture,” he said.
He’s been able to look at that bigger picture in places all over the world: the Canadian Plains, the Australian Outback, Central Siberia and the south coast of Peru, where he helped an archaeologist friend recover 2,000 year-old mummified human remains that had been unearthed by generations of looters.
But he’s been just as fascinated by what he’s discovered closer to home. Two years after he was hired to work for the state parks in 1981, he was assigned to Northern California, eventually becoming a senior archaeologist, managing cultural resources at more than 70 parks, from Del Norte County to Angel Island to Alturus in the far northeast.
For a scientist/storyteller, the Bay Area parks have given him a lot to work with. He’s investigated early Paleo-Indian migration along the West Coast, Elizabethan California and the archaeological history of Fort Ross State Historic Park, when it was an outpost for Russian fur traders in the early 1800s.
Parkman has garnered media attention for his studies in contemporary archaeology, including the secret lives of soldiers who passed through Angel Island, Beat-era artists and his “55th raincoat” theory about the 1962 escape from Alcatraz.
He may be best known for sifting through the charred ruins of the Burdell mansion at Olompali State Historic Park in Novato in 2009 to understand the lives of the people who participated in one of the Bay Area’s famous 1960s counterculture experiments: the Chosen Family commune. He explained how several families, loosely affiliated with the Grateful Dead, came together in 1967 to create “a new way of living” and of “getting along in the world.” Unfortunately, their idealism collapsed as outsiders who didn’t share their values moved in. The commune disbanded in 1969 after a fire destroyed the mansion.
Among other things, Parkman studied the remnants of more than 90 vinyl records found in the ruins, concluding that the range of artists represented in the collection — from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra — defied stereotypes about commune hippies, showing instead a surprising diversity in the ages and personal tastes of residents.
Parkman’s path to a 1960s commune began with his own experiences as a child in mid-20th-century America. Growing up in southern Georgia, he had always been interested in archaeology, as he sometimes found Native American arrowheads and pottery shards in plowed fields near his home. The first book he ever remembers reading was about Native Americans.
But contemporary events also intrigued him — he grew up painfully aware of racial segregation while receiving an early introduction to the civil rights movement. When he was five, his family’s Black babysitter took him and his little sister to a large gathering. He remembers sitting on his babysitter’s shoulders amid a crowd of Black onlookers who all were mesmerized by a speaker — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I picked up on the energy, and it was, like, put your finger in the electrical socket,” he said.
An early encounter with another American icon planted the seed of his desire to become a civil servant. In third grade, he and his classmates lined the streets to see presidential candidate John F. Kennedy drive by. “I was the first person at the end of the line. I waved, and he looked up, and he waved at me. I didn’t have a clue who he was, but when I found out who he was, he became my hero and I read everything he wrote.”
Parkman initially considered going to medical school, but instead came to the Bay Area in 1971 to pursue his first love of archaeology. He got his bachelor’s and master’s degree at what was then Cal State Hayward, and remembers how the environmental movement awakened people to the need to protect and support parks.
His early assignments were in San Diego County before he came north as the first state archeologist assigned to the field, and honed his belief that studying cultures of the past explains where we have been and how to prepare for the future. He also developed his love of doing the scientific detective work to uncover little-known narratives, though he came to appreciate that sometimes those discoveries come about by accident.
For example, one of his proudest accomplishments was finding rocks along the Sonoma Coast that he believes were a popular attraction for Columbian mammoths of the late Pleistocene, up to about 11,500 years ago. On otherwise craggy seastacks near Goat Rock in Sonoma Coast State Park, Parkman found atypically shiny patches about 10 to 14 feet above the ground. That’s where, he believes, these long-extinct megafauna rhythmically rubbed against the rocks in a form of self-grooming, similar to how African elephants rid their hides of itchy ectoparasites
Parkman said this discovery might not have been possible had he and a paleontologist colleague not decided to proceed with doing some fieldwork near those rocks on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As they hiked along the coast, they noticed no planes in the skies or ships on the ocean, save for a Coast Guard aircraft flying circles, and possibly several submarine periscopes popping up. Instead of a usual 10-minute lunch, they sat beneath those rocks for more than an hour to ponder whether the United States was at war, giving Parkman the time to notice those shiny patches.
“You know, finding that in a lot of ways changed my life, because I never thought much about the Ice Age,” he said. That fascination has led to more recent, post-retirement explorations into the role that the lowly dung and the lofty condor play in maintaining environmental health and balance.
Personal projects have kept Parkman busy, such as chronicling the life he shared with his photographer wife, Diane Askew, and 19-year-old son while living at Sugar Loaf Ridge State Park. He’s posted a moving YouTube tribute to Diane, who died in December 2021, as a contemplation on death and grief. He speaks of all the “falling stars” in the sky the night she died, “too many” to catch. Only recently, he said, has he been able to go outside at night and look up.
Stories about death, as part of that arc of life, came up in other ways as Parkman talked at the picnic table. He recalled organizing the installation of a set of plaques outside the mission, listing the names of Wappo, Patwin, Pomo, and Coast Miwok people who labored and were buried there. He also related his vision of the plaza 15,000 years ago or in the 1830s to the collapse of time and memories he imagines could occur during our transition from life to death: “Maybe that second of time in that white room is actually eternity?”