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West of San Juan Bautista, on a hill turned gold by the summer sun, stands a barn built in the early 20th century. Just beside it, a group of archaeology students kneel in the dirt, sifting through layers of San Benito County’s past.
One unearths what appears to be a button from the late 19th or early 20th century. Another finds a splintered redwood plank with rusted nails still in it, and carries it to Gabriel Sanchez, an archeologist and assistant professor at the University of Oregon.
“That’s most likely American, right?” Sanchez asks, and, around him, about a dozen students nod. It’s the nails, Sanchez explains, that give it away. If the plank dated back to the Mexican period—before the mid-19th century, when California was still part of Mexico—the nails would have been produced by blacksmiths, not machines.
But the plank, while curious, isn’t why they’re here.
Archaeology students from the University of Oregon and 16 members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band are searching for the remains of a two-story adobe once owned by Manuel Larios, a 19th-century Californio, one of the first Spanish settlers in California.
Larios owned 48,000 acres east of what is now Hollister, as well as a smaller 4,000-acre property known as El Ranchito in the area that would become San Juan Bautista and surrounding San Benito County.
Larios, Sanchez says, is “integral to the history of San Benito County,” because he lived through the three eras that shaped modern California.
Born in 1798 during the Spanish period, he enlisted in the Spanish army as a young man. In the 1830s, under Mexican rule, he acquired his San Juan Bautista ranchito after the secularization of the missions, when the government stripped the Franciscan order of its land and sold it off. By the time he died in 1861, California had become part of the United States.
The land is now owned by the San Benito Agricultural Land Trust, which acquired the property in 2023, including the century-old barn visible from Hwy 156. During early efforts to stabilize and restore the barn, there were signs that an older structure might lie nearby, land trust Vice President Bob Connolly told BenitoLink.
Suspecting it could be the long-lost adobe in Manuel Larios’ ranchito, the organization reached out to Sanchez, who specializes in California history, and to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which identifies as descendants of the Indigenous people who survived the missions of Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista.
“We’re collaborating because the adobe affects all of us,” Connolly said. “It brings the past to the present.”
Sanchez visited the site with a ground-penetrating radar and, a few feet from the barn, detected a rectangular shape which suggested there was a human-made structure underneath. “You usually don’t find rectangular things that occur naturally in the world,” he says.
So, in early July, he returned with a group of students and members of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band to excavate.
For the Amah Mutsun, finding the adobe would mean bringing their history to light.
“Who would have been on the rancho working?” Sanchez says. “It would have been the Mission Indians. And who were the Mission Indians? It was the local Mutsun people, people from the surrounding areas, all the way to the Yokuts from the Central Valley.”
To Alec Apodaca, a staff member with the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, the nonprofit which protects and stewards the tribe’s cultural heritage, the adobe, if found, could help people today understand the world the Amah Mutsun once inhabited.
“When people made those adobes, they collected signatures of the environment,” Apodaca said. “When they made those adobe bricks, it preserved those seeds. So if we find that adobe—and if the conditions are right—we can extract those seeds and analyze them.”
The tribe also sees the excavation as an opportunity to train its members in archaeological methods and reconnect with their history. Unlike burial grounds or sacred sites, the barn and its surroundings are a place to practice excavation in a respectful way. Because the land holds layers from each of California’s historical periods, it allows for study without the fear of disturbing sacred sites.
The group plans to return to the barn in September to continue excavating. The hope is to uncover the adobe and, through it, tell the story of the Indigenous people who lived in what is now San Benito County, and whose lives are often left out of the history books.
“Through archaeology,” Apodaca said, “we can actually tell their story.”
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