A majority of the people along the San Joaquin River and its tributaries lived in small bands or tribes, which had no distinguishing names. Villages were small and usually the size of camps, rarely numbering more than a few hundred inhabitants. The Miwok, for example, rarely traveled more than a few miles from their home villages, and as such the inhabitants of one village would not know much of the surrounding country beyond the neighboring villages. The staple food for San Joaquin Valley inhabitants was the acorn, which when ground, could be made into various foods such as cakes. Grinding the acorns was a simple process where they crushed the nuts using rocks in natural granite depressions. Many of the surviving examples of acorn milling areas can still be found in the foothills, especially around the Kaweah River area.