10:45 - 11:15 am
Yellowstone Archaeology
Ann Johnson
Yellowstone Center for Resources

Transcript

Ann Johnson: Good. Um, before I forget, I wanted to talk about what to do when you find something because things are being found in the park all the time and important things not just chips and flakes but important resources, sites that turn out to be things that we’re very interested in knowing about and getting documentation on. So what we need from you is to know what it is you think you’ve found and then the next thing we need to know is where is it? So in these days and age, we often have our little GPS unit with us and that’s a really great thing so if you provide me a note that says we found blankety blank and it seemed to about this big and this is where it was, this is what my GPS unit says but as technology advances, now we need to know if you’re using NAD27 or 83 because it makes a big difference in whether we can get back and find that exact spot.

OK so, generally we’re trying to leave stuff in the park because we’re not, our goal is not to fill the Heritage Center. (Laughter) On the other hand, there are times when you believe that either the resource will be lost through erosion, it will be washed into the creek or leaving it there will endanger it because the next visitor who comes along is likely to see it. And some of this stuff is, you know, they can’t help themselves. And then sometimes the collecting is intentional. So if you decide to collect something, be sure that you package it properly so that when it gets to me it’s whole and it gets to me in that box because if that box for example has room for it to shift back and forth in the mail if it does that on bumpy roads, it can wear a hole in that box or in that holey envelope or whatever and I might not get it. And the other thing is of course we want to be sure that it doesn’t get some additional flaking on it through the transportation. So it’s important to think about what we’re doing, make a decision. We need to protect the resource, OK collect something, package it properly, see that it gets to me. I get quite a lot of stuff from park staff and a surprising number of visitors so that’s a good thing.

All right so let’s see… I can’t remember exactly, did we have this resource meeting last year? Two years ago, OK, well two years ago then I talked about Osprey Beach, right? I was going to show you some pictures of Osprey Beach and some of the artifacts but my PowerPoint wouldn’t cooperate so we just have to talk. We finished our report and it’s 350 pages or so and I think it’s smashing I just think it’s just you know um if you would like to borrow a copy of the report I have it on CD and I’d be glad to send you a CD. You can look through and see the pretty pictures and read the conclusions or the technical summary or the whole thing if you have lots of time. But the big thing about it is that it’s a very old campsite on Yellowstone Lake. It is, we have a radiocarbon date of 9,400 years ago. So that’s you know 7,400 BC and we believe that this bigger site is composed of a whole number of smaller campsites. People coming repetitively to Yellowstone Lake to spend some period of time, some significant period of time. We have excavated about 60 square meters, 1 meter holes about 3 feet deep each of those and from that we know we have a campsite here a thing then we have nothing then we have another concentration of materials so we have different groups coming at different times and our artifacts or diagnostic projectile points would also show that in that they seem to represent 7 or 8 hundred years worth of time, the different kinds of projectile points, so that’s interesting, too. We have more obsidian artifacts from this time period than any other site in North America. That in part represents the availability of tool quality obsidian in the park. But it’s not all obsidian from the park. There are four sources, four or five sources that we know come out of Yellowstone and are found as tools at Osprey Beach but we also get Teton Pass obsidian, Packsaddle Creek which is west of Teton Pass in eastern Idaho, Bear Gulch which is up by I-15 in the Montana border, Reese Pass which is sort of between the interstate and west Yellowstone. So if we assume that people in the immediate post glacial era are not probably going to live in the park in the center of the park during the winter time I mean I just can’t imagine that happening – voluntarily anyway. Then we can make a seasonal round if we have them here in the summertime, in the fall we have them moving into Jackson Hole, crossing the pass, wintering in Idaho where the elevation is lower, and in theory should be warmer, less difficult and then coming back up the Madison river into the park in the spring. And that would explain how they could get Teton Pass obsidian and how they could get Packsaddle and Bear Gulch and stuff on this seasonal round.

The other thing that we have lots of are sandstone objects. They’re modified, some of them have big wide linear grooves that we believe were used for shaft straightening, smoothing shafts and I understand from people who make reconstructed bows and arrows and stuff that they spend more time working on their shafts than they do on their arrowheads. In order to get it to fly right this is the piece that really has to have a lot of attention. Which is OK except that we have more of those than any other paleo Indian site in North America either and if we were to dig some more we’d probably get some more but that’s interesting. So when we go to these meetings and we talk, people say “Oh, yeah sure, you get these things, sure paleo Indians, they didn’t really use obsidian, they don’t like it, it’s brittle, it doesn’t work for them”, it’s sort of like Robert Lister saying if you wash your hands you get less infection. “Oh yeah sure, but we don’t believe you.” You know I feel like we need a major paradigm shift here and so we’re going to have to pound on them to say you know when these Indians were moving around the countryside they had opportunities to obtain other kinds of tools, raw material for tools. Some of that they did use, yeah, but they selected for this obsidian and in an area that had lots of obsidian it apparently didn’t matter that it was kind of brittle. Anyway so we’re pounding away at that idea.

OK, so we’re going to talk about another campsite that we recently excavated. This report is not available yet but we’re in progress with analysis and writing. The history is that the site had a little bit of testing salvage in 1989. Many of you have seen roasting pits eroding in the Yellowstone River cut banks well some of these, a couple of these were excavated at this site. We get cactus pads, seeds, spines out of them. We think that this was material that added moisture and buffering between the charcoal, the fire, the hot rocks and whatever it is that these people were heating, cooking in these roasting pits. They also found a number of bighorn sheep bones. It’s not surprising because this site is right across the river from lots of bighorn sheep winter range and so it would have been a good place to be.

Question from audience (inaudible): “What happened to the…”

Ann Johnson: I think that’s the fruit on the cactus and I think it just comes along with the pads and the spines I mean why would you need to cook that? I don’t think, no, no (laughter from the audience) not as tuna fish. I think you’re just dumping that in along with everything else as you’re looking for a buffer. You don’t want to scorch or burn whatever it is you’re cooking and you also want to add some moisture. You know, like a crock-pot.

Ok so this is what we did. We had a big excavation. And what we found was that we have seven different campsites at this location. And this is pretty rare, well, its one of those things maybe when we start looking for them we’ll find lots of them but right now to find preservation, find a place that hasn’t been churned up by rodents and by freeze thaw action and by trees tipping over and bringing material up with their roots. It’s pretty unusual. And I don’t know of another place in the park where we’ve got seven different prehistoric campsites on top of one another.

The roasting pits are in this level here (points to 700 AD) and we didn’t find any other roasting pits any deeper so it may be a technology that’s coming in and in fact when we have radio carbon dated roasting pits from other places in the park and we radiocarbon dated everyone we could get our hands on they all end up about 700 AD. That’s kind of interesting.

We were very concerned that we get to the bottom, that we find the very deepest, earliest people there, so that ends up about 170 centimeters bs which is below surface. And then we punched a hole deeper just to be sure we were down there. Down there at 240 cm we got some charcoal, we got a radiocarbon date so somewhere near the bottom of that terrace is about 10,600 years ago which is, here we have some information that we can share with the geologist about terrace building, you know. Something that makes us more valuable.

Where are we going? Technologically challenged, there we go OK.

Here we have  ….  All right all right, come on Doug, help me. Well, OK.

So here we have an inset terrace as you can see (Audience laughter) We were attracted to this place because the river. We had cultural deposit exposed in the cut bank and the river’s actively eroding them every time we… [technical problem with slides] Pause.

OK, so this past summer we got we unfortunately didn’t hit any features. Features are something that’s constructed on the site that you excavate or that you see on the site that’s not movable. A typical feature would be a hearth or maybe a roasting pit and we didn’t find any of those. One of the big attractions about this that they usually contain some sort of sediment, culturally produced sediment and it’s usually in a confined space so that if you analyze those contents, then you can interpret them. It’s not that I can go out and take any kind of dirt any dirt outside this window but whether or not that contains any information that’s going to be helpful in telling us how people used an area is  debatable because you don’t know who was there, why it was there. Anyway, so we’ve been very unsuccessful at finding additional features like those roasting pits from the top surface at this site. But what we did do is when we got to the bottom, we took a soil profile, a soil column out and so we have a column that goes from the surface down 240 centimeters. Well I guess it’s only we stopped at 180 or something. And then we took a chunk, a horizontal block 10 centimeters thick every 10 centimeters we put that in a sack and we’d take that out and subject that to special processing of a whole variety of types depending on what questions we’re trying to ask. And hopefully then we can address some questions. One of the things we’re interested in is how are terraces in the Black Canyon constructed? We’ve got terraces. But right now the river is widening in its channel and eroding those banks. Ok, it’s not in a terrace building sequence right now. So when did those terraces begin to build? Well we have some idea from that radiocarbon date at the bottom and we also gain some sort of insight into terrace building by looking at the sediments in them. I mean for example when we get a major flood, we get deposits built up and in some areas we get lots of sand and silts and stuff after if you go along the river after big flood you see these in certain areas. OK so that would be one kind we could get over bank deposits helping us to build terraces. We could get major storms on the canyon walls washing things down and we – these cultural horizons are each separated by sterile zones so that we know we’re getting deposition between campsites.

OK, so, Cheryl’s been helping us with this and part of and I’m going to just do a little science fiction here. Part of the analysis suggests that we have slack water deposits in the bottom because we have very fine clays and silts and you get those kinds of deposits in quiet water like under a lake. OK, that’s interesting. But what kind of a lake? Well, Ken Pierce from the USGS has documented landslides in Yankee Jim Canyon that backed up water, OK made a lake. And maybe it came up as far as Gardiner. Well Cheryl’s been working out at Stephen’s Creek and she’s looked at some holes the plumbers dug. She thinks she sees lake deposits out there at Stephen’s Creek. That’s pretty cool, but if you then take the contour include Stephen’s Creek and you go all the way around and you include my site, it just works perfectly at that one elevation. OK, so maybe we have Lake Gardiner 10,000 years ago That’d be way cool because I have people here 10,000 years ago and here we can have them paddling across the lake.

OK so what I want to say is that I want to thank corral operations for hauling out all my dirt. It took two loads of nine mules each time to haul out that soil. That was a really big deal. And they, they’re very interested in seeing that that dirt gets analyzed for their efforts so. 

There we go, OK, quick, Ok, this is the, here’s the terrace, here we have an eroding cut bank … OK, a couple of slides of just excavation, tremendous fishing hole here. The interesting thing is that the roasting pits on the upper cultural horizon had suckers and some unidentified fish, it’s probably cutthroat. If it’s not suckers, it’s the only other major thing we had back at that time. And this is, this continues to be a fabulous fishing hole.

Audience member: Ann, why was it called the Malin…?

Ann Johnson: It’s a stealth name.

Another Audience member offers: I can explain that. We didn’t have that place name until the new 7 1/2 minute maps were published. I just wrote a piece for the new edition of Yellowstone Place Names on the history of the Malin brothers who were prospectors there in the 1890s. So that’s where that comes from.

Ann Johnson: OK, so digging down digging down digging down and here we come across some stuff that’s obviously cultural, look at all these fine silts and stuff and here we get a grinding stone and a hand stone and that’s exactly how they were found in that position. About 8,000 years old. This is really interesting because we don’t get very many grinding stones in Yellowstone.

OK, Cody knife. This is interesting because remember Osprey Beach is Cody and here our bottom component here is also a Cody complex. Same group of people, different sites. This site radiocarbon dated 9,600 years, a couple of years older probably within radiocarbon dating years it’s the same date essentially.

OK, those are our identified groups. Pelican Lake is the most common cultural prehistoric group we have in the park. We don’t have a radiocarbon date, that’s the range of time period that Pelican Lake is found in the park.

These two campsites; this is the first time we’ve found these two groups in an excavated context instead of just being a surface find someplace where they’ve already eroded. Here is Christy helping to take soil samples. You can see they’re quite substantial any individual one. Our soil profile; the interesting thing here is that here’s a soil horizon. It’s very high in calcium carbonate and that’s a sort of horizon marker in the sense that if you are doing an excavation and you find that you know that that represents a very hot dry period and you get a lot of this calcium deposited and that’s why it looks that color. It’s the first time I’ve excavated one like that in the park. Roughly other dates here and Cody’s coming down here. These are, these are paleosols. These are, these represent, these darker areas represent periods when the soil, the surface of the soil was stable and so it had time to build up an organic layer. So it’s a period of stability.

Audience member: That slide right there where you showed 5000 to 7000 BC then much lower than that you show 6,800 BC…

Ann Johnson: Right, I have a radiocarbon date for this and this is a range. I don’t have a radiocarbon date for this. This is a range of where this altathermal soil is typically found. So you’re right, Paul, that kind of is odd. But suppose it’s 5,000. I don’t know exactly and then we have one of these over bank floods or we have a massive thunderstorm on the canyon wall washing dirt down, so we, you can’t say we’ve got four inches or you’ve got eight inches so eight inches is, takes a longer time to accumulate because you don’t’ know the event that causes that deposition. So you’re right that there’s a theoretical conflict there, but not necessarily. Clear as mud.

Audience member: I have a technique question just out of curiosity. How do you get those sides so straight so they don’t…

Ann Johnson: First, you have to have the right kind of sediment. At Osprey Beach, it was largely sand. And we just had collapse after collapse as it dries out it becomes less stable. Here it has enough clay in it that as it dries out it becomes concrete. Well, not exactly but it becomes very durable and so you trowel down and it stands. We didn’t have any collapses.

Audience member: You don’t ever try to stabilize it with some chemical, do you?

Ann Johnson: No, that wouldn’t be very profitable for us. You never know. Usually the rule is you want to excavate where you put your back dirt. In this case you probably want to excavate where you stabilize.

OK, so  Blah blah blah blah blah

OK so we’ve already talked about those mostly. Talked about this, about Lake Gardiner. Lake Gardiner would be from Yankee Jim Canyon four miles up from Gardiner. My own name. I named it first.

We owe the packers. This is typical, this is what our expertise is we can hold mules. Sometimes of course that post gets run over. Mike, that’s Jet in the lead. You notice his head’s up looking around. I wanted to mention we’re about ending here. I wanted to mention you will probably run into some of these kind of hunting sites and if you do I’m real interested in knowing about them.

They’re represented by pits and talus slopes. And we think they represent bighorn sheep hunting. OK, this is by Old Faithful and this is Micky Anderson so that’s not, it’s not that deep. (Laughter) But basically you know you’ve got your big rocks here and then you can see they’ve made a hole and there’s a little bit of a rim of rock sticking up here and they probably were roofed over or camouflaged with sticks or dead trees maybe live trees at the time they were being used. So we know of one north of Tower, one near Wraith Falls, one northeast of Gardiner, and this one by Old Faithful and this is all in the last three or four years so it’s really a matter, we’re just figuring out how to recognize them. So you probably will see them and we’re interested in knowing about them.

Audience member: inaudible

OK so they’re all in areas that have traditional sheep routes. They’re all culturally manufactured at the talus below a vertical or near vertical cliff. They represent a traditional kind of hunting. We don’t think they’re hunting elk. We don’t have any bones Paul; I mean the smoking gun is not there. But they’re not antelope hunting, right? OK.

I think this is it Doug, Yup.

Audience member (Paul): How do you distinguish that from an eagle capture pit? 

Ann Johnson: Not the high ground. Typically an eagle trapping pit will be the high ground on a cliff