Video
Change in Holocene Treeline, Paleoclimate, and High Altitude Hunting Systems in Rocky Mountain NP
Transcript
Karen: All right, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the NPS archaeology program speaker series through 2015-2016. My name is Karen Mudar, and I'm an archeologist in the Washington Archaeology Program office. We're halfway through the part of the webinar series devoted to presentations by and for park Service archaeologists.
Today, we have two speakers with us. Dr. Robert Brunswig is Emeritus professor of anthropology and Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado, and he's directed archaeological Aative American consultation and paleoenvironment projects at Rocky Mountain National Park, and nearby, BLM lands since 1998. He's a University of Northern Colorado distinguished scholar, and recently, was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Poland's oldest university, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
If we run out of things to talk about, we can always ask him about his time in Poland. Today, though, Bob is going to talk about a project that he and fellow researchers at the University of Northern Colorado have been working on in Rocky Mountain National Park. Using data from archaeological survey in high altitude areas, they produced a reconstruction of game drive use, and elevation-specific environmental zone shifts from about 10,500 BP. They've identified more than 80 game drives, which is just amazing to me, and collected data to develop a better understanding of the interactive effect of cyclical climate, and ecosystem change and Holocene alpine tundra hunting systems.
Thank you Bob, for joining us today.
Robert Brunswig: Well, thank you Karen, and welcome to everyone. This is a, it's not the culmination, everything is preliminary in what we do, so this is about 17 years worth of research. It started out in 1998, with a large-scale five-year high-altitude survey program and testing program in Rocky Mountain National Park. We were able to cover over 30,000 acres in the park during that period of time. Since then we've been back, we've been basically combining a great deal of paleoenvironmental work with the archaeological research, and just about every other area of analysis that you can think about.
Getting ready to move the slide, here we go. One of the things that's quite interesting for the area, both in the park and nearby, is the fact that we have a great deal of paleoenvironmental paleoclimate research sites, places where various universities, including my own university, have been doing various types of coring programs, looking at pollen and sediments and so forth to try to reconstruct climate change, since the last Ice Age.
The little map that you see here show in red dots 12 study sites that we have managed to either core or in some cases, we actually did back hoe trenches in north park, which is a interior valley basin. We've been working in North Park since 2003, and that provides us some slightly lower elevation inter-montaigne terrain, to compare with the more high altitude areas of Rocky Mountain National Park. We have a great deal of data that was available to us, and which we had generated ourselves over the past several years.
Our methodology in reconstructing climates is varied over a period of time, obviously we've done sediment coring in fens and ponds. The deepest pond that we've done is Bear Lake, which is about 60 feet deep and then has sediments that go down about 25 or 30 feet below that, which go back to the last Ice Age. We've relied on a variety of proxy data for reconstructing climate and past ecosystems. We've done some pollen, but pollen in many cases has proven to be less than effective. There are a lot of factors that differentially destroy different types of pollen, so we're very careful about how we apply pollen analysis.
Our three primary proxies are organic content, bulk density, and magnetic susceptibility, and the combination of these three give us very good information in terms of temperature changes and ecosystem changes over time. Something new, relatively new that has emerged, is looking at tree line changes and ecosystem movement, because of environmental change. Something that is only just a few years old, maybe 10 or 15 years old, at the most, in our area, is the idea of ice patches and melting glaciers, where we have others, and including ourselves has been able to find tree remains that mark ancient tree lines. In many cases, those tree lines are quite a bit above modern levels. We can at least have data points where past tree lines have existed in many cases, but that kind of science is really in its infancy. Alpine ponds, which we and others have cored, we've been able to find tree remains in alpine tundra, where tree lines once existed but no longer exist, so we're able to reestablish some kind of a record of past tree lines.
This is a slide of some of our field work. You see 14 different locations that we and others in Rocky Mountain National Park have been coring. You'll notice that in the upper left hand quadrant of the map, that there's a rather significant cluster of sediment coring areas, sampling areas, and we'll get to that here in just a second. On the right hand side, you see Bear Lake coring, which is in a lower elevation, it’s in the montane, not too far from Estes Park, in the eastern part of the park, and my colleague Jim Doerner cored through the ice to get that one, that was a real fun one with the wind blowing,
then, an alpine location in the center, and then higher ecosystem, or ecotone, sub alpine ecotone at the top, so these kind of give you an example of the areas that we've been working in.
Having a rather significant amount of paleoclimate data from different types of locations within the park and outside the park, we've been able to construct a pattern, a temperature change pattern, over a period of more than 10,000 years, both in the park and the neighboring region, and correlate that with the archaeology, and you can see on this chart that we have, starting 10,650 years ago, through 9700 and so forth, we have a period right after, in the early Holocene and the end of Pleistocene, in which we have a very rapid warming event, and as a matter of fact this is the period in which archaeology really begins to emerge in a significant way in high mountain areas in the southern Colorado Rockies.
You can see abrupt warming taking place between 9700 and 8700 and so forth. We have a fairly substantial and relatively detailed record of climate change over a period of time in the park. The study that we began in 2011 was to try to model or at least start the process of modeling tree lines, and correlating those with climate change and correlating those with archaeological site distributions and landform patterns, or land use pattern within the park. The area that we picked as a sample area is rather large, it's 47 square kilometers. At the top of this illustration, you see the red rectangle area, which shows the area that we're working in, and then below that, we have a GIS model that we clipped out, which includes high altitude, everything from upper montane to subalpine up into alpine areas.
The good thing about this area, which I'll show you in a second, is that we have a lot of sediment core sample sites, and we have a significant number of archaeological sites that we discovered in our high altitude surveys. The area, as a whole the 47 sq. km, has a survey coverage, an archaeological surface survey coverage of 70%, given the fact that probably 25% of the area is steep canyon where you're not going to find any site, our effective coverage,] is probably in the order of 90+ . 86 different archaeological sites, many of them multi-component, coming with evidence of different time periods, occupations within that area, and 23 of those sites have what we call diagnostics, meaning that we have the projectile points, spear points and so forth, that can be assigned both a cultural designation, a cultural period designation, and a time period designation.
These little boxes that you see on, superimposed over the chart - are the top number is 5 GA, 1085 is the site number, and then the little designations underneath like LPEAMALAEC - these are cultural components of different cultural periods, so LP would be Late Paleoindian, EA would be Early Archaic, MA would be Middle Archaic and so forth and so on. You can see that we've got a rather significant number of sites that are multicomponent, and many of them going back to Paleoindian times, which is quite interesting. Some of the site are now on tundra, many of the sites are on subalpine, alpine ecotone, and some of the sites are just inside or just outside the alpine environmental zone.
This is a more precise map, which shows the bulk of the research area that we're working with. Up in the upper right hand corner Forest Canyon Pass has a series of camps that are immediately above the subalpine zone, in an ecotone area. This is a major pass, which has many, many clusters of sites, some sites rather large. This is the major pass site across the continental divide, which is actually, is close to a number of, 2 or 3 Clovis sites which is the earliest that we have going back over 11,000 years. Then as you move from the upper right hand corner to the continental divide, that's what that dashed line is, you're up in tundra and that tundra ridge, which extends clear down to the bottom of the map, is loaded with game drives.
You've got 2 game drives, 1095 and 5GA2002, which are noted on this map. These are game drives that were occupied starting in the neighborhood of 9000+ years ago, and many of them continued in use up until historic times. These game drives have been in operation for a very long period of time. We believe that the subsistence system that was practiced from at least 9500 years ago up until recently was - involved base camps that were set in lower elevation areas, but still close enough to get up on top of the continental divide, get up on top of the alpine, and hunt animals that migrated to high altitude alpine pastures during the summertime. It's a transhumant system, where these drive systems were set up, and operated for thousands and thousands of years.
This is a GIS model of the research area, and it shows a number of important coring localities. There is an ice patch in the center of this, if you can see, ROMO3 ice patch, which has wood, actually part of a tree, and that marks a former tree line, and then there's the pond, which was cored in about 20 years ago, 25 years ago, which has tree remains in it, so these actually give us two data points that allow us to establish tree lines that have been dated using radiocarbon dating.
Here we are again, kind of looking at some of these locations, these coring locations. This is a GIS map that we put together based on our research area. The blue is areas of tundra that we believe has remained tundra for the past 19,000 years, really hasn't changed much despite the fact that tree lines did move up in certain periods and down in other periods. The dark green area is alpine zone, and that alpine zone hasn't changed significantly in - since the Pleistocene. But the light green area in the center are areas where tree line moved up, into, and then back down again, through this is an ecotone area which has ecotone patches of krummholz trees, and so forth, that do shift as climate shifts over a period of time. You can see the ice patch in the center, and you can see the modern tree line down here. This particular ice patch has a piece of spruce tree in it that was radiocardbon dated at 4,300 years ago, and is approximately 70 meters above the modern tree line. There was an upward shift 4,300 years ago, and probably a shift before that during a warm period, that this is the very end of that particular warm period that we call the Altithermal.
The Mount Ida pond, which is located not too far from there, is 130 meters above tree line, and the needles and spruce cones that were recovered in a core there have a 9,700 BP date, calibrated date, and so tree line at that point in time, almost 9800, 10,000 years ago, was 130 meters above the modern. These are data points that we're concerned with mapping tree line in the area. Tree line is not consistent, obviously; it depends on slope, it depends on aspect and a number of other factors, and so we're using modern-day tree line undulations and the landscape to -as a means of trying to reconstruct tree lines in different areas of the study area.
Here we go again, this is Mount Ida Ridge, appears at the top, see Mount Ida pond, this is Mount Ida ridge, Mount Ida ice patch is located in here with a piece of tree. Move on ... there we go. That's just a core and the dates we're in the pond area.
Now one thing that has emerged as we began to do our work in Rocky Mountain National Park and then subsequently in North Park and the valley to the northwest, is that it became pretty obvious by connecting tool materials, stone tool materials, and other types of artifacts that what was going on, at least by 9000 years ago, is that people were over-wintering in these lower interior mountain valleys and along the foothills. The range over here to the left of Rocky Mountains National Park to the east, that's where they over wintered. We have located a number of wintering camps in that valley, which I'm showing here. Then we have spring, fall, hunting camps, so, they would go, as weather began to warm up, they would move out into the center of the valley more, they were hunting bison, they were hunting pronghorn elk, and even some bighorn sheep wandered down here.
Herds of elk in particular seem to have had a transhumant pattern, where they moved from these wintering valleys into the high altitude areas in places like Rocky Mountain National Park. There are a number of passes that we've looked at between the park and places like North Park, and that's where they operated the hunting territories, on ridges like we have along Mount Ida ridge, which is our research area.
We've got a lot of things going on, we have a lot of archaeological sites, little red triangles are the archaeological sites. Again, tundra has not changed significantly. Subalpine forest has moved up or down into the ecotone, what's now the ecotone today, so there's been some shifting of as many as 130 meters at one time. That's what -this is where all the fluctuation takes place.
Now what does that mean? That means that certain high altitude areas were open for hunting at different times. Sometimes the area, the amount of tundra was greater than today, or lesser than today, and we've been able to reconstruct a little bit of modeling of that tree line, early Paleoindian times, from 13,000 to 10,800. These are calibrated radiocarbon years. Tree lines were significantly lower than they are today, based on data from other places in the Colorado front range. We're probably looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 meters, so that's almost 1,000 feet lower tree line, because it was colder. We do have archaeology during that time range. It's rare and it's primarily projectile points, spear points, Clovis spear points, not much in the way of any camp activity or anything like this, but there were people up there, but it was not as positive a terrain for hunting or anything, so they probably didn't spend a great deal of time in the high altitude.
By 9,800 years ago, approximately, to 7,500 years ago we had Late Paleoindian folks, and this is when we begin to get the high altitude exploitation, the development of the earliest game drive. Tree line was significantly higher than it is today, probably about 130 meters. That it was warmer, it was much more productive growing season and the alpine tundra was greater, and there's a great deal of activity going on. You can see some of these camps, and so areas in the light green, which are ecotone today, which are a combination of alpine and these krummholz tree islands, much of that area was probably subalpine, where tree lines went upwards quite a bit and covered some area.
This gives you a sense, alpine tundra was the same, but this is Forest Canyon pass, up here in the upper right hand corner, what it looks like today, and then there's a little picture in the corner which shows what it probably looked like about 9,800 to 7,500 years ago. It would've been more heavily forested then, than at the present. We had a rise in tree line, a very warm period, in the early Holocene.
The Early Archaic, which comes along about 7500 to 4300 years ago is a period in which sometimes we refer to as the Altithermal, the high temperature period, in which seasonal temperatures broadly were higher than they are today, possibly as much as 5 to 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit. It opened up a lot of the high altitude tundra, game drives were operating rather heavily. There was a lot of activity going on. We have Early Archaic sites all through the mountains. It's probably the period in which we have the largest number of actual sites and populations were probably a bit more than we had in most other periods.
We would've had, again, more forest areas, higher up, we think tree lines were at least 70 meters higher than they are today and possibly even higher, because the one data point that we have in that ice patch with the tree stump is that that's pretty late, that's about 4300 years ago, which is the very end of the Early Archaic in the Altithermal. We are able to begin the process of attempting to model treeline changes based on climate changes, and relate that to the archaeology.
In summary, we can - I can say that tree line shifts and high altitude mountain tundra and subalpine zones, due to climate and ecosystem changes over long periods, are potentially reconstructible, through multiple lines of evidence, and those multiple lines of evidence include radiocarbon dated plant remains from ponds and fens, radiocarbon dated fossil tree remnants embedded in ice patches, and this is something we really need to pay a lot of attention to, because those are disappearing rapidly, with climate change, and then sediment core samples analyzed for ecozone histories and climate change histories.
Archaeological landscape histories and mountain regions combined with tree line, climate change evidence, provide enormously valuable evidence for prehistoric land use patterns, and evolution over time, and our research area in the trail ridge location really tells us that it's possible to do that. Another thing that is becoming very apparent is that ancient ice patches, although chronologically finite resource - because of global warming, they're disappearing - represent a significant source of evidence for past climactic change, tree line, ecosystem movement and insights into past human subsistence strategies in North American areas and mountain regions elsewhere in the world, potentially. We're hoping to begin a project in the Carpathian Mountains, in 2017, in a national park which is affiliated with Rocky Mountain National Park, in looking for high altitude changes and ice patches, as well as archaeology in that area, too.
There have been some publications, which you can go back and check these out when you look at this webinar presentation at you leisure, which have been published recently. There'll be more publications coming out about this by ourselves and others, we'll be presenting a paper at a conference in Innsbruck next October, along with many other specialists working in glaciers and ice patch archaeology. That's going to be a lot of fun. We, none of this work, and 17 years is a long time, would've been possible, without support from the National Park Service, who has managed to fund us for many, many, many years. We've worked with the BLM, and there's been collaboration between Park Service and BLM. There's even funding from the state of Colorado, the state historical fund has gone into this and our own university has provided a great deal of funding.
I guess we're on the cusp of moving even further into understanding the past in a variety of ways ... And that's my presentation. Karen?
Karen: Sorry, I put myself on mute. Wow, what interesting research, Bob.
Robert Brunswig: Well, thank you.
Karen: Do we have any questions? Well, let's see, someone's on the line?
Robert Brunswig: Hello?
Karen: Maybe it was me just echoing. You had put, I think at some point in your presentation, you had put the time period, or the, let's see, how do I say this ... You had indicated that the temperatures were five to six degrees warmer than now. Are these annual temperatures?
Robert Brunswig: There was a great deal - there was a lot - from what we were able to tell, I mean we don't have precise year by year records or even century by century records that are very precise. But our reconstructions of temperature patterns and precipitation patterns, but mainly temperature patterns, tell us that there were cycles, and at the warmest, those cycles reached probably 5 to 6 degrees Centigrade increased temperatures for, say a period of maybe three or four, five or six centuries. Then it would cool down a bit, but even above modern temperatures, they would still cool down and then it would rise again, so there are cycles within cycles which everybody is pretty familiar with in terms of how past climates have existed.
Now, what does this mean for the future, is a really good question, and I suspect that we're going to have tree line rises over the next couple of centuries. How fast that's going to take place, it's -because there's always a lag effect in tree lines moving. But if we do hit temperatures of, say, three, four, five degrees, and there are predictions that world temperature increases might be that high. Then we can expect some of these changes in mountain areas such as Rocky Mountain National Park and Yellowstone. They're going to be pretty significant and they're really going to impact the ecosystems, and how people use those places.
Karen: Of course what they're predicting for the future is going to be longer term-
Robert Brunswig: Yep.
Karen: Than what we've seen in the past, but it seems like there's some lessons here for park managers and for climatologists as well. Very interesting. You had mentioned at some point that pollen was not reliable, and that it tended to degrade over time, I would've expected that there would be less degradation, just because of the long periods of cold every year. Can you talk about that for a minute?
Robert Brunswig: Well, I, of course I'm not palynologist, so I'm one of those guys that kind of hangs around those folks. But when we began to do pollen work 15, 16, 17 years ago in Rocky Mountain National Park, we got some records that were, we thought, good. We thought that they represented the various plant communities and so forth that existed at different times in the areas we were coring. Finally, after a while, we began to look much more closely at the pollen itself, and what we found is that pollen isn't always the best indicator. You need other lines of evidence to support it. The reason is, that certain types of pollen preserve well in high altitude sedimentary environments, and other types of pollen don't. The other problem was that we had pollen types that are extremely mobile. Arborial pollen, for instance, like pine, pine, when pine trees, ponderosa pine and so forth, begin to pollinate, they send up enormous clouds of pollen, and so you've got this pollen flooding into areas well out of the zones in which the trees are actually living.
That caused some issues, too, because you're looking at pollen percentages in which you've got 60% pine pollen, and there aren't any pine trees, then you've got a little bit of a biased record.
Karen: Yeah, I understand that.
Robert Brunswig: We found that magnetic susceptibility and bulk density are pretty good indicators. Magnetic susceptibility works very well for us because different types - sedimentary environments based on different environmental conditions will change the susceptibility and the bulk densities is related to the amount of organic material that's being produced in warmer times and cooler times. That allows us to come up with these, what we think are reasonably reliable proxies.
Karen: How interesting. Could you talk a little bit about just the mechanics of the hunting, the drives that you had found? Are they a lot like the ones that people have identified in Alaska? Where there's cairns, or do they look like, that are distributed across the landscape at strategic places, or do they look more like buffalo jumps?
Robert Brunswig: The game drive systems and the hunting systems that we have in the Rockies, in the southern Rockies in particular but also in the central Rockies, are somewhat idiosyncratic. In other words, it depends on the terrain, it depends on the behavior of the animal that you're hunting, how they're going to respond and so forth. Two primary animals were being hunting in high altitudes. One of them was elk, and the other was bighorn sheep. The hunting techniques for those two species was a little different. We believe that in some places, we actually have one game drive that has two different hunting strategies being employed. One of them is a system where elk were grazing uphill of a relatively steep mountain slope, which they do in the mornings. They move up into the tundra to graze, and then, they were pushed up into an area where we had pits, blinds, and things like this where they were ambushed and killed with projectiles and so forth.
The other side of this drive is a really steep talus slope that goes down into a glacial cirque but we also have blinds that are placed right along the edge of the scarp of that, it's almost a cliff edge, and the only thing that would work there would be if you were driving bighorn sheep up a steep slope, and they were popping over the top, and then you were ambushing them as they came up over the top and using nets and things like this, so it was kind of a dual species – dual hunting strategy, just on one drive itself.
It depended on the local terrain, there are places where animals were just using natural features to trap them and kill them. We have game drives in the lower valleys on ridge lines, we - one of them that we just mapped south of Walden in North Park, this big North Park Valley, was three quarters of a mile long and it was used to hunt bison. There are a few bison in the high altitude areas, we're getting bison remains melting out of glaciers, above tree line and things like this, but probably bison weren't up there grazing on the alpine all that much. That was one species that occasionally showed up but probably the game drives weren't designed to hunt that particular species.
Karen: Have you been able to excavate any of the camp sites to see what the types of faunal remains you're getting?
Robert Brunswig: In high altitude areas, it's very difficult to recover faunal remains. The soils in the highest mountains are very acidic, and bone doesn't preserve very well, so if you get something you typically get little tiny fragments and bits and pieces, and charred bone. On the other hand, we're getting significant amounts of buffalo, of bison bone, pronghorn antelope, elk, even possibly a couple of fragments of moose, in lower altitude areas in the mountain valleys. The reason is, that the mountain valleys we're working in next to Rocky are sedimentary valleys, and they have low acidity, and so the very alkaline soils, and so the preservation of bone is very, very good. It's kind of odd, it depends on your soil conditions, your environments.
Karen: Well, once again, thank you so much for this talk. This was excellent.
Robert Brunswig: Well, thank you.
40:49 Break here and start a new recording
Karen: Next, we're going to hear a talk from Staffan Peterson, and Staffan is the park archeologist at Yellowstone National Park, and he's responsible for archaeological research and steward for the park's 2.2 million acres. He has a PhD from Indiana University and 18 years of experience in the archaeology of the Great Plains and the Midwest. Before coming to Yellowstone, and I'm not positive but I think this is his first Park Service station, he investigated pioneer sites in Minnesota; Lewis and Clark camp sites in Montana; and large prehistoric towns in Indiana and Illinois; and today, he'll be talking about the archaeology of the Nez Perce War of 1877, in Yellowstone National Park.
Along with the 70 sites ranging from Paleoindian to the earliest 20th century that were discovered along the Nez Perce National Historic Trail, the project identified what may be traces of camps that the Nez Perce made during their flight across the northwest US to try to get to Canada. It's so difficult to identify such ephemeral site archaeology, that I'm very interested to hear about these discoveries, and Staffan has also been successful in ensuring that archaeological information is integrated into other park management plans, and I hope that he talks about that as well.
Thank you Staffan, for joining us today.
Staffan Peterso: Great, thanks Karen. Happy to be here. Well, I'm going to get started, but first, I'd like to thank a number of our really great partners, that we wouldn't have been able to get this project going without. Most significantly, the participation and assistance of the Nez Perce tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville and Umatilla India Reservations, financial support from the Yellowstone Park Foundation, and the Rocky Mountain CESU is instrumental in getting a lot of our agreements and finding us great partners to work with. University of Wyoming worked with us on doing much of the field work. We had interns from Stanford University, Bill Lane Center, and most importantly, I want to thank Rosemary Sucec and Ann Johnson, who were really the progenitors of this project going back 10 years, and a real shout out for them. Many of our rangers, and packers, and a lot of really great VIPs, so they all made this work possible.
Karen: Staffan, can I interrupt you for just a minute-
Staffan Peterso: Absolutely, please do.
Karen: I wanted to remind people to make sure they mute their phones, so that we don't get any background noise, and everybody can hear our speakers clearly. Thank you.
Staffan Peterso: Our overarching goal was to identify sites associated within the Nez Perce National Historic Trail corridor within our park, especially those associated with the Nez Perce War of 1877, in order to preserve, protect, and interpret those, any resources present. The Nez Perce National Historic Trail was designated by Congress under the National Trail System Act in 1986, to commemorate the 1877 flight of the non-treaty Nez Perce from their homelands in present day Oregon, Idaho, Washington. This flight occurred, as you can see on the map, this red line traces a extensive route passing through the park, and we have about 85 miles of this route within Yellowstone. This is the only congressionally designated, nationally significant resource within the park, other than the park itself.
This event, this is about 800 Nez Perce men, women and children, 2000 horses, about 400 dogs, which we recently learned about, they were passing through the park over about 11 day period. This is a 85 mile route. For scale, I got a little map of DC, it's the same scale, so you can see what this undertaking must have been like. We've identified, through historic documentation, nine sites associated with camps or other events that were historically attested. We conducted field work at ten of these numbered sites over about a nine year period.
The trail's been… it's been really well protected up until recently, and this is because it's managed, mainly in areas managed, as wilderness, and because we don't develop in wilderness, any resources associated with the trail have been pretty well protected, and it's mostly in the back country, and we haven't had a lot of protection or preservation concerns. However, it's starting to get more attention from visitors who want to hike or ride the trail. For example, one individual created a map of his interpretation of the route of this trail through the park, and markets it to outfitters and others, and so we've been trying to stay out in front of any potential threats to resources by conducting inventory so that we can protect and preserve and ultimately interpret them.
Because of the complexity of this event, there's a lot of social and historical complexities and various representations of it, and a lot of meetings to tribes, to the park, in public, protecting and interpreting it, ideally, calls for collaborative and interdisciplinary approach. That's exactly what we did. We've done ethnographic interviews, archival research, and broad scale archaeological investigations and each of those contributed uniquely to the project so, as I said, it's been about nine years and we've done this in consultation with the three tribes, along the way.
From the outset, though, the three tribes of descendants in the 1877 events said that they wanted a conscious management strategy, so that their heritage associated with the national historic trail will be preserved and interpreted correctly. In order to do that, obviously, we needed to know what's out there, we needed to confirm the route, and document artifacts and features associated with it. Our archaeological inventories have this strong ethnographic component. We've brought in elders, under cooperative agreement, for extensive oral interviews on site, and we have a lot of, these are all recorded in video, and at the same time, invited them to participate in the planning process.
Recognizing these folks, they're the experts, and their resources - they know where camp sites would've been located, in some cases they know exactly where they were located, types of artifacts and features that we might be likely to find. They can assist in identifying and interpreting artifacts. We've brought on tribal archaeologists as part of the crew for field work, and we have strove to incorporate their comments into reports. All this, it’s a real privilege that we don't usually get in archaeology, and it's led to a richer and more inclusive understanding of the resource.
As I said,we began our field work around 2007. We were trying to identify sites that related to key events in the park. This would've been where tourists, who'd encountered the Nez Perce, where they might've camped, where they might've had encounters, or the locations of Nez Perce encampments. Keep in mind that this was a park when this happened, we were already a park for five years, and as far as I know, this is the only kind of military engagement within an existing park in the National Park System.
We do have historic documentation associated with many of these events and encounters because the park staff brought both Nez Perce and tourists back to the park to talk about the events in the early 1900s, so we have good, solid sort of firsthand evidence of many of the things that happened and where they happened. In other cases, we only have general locations, people weren't sure where they were, or memories fade. However, we used what we had to design our archaeological studies, including pedestrian survey, extensive use of metal detectors. The gentleman here in the center from Nez Perce tribe, with a brass shotgun shell. Broad scale inventory around general areas where we weren't quite sure where things were.
As a result of these multi-year field studies, we identified over 70 sites, ranging from Paleoindian to early 20th century, including five previously unverified 1877-related sites, as well as a high elevation bivouac, where we believe the Nez Perce rested prior to their descent out of the park and down onto the plains on their ill-fated race to Canada. About a third of the sites are in the back country, the rest of them are actually near roads or trails, and we feel those are the one that are at greatest risk. I'm going to talk a little bit about some specific sites, this particular site the Radersburg Party, you can see this gentleman down on the bottom right, who was brought back to the park to tell his story, and the Park Service duly put up a sign, noting that that was the location of the event.
The upper right is the location as it looks today. A couple of other sites, historic attestations, Nez Perce Council site, the Howard Bivouac. Again, in the case of the Howard Bivouac, we had, eyewitness accounts who identified the place, the site. Some of the artifacts we recovered from these sites. These are all period appropriate. It's always a question of, “ Was it from this event, or was it a few years later, or earlier?” so most of our efforts were associated with building the best circumstantial case that we could. On the upper left, you'll see some cartridges, a couple of those are Parker brass shotgun shells. We'll talk about those a little more, those turned out to be pretty important. We have iron tent stakes, we believe those are from Fort Sibley. Sorry, they're from Sibley tents, from Fort Laramie,
meat cans from about 1880, all these are period appropriate. In addition, one unfortunate event in trying to do archaeology. In an active park, a couple of cartridge cases that we had identified during metal detectors, during metal detector survey, were stolen overnight, they disappeared and they weren't there the next day. It was a regrettable event.
The coin is a very curious thing, it's an 1877 Borneo-Malaya Straits Settlement coin. What's this doing way up in the mountains in Wyoming? Well, we're not sure, but we do have a lead that we want to chase down. Apparently a couple of the principles involved on the military side may have served in the British army and perhaps were duty stationed in the Malaysia Straits. Some people we'd have to chase down in the archives in England, I suppose.
This is a copy of an Indian Depredation claim, filed by one of the tourists, who'd lost quite a bit in an encounter with a Nez Perce. One of the items in particular stands out to us, and this is the breech loading shotgun, value of $100. This would've been a very rare and expensive gun, probably not many of them around in Montana in 1877. We believe that that breech loading shotgun is a Parker shotgun, and perhaps a Remington Whitmore, and each of those would've used those brass shotgun shells that I'd shown you earlier. At the same site, we also found a large number of harness parts, probably associated with the destroyed wagon, these are again items that were claimed under the Depredation Act, so good supporting circumstantial evidence there that we'd found the actual site of that location.
The site does have more time depth. We found artifacts appropriate to other periods as well, two metal projectile points here that are brass, and these possibly came out of brass from Hudson's Bay, probably not associated with the 1877 events.
Some more period appropriate artifacts, some military buttons, and of course, the Nez Perce were being chased by various units of the US cavalry, all throughout that route, and there was some, some material was taken from the cavalry, so it was who had fit into that narrative. The Helena Party Camp, another historically attested site. We… there was an old sign there from the 50s, and persons in the park decided the sign needed to be taken down and put back up, and this caused a lot of internal debate within the park about whether that was a good idea to do it or not. It serves, obviously, it does serve an interpretation purpose, but you know, as an archeologist, I'm always concerned about directing people towards these places, and this is just a challenge we have to work through.
Again, some more period-appropriate artifacts down at the site, gives you some view into what tourists were bringing into the park at that time. China, silverware, and canned goods, we managed to pick a tin over here. The Helena Party Site, we also found a, portions of a shotgun that'd been pretty badly beat up, and members of that party did state that they had had a shotgun taken from them and bashed against a tree, and we think that this is the shotgun, so we're pretty happy about being able to identify this site. This is another, this is a artifact I suppose, an ecofact, it's a culturally modified tree, and what you're looking at is a cross that was hacked into this tree, probably with a shovel, and you can see the horizontal and vertical scarring. This is now being re-engulfed, and we are sure that this is the site where one of the tourists who was killed, this is Charles Kenck, was killed and temporarily buried here. It's another important resource for us to document and preserve.
The last site I'm going to talk about is the Parker Peak Site, and if you recall in the map showing the red routes across the park, it kind of, it diverges over on the east, and this is Absaroka Mountainsand we have no historic documentation concerning how they got out of the park at that point. However, we have always been aware of this site. Philetus Norris here, in his finest mountain man garb, he's the second superintendent, and sent in a report from 1880, saying that he was at this site on a pass up in the Absarokas, where he observed “an Indian lodge, more than 40 others that had fallen, close by a dwarf-fringed pond on Parker's Peak, with fragments of chinaware, blankets, bed-clothing and most costly male and female wearing apparel, mute but mournful witnesses of border raids and massacres.”
This is really remote, this is far back country, about 10,000 feet. That kind of stuff really shouldn't be up there, so, to us, it was a pretty big signal that this could be the route of the Nez Perce out of the park. We have, since been up on four missions to investigate this site, this is a site map that's about 400 meters, by about 300 meters across, we've thoroughly metal detected it, and found a lot of artifacts as well as lodge poles and cambium harvest trees. These are some lodge poles, there used to be many more up there, we think they're being used for fuel, perhaps. We had cited an out-of-bounds camper in 2002, who had been collecting them.
This is a scarred tree, we think it's, the tree was probably used for cambium harvesting, and this is kind of a survival food. It is nutritious and something that you might've fed to horses of people in a stressful situation, and at this point, the Nez Perce had been stressed out, they were, they'd been running for months and a lot of their goods were gone, and this was kind of a place where things were going to turn for them, and not for the better.
Another thing we noticed was a large number of small diameter trees, that had been cut, and these were not cut with a saw, they were cut with a small, probably a hatchet, and there shouldn't have been this many of them up there. Again, it's very remote, and we found them in these ribbon forests. We took a dendrochronologist with us, and sampled eight of them, and three of these came back to a date of death of summer of 1877. We're pretty enthused by that result, and think that these trees were being harvested as expedient lodge poles for shelter.
The last find we've made was just recovered this year, we brought an individual from the Nez Perce tribe with us who's a great-great-granddaughter of one of the members of the 1877 flight through the park. We recovered a - many portions of a pre-1877, sorry, 1874, pattern McClellan saddle, so this would've been US a cavalry saddle, again, it's in the middle of nowhere, and we think that this was probably taken as loot from the cavalry. Here's some of the parts, and we've been able to identify this as an early McClellan saddle, so again, really great circumstantial case being built that we've identified that site.
Where we're headed is, we want to use all these results, which are just about complete now, and reporting phase, to develop an evaluative framework for site interpretation protection. We'd like to be able to bring tribes and other scholars to the park to help develop interpretive themes for the trail and - which would ultimately produce interpretive material. That's where we're at.
Karen: Staffan, thank you for that talk. Do we have any questions? Okay, I have some questions. First, I have a question about your site interpretation, and I'm going to apologize in advance for not knowing very much about this historical event, and I'm not questioning your conclusions, but I'm very interested in the process. I noticed that when you showed us pictured of the assemblages, they're primarily Euroamerican in origin, and I was wondering how you separated these sites that you've attributed to the Nez Perce, from military sites. Were there no military engagements during their flight through the park?
Staffan Peterso: Well, we did identify one site that was - we believe is primarily a military encampment. As far as the question of these being Euroamerican goods, by this point, many many people, many tribes would've been, they would've had Euroamerican goods as part of their material culture for, you know, decades.
Karen: Oh, yes, absolutely.
Staffan Peterso: Yeah, so, and this is a question for us, like, what does a Nez Perce encampment look like archaeologically? Had we not had the historic documentation, we don't feel we would've been able to be as confident in our identifications as we are. It was really a great privilege to have these folks come back, both Nez Perce and the Euroamericans, and identify the areas. I'm also going to hazard a guess that some sites were kind of multi-component if you will, having both US military material as well as Nez Perce material, I mean, this is not a linear, a very narrow linear thing. This is a flood of people and armies passing over expanses of land, and there was probably less clarity than you might guess when it comes to identifying a trail proper. The other thing to keep in mind is, there's the national historic trail, versus the historic trail, versus the spaces and places associated with the 1877 event, and those are two different things, and yes, the trail is a conceptual, commemorative type trail, that crosses dozens of jurisdictions and hundred of private parcels.
It was enacted in 1986, and we're just getting to an EIS, I think in maybe about two years.
Karen: Oh, okay.
Staffan Peterso: Yeah, it's a huge project, but once completed, it'll be something akin to the Pacific Rim trail or the Appalachian trail that people can travel on foot or on horse, or in car, depending on the location.
Karen: Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of preserving this particular cultural feature, within the Yellowstone Wilderness areas?
Staffan Peterso: Sure, well, I guess, we're not going to cut trail. We're not going to make new trails for the national historic trail, that's almost a certainty. These sites that are in the back country and much of the park is wilderness anyway, but the sites in the back country, we're not too concerned about, particularly now that we've been able to get out and have a look at them and recover a lot of artifacts. Sure, people could sneak back with a metal detector, and do some harm, but we're not real concerned about those. The ones that are on the other hand, that are near roads, and on trails, or even ones that we'd signed, you know, this is just a concern we have for sites of all types, and we just have to do our best with monitoring and educating folks about the point of having parks, which is to take care of them. It's just an ongoing challenge we face for all of our sites.
Karen: Did you have to do an analysis and get special permits to go into the wilderness and do research?
Staffan Peterso: Yes, we do, we - all the work that I do as part of my job goes through our standard research permit process, that everyone has to go through. That includes looking at impacts to natural resources, and making sure that we're in compliance with the Wilderness Act.
Karen: You had to do the analysis beforehand, and you had to plan for leave no trace?
Staffan Peterso: Yes, we do follow all the park regulations and policies ourselves.
Karen: Very good! Does anybody else have any questions? This is a very quiet crowd today.
Robert Brunswig: This is Bob Brunswig, and I, the question, I would… we've worked with Native Americans a great deal in consultation, we do a sacred landscape project in Rocky Mountain National Park in the area, and, how much information from coming down through the generations, did you think you were able to get from the Nez Perce?
Staffan Peterso: Well, our oral interviews were really valuable to us, but as far as specific….information, specific to, say, a campsite, we didn't get too much of that. We were told things we didn't know, for example, that there are burials associated with the trail here that we've no knowledge of, and frankly, we - this is information that's sacred to them, and we didn't necessarily want to know that. We don't have a sacred landscape here associated with this at this time, I don't think that's come up. In interviews, we’re, I'd say more of a, I guess an initial look at something that we had never looked at before in that kind of detail.
To answer your question, you know, the information was variable, in terms of how specific it was, and the themes that they were touching upon. But it was still seen as a great experience for everybody involved. We'd never done anything like that here before.
Robert Brunswig: One of the reactions that we frequently get is the, eventually, there comes about a pride in coming back to traditional places, and a feeling that they're fulfilled, that they actually have some satisfaction in retouching with the ancestors and with the ancestral past, and that's very gratifying for both the Native Americans and researchers like ourselves.
Staffan Peterso: Yeah, absolutely Bob. The last trip we took, which was just a month ago to recover that saddle, the young woman was, I think it was a big experience for her. She'd never been backpacking, had never been out on this trail, and we took her to this site where, literally, her ancestors stayed, and it was great. She prayed there, and we were very impressed by that, and really touched actually, and it was a wonderful experience for all of us, and I expect there to be more coming up as a result of this project. We opened a lot of doors, and it's been quite positive for us.
Robert Brunswig: Yeah. Thank you.
Karen: Okay, any other questions or comments? Well, if that is the case, I will thank Staffan once again, and Bob also, for the excellent talks that we heard today, and I invite everybody to come back next week on October 8, and we'll hear two more talks. Thank you all, have a good evening.
Staffan Peterso: Thank you.
Robert Brunswig: Thank you.
Description
Bob Brunswig, 10/1/2015, ArcheoThursday
Duration
34 minutes, 34 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/01/2015
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