Video
Where the Buffalo Still Roam
Transcript
Karen: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the NPS Archaeology Program series for 2015-2016. My name is Karen Mudar and I'm an archaeologist in the Washington Archaeology Program office. Last week we heard two excellent presentations about archaeological projects in our national parks.
Resource manager Adam Johnson reported on the Puukohola Heiau nNational Historic Site earthquake stabilization project, which won a 2015 Cotter Award. This was a large project undertaken to document and repair the damage to two heiaus’ traditional masonry caused by a 2006 earthquake. The park worked closely with Native Hawaiian volunteers and masons to rebuild significant parts of the faces of these heiaus that are located on the Big Island of Hawaii. Besides rebuilding the walls using traditional dry point techniques, teams built and used traditional scaffolding, and also carried out ceremonies before and after work to ensure the safety of the workers. Community commitment to this project was high and the park went from holding training workshops four times a year to twice a month. I can't even imagine how intense that was.
Tim Schilling was our second speaker last week and he's an archaeologist at the NPS Midwest Archaeology Center, which has been very involved in a project being carried out at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Park Service is engaged in redesigning the park and they're doing a lot of earth moving. Despite intensive early 20th century use of the riverfront for industry and docks, there have been several older features identified, including a hotel cistern. Tim’s presentation discussed interpretations of the features found to date, and some discussion of artifacts and points to the potential for older material being present at the site, by bringing examples from other excavations that have been carried out along the river. I hope that he keeps us posted on this very interesting project.
The presentations next week are a nice segue into this year's webcast theme, being a maritime park project. Josh Moreno and David Gadsby are going to talk about investigations and management of the HMS Fowey, an 18th century British ship whose remains are located in present-day Biscayne National Park. Josh is going to address research, stabilization and, I think, problems with looting, while David will describe the work to craft a management agreement with the British government. If you're dealing with similar issues in your park, you'll certainly want to hear what Josh and David have to say. Join us next week for this webcast.
Before I introduce today's speakers I want to say a few words about the speaker series for the remainder of 2015, so I want to put a plug in for the next webinars. On November fifth, we will hear from Jim Dixon who is at the University of New Mexico. He's a very well known and well respected Arctic archaeologist. He's been involved in a number of research projects related to the peopling of the new world by via Berengia, and will share with us his thoughts on a maritime route for colonization.
Switching oceans, on November 12, Charles Mead will report on efforts to locate a French fleet of ships that went down in waters off the coast of Florida in 1565 and Mead is part of the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program, the research on the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum. I think there has been park service involvement in this project as well. It will be very interesting to hear what they've found.
Dave Conlin is resisting, but if I can bend him to my will, he will give a recap and an update of his very interesting talk, "One Ship, Two Ship, Our Ship, Who's Ship? Untangling Submerged Cultural Resources Laws". We weren't able to record this talk when he gave it for the webinar series four years ago, so I want to make sure that I get a copy of that for our library. I hope it doesn't also involve a major health hazard on his part immediately afterwards, which is what happened to him last time. He is back and in fine health.
December third, Steven Lubkemann is going to talk us about a project that George Washington University, the National Park Service, and a number of other partners have been involved with, to investigate a slave ship that sank just off shore of Cape Town, South Africa. There is going to be, I think, a PBS program about this, just prior to his presentation. He didn't want to give it until afterwards, so that he wouldn't scoop the television program. I'm very excited to hear about that.
After December third we're going to take a break and we will start up in January with another series of talks on the same topic. I'll talk more about that when the time comes.
Today, I'm very happy to welcome Anne Vawser, back to ArcheoThursday. She has been a strong supporter of the series and has never turned down an invitation to talk to us about research being carried out by the Midwest Archeology Center, which I appreciate very much. Today, she is going to report on archaeological work that the center has been conducting at Wind Cave National Park. The park has recently acquired a new property, which contains a habitation site located near a game drive. I was recently tasked with a review of some of the park documents and I was really impressed with the complexity of cultural resources on this piece of property. We're very lucky that the Park Service was able to negotiate the acquisition and preservation of these resources. I heard an earlier presentation by Anne on this research and I'm eager to hear what the archaeologists have learned since than.
Thank you for speaking to us today, Anne. Oh, I forgot to change my power-point, let me just ... There it is. Sorry everybody, I spent so much time putting this together, I just wanted people to look at it. Okay, Anne, you can switch it out.
Anne: Very nice. That picture is actually, we held a public day which I will talk a little bit about, last year, and had a good group of visitors come out, so we were showing them some of our excavations.
Karen: Oh, very good. I'm sorry I got the timing wrong, but I'm glad to be able to put that up.
Anne: No problem. Okay, so I'm going to switch back and forth a little bit between the power-point and some little videos that I put together for this. We'll see how that goes. Beginning of 2012, we had the opportunity to work at, what I think is a really fascinating site, at Wind Cave National Park called the Sanson Site. Today, I plan to give you an overview of the site and talk a little bit about it's relationship to some other sites and other features around it. I'm also going to touch on how the National Park Service is planning to use this site to enhance their interpretation of American Indian use of the park area.
The Sanson Site, which is 39CU2, is a multicomponent site, that is located at Wind Cave National Park in the southern Black Hills of South Dakota. The site included a prehistoric occupation, as well as the historic Sanson Ranch, which was originally established in 1880. This site, the prehistoric site, was first recorded in 1948, as what they termed a "buffalo fall." It was also later investigated by Larry Agenbroad in 1972 and 1973. The first really extensive investigations were undertaken by us, at the Midwest Archaeological Center beginning in 2012. As Karen mentioned, the land that the site is located on was added to Wind Cave in 2011. Our investigations were initially undertaken because the park wanted more information about the site for possible interpretation to the public. If you're looking at this image, you can see the boundary of the park there. That is actually the old boundary. It's that sort of little key hole area in the middle is where the Sanson Site is, that is the property that was added to the park.
Previous investigations at the site had really focused on the area of, what are believed to be, drive lines leading to a hundred foot high drop off, and what was hoped to be a bison bone bed at the base of the bluff. While bison bone and the hearths were discovered by Agenbroad, the site did not appear to contain extensive bone beds, like many other bone bed buffalo jumps, like the Vore site. For some, this brought into question whether the site was indeed a buffalo jump. When we designed our research beginning in 2012 we designed our investigations to discover as much about the possible jump, but also about other features that might be at the site. We continued that work in 2014. Just to give you an idea of how prominent the drive line features are, in this image I've turned off the GPS data overlays, so that you can see the drive lines actually visible on the air photo. You can go into Google Earth and check it out, it's pretty interesting.
I don't have time today to go into detail about all of the different investigations that we've conducted and all the different work that we've done. I thought I would provide, kind of, a quick summary and then focus on a couple of important aspects about the site and why we think it’s so important.
Beginning in 2012 our work included pedestrian inventory,geo physical prospection, magnetometer survey was the work that we did then, archaeological excavation, which is indicated by the little blue boxes on the slide. Also, geoarchaeological evaluation of the valley floor deposits through trenches, and also extensive mapping of futures using survey-grade GPS. When we left the field in 2012 we knew that there were areas that we hadn't looked at yet, and we knew that there was more out there to be discovered. We returned in 2014 and expanded our investigations, we added a lot more area of pedestrian inventory, did some more geophysical prospections, some more excavations, more mapping, and then we also did metal detector survey around some of the historic buildings, which turned out to be crazy when you think of a hundred years of historic occupation that turns out to be a lot of metal.
What we have discovered so far, to date, the site area comes to about 76 acres overall. There are still areas that we haven't had time to look at. I think eventually it will be larger than that. Based on the artifacts and the features that we've recorded, the activities that we believe took place at the site includes communal hunting, food and hide processing, habitation, ceremonial activities, among others.
Some of the features that we've recorded include drive lines, as well as other rock alignments, rock cairns stone circles, hearths, animal bones, and various artifact concentrations. Artifacts observed so far include debitage in a variety of materials including chert, quartzite, and obsidian. We haven't had a chance to source the obsidian yet to find out where it's coming from. Artifacts that were collected include a variety of tools including scrapers, bifaces, choppers, drills, projectile points, pottery. Some of the other materials that we recovered include pottery, bottle remains, charcoal, soil samples. These are just a few examples of some of the projectile point faces and the hafted scraper which we found quite a few of those and a very large chopper.
The Sanson family also had made collections of projectile points and other materials from the site. Their collections included several obsidian projectile points and also Knife River Flint and at least one metal projectile point.
As far as dating at the site, so far one [ma-kin-to 00:15:21] point that was collected at the site suggests our earliest date of 4,000 years ago, while our radio carbon dating of charcoal and bison suggests a date range between 12,00 and 7,00 years ago. However, the presence of that metal projectile point in the Sanson collection, if it was from this site, suggests that the site could have been used as recently as 265 years ago, or even later.
While this is all really exciting stuff for any archaeologist, I think one of the things that makes the site really important is also its relationship to other significant features of the southern Black Hills and also how it complements the stories and more of the tribes like the Lakota and the Cheyenne and Arapaho and many other groups that visited and lived in the Black Hills.
The site not only lies within the Black Hills, which is considered sacred by most of the tribes that had associations with that area, but it's near Wind Cave, the cave being believed by the Lakota to be the place of emergence in their tribal lore. It's also very near the Red Valley, or what's called the Racetrack. You can see that here between the outer edge of the hills and the interior hills. The Sanson site is basically right at the edge of the Racetrack - it's that red valley. You can see the red deposits in the soil there. All of these, the Wind Cave, the Racetrack, figure prominently in Lakota stories. Also, Buffalo Gapis a major landmark and passageway from the plains to the hills and you can see in this slide the Buffalo Gap is very near where the Sanson place.
Just to kind of confirm that relationship, or importance of Buffalo Gap, I have a quote from Luther Standing Bear who was born in 1868 and he describes Buffalo Gap as a passageway where the buffalo entered into the hills for the winter. When he was a child he said his people followed the buffalo through the gap to create winter camps. Their use of the gap in the Southern Black Hills for winter camps was also described by Nicholas Black Elk.
What Standing Bear wrote, to quote him, "According to tribal legend, these hills were a reclining female figure from whom breasts flowed life giving force and to them the Lakota went as a child to its mother's arms. The various entrances to the hills were very rough and rugged, but there was one very beautiful and easy path through which both buffalo and Lakota entered. Every fall thousands of buffalo and Lakotas went through this path to spend the winter in the hills. It was called by the Lakotas 'Gate of the Buffalo'."
I think, significant to the Sanson site location, if groups were moving from the plains to the hills through Buffalo Gap, they would have been following Beaver Creek and they would have passed through the gap, across the Racetrack and the first place they would have come to at the edge of the hills themselves would be the Sanson Site which was on Beaver Creek.
Now I'm going to try to switch back over to our little video here. This is a little fly over that will give you an idea of what that trip would have been like passing through Buffalo Gap to the Sanson Site. Here's Buffalo Gap, Beaver Creek falling from the hills out to the plain. You can see it's a pretty general little valley, a nice little pass through there, wide terraces;it would have been easy to follow the creek. Once it gets to the valley it sort of turns off to the north, unfortunately there's an ugly gravel pit there, but then now you can see it's heading back to the west towards the hills and Beaver Creek and Sanson Site, right along Beaver Creet. As the crow flies, it’s just about four miles from the gap to Sanson Site. Then this is just zooming in on the drive lines on the jump there.
How do I go back here? Hopefully, we end up in the right place. Beaver Creek is fed by a spring and so the creek would have provided access to water for both bison and people. In these photos the creeks are all dry and Carl Sanson who lived there into the [19]80s indicated that Beaver Creek ran up until 1950 and then went dry. We discovered this last spring when it rained for two months that it does run and it's actually shown on the geotopographical maps as a perennial stream. I think what happened, probably, with the increases in agriculture and use of wells for center pivots the aquifers have gone down but with all the rain they had this spring it actually refilled aquifers enough that the springs could begin to flowagain so both Beaver Creek and Cottonwood Creek were flowing quite heavily this last summer. There is a spring right by the Sanson Ranch Headquarters there.
Obviously, a great location, easy access from the gap, you've got two creeks there, you've got flowing water, you've got great grassland for the bison, and of course, the nearby bluff that would have provided the needed dropoff for the buffalo jump. Then up in the upper right corner here there's another picture of the air photo that shows the drive line. This site really would have provided the perfect opportunity for late autumn communal hunts, where you have smaller groups coming together at one location to participate in a communal hunt. That would have provided the needed stores of meats and hides that would have sustained them through winter months as they moved further into the hills.
The jump may have only been used by earlier visitors though, because once groups acquired the horse, they began to abandon communal drives, hunting instead from horseback. However the location still would have been a very good place to gather and hunt, regardless whether the jump was used or not. The other advantage of this location at the confluence of the of Beaver and Cottonwood Creeks is that it would have provided access to Wind Cave itself. In this slide you can see the location of Sanson Site and then on the left side, the location of Wind Cave which would have been accessed through Wind Cave Canyon. Again, the natural opening of Wind Cave is believed by many tribes to represent their place of emergence.
We'll take a little gander at what that trip would have been like. If I'm starting up at Sanson Ranch, and again that's Beaver Creek on the north there, and then the drainage to the south, what we're going to fly through is Cottonwood Creek, which runs through Wind Cave Canyon. We were able to do inventory in that canyon this summer. Fortunately, they had a little wildfire so it burned it all off and we were able to find quite a few sites, I think, several of which were probably winter camps and probably associated with the Sanson Site. You can see as we go through here there's some small terraces that would have been good for occupation. We found some other collections of stone circles there. Going through Wind Cave Canyon and then eventually to the natural opening of the cave itself.
We think the groups likely gathered here in large numbers in the fall, hunt bison, spent their time processing the meat and hides. The large group size is evidenced by a number of factors, not the least of which is a large collection of stone circles. Both those have been discovered by us to date and those that were reported by the Sanson Family. When Larry Agenbroad visited the site in 1972 he told me that Carl Sanson who had been born and raised and lived most of his life on the ranch, told him that the entire terrace between the two creeks was covered with stone circles. Unfortunately, these were all picked up by the family so the terrace could be cultivated for hay so now there are piles of stone along the edge of the creek. It's good to have that knowledge that there was such an extensive use of the area.
This slide just kind of gives you an idea of how we sort of interpreted the use of space, the large habitation area along the creek. Up in the right hand corner there, that's the gathering basin where they would have sort of herded the buffalo towards the jump. Of course the jump itself, hide processing areas, and then some of the other activities that we believe took place at the site. These are some of the stone circles that we have recorded to date, mostly along the edges of terraces where it wasn't cultivated so you can see on the right hand side there they are all surviving just right along that terrace, and just above that you can see that that was cultivated. Some of them did survive.
Food processing activities are indicated by the several hearths that we found to date as well as a large number of processing tools such as choppers, bifaces, and scrapers. Just tons of scrapers at the site, as well as a lot of well formed scrapers as well as just a lot of utilized flakes and very expedient tools. The bone bed below the jump so far has not proven to be extensive. Bison bone has been recovered from that area as well as along the creek bank. I mentioned that photo at the beginning. We did an excavation where some bison bone was eroding from the bank last summer, in 2014. We found fairly large pieces of bison down there and then also some smaller pieces in association with a hearth, the hearth that you see in this feature, which was excavated in 2012.
The lack of an extensive bone bed is likely the result of several factors, including what we believe are probably smaller drives where they weren't driving large herds they were just driving as many animals as they really needed. But, also, we think we had a pretty large group using this area so I think it was probably very efficient use of the bison they did kill. There wasn't a lot left behind. Also, it being that close to the stream we think there was also probably flash flooding and stream action that would have washed away some of the bone bed that remained.
One of the other interesting features that we found this last year when we were there, what we believe to be prayer circles. These features have a direct view across the valley to the drive line. Some of the ethnographic resources that I've looked at indicate that in the use of pounds andin jumps usually a shaman or a medicine man would have the job of calling the bison to the trap during a communal hunt. We believe that might be what these features represent, that the shaman or medicine man would have been across from the jump recitinging his prayers, calling the bison to the jump for the people. I should point out that the suggestion that that's what these features might be, which are likely these semicircular stone alignments which have other stones incorporated in significant ways. The suggestion that they might be prayer circles was actually made by one of the tribal monitors that was working with us in 2014.
This is just another view from that area where these features were found to the drive line and on the opposite side of the creek. We think that groups were coming here in the fall, hunting bison, and then likely moving on into the main interior of thehills for the winter. Probably would have broken up into smaller groups as they moved into the hills for the winter. Probably following Beaver Creek Canyon and also probably Cottonwood Creek and Wind Cave Canyon. We've found many sites in the more interior parts of the park that have four or five stone circles just on these little terraces in these canyons. They probably represent these smaller family groups in winter camps. Again, to just give you an idea of what that trip might have been like to move into the interior of the hills, following Beaver Creek Canyon this time. We will be doing inventory in Beaver Creek Canyon next summer. Really looking forward to getting a chance to get in there and see what we see.
You can see how that canyon, when you follow it, takes you into the more interior portions of the hills. Sorry about having to jump back and forth, I couldn't figure out how to make it work from inside the PowerPoint. The presence of this important site is one of the reasons that the National Park Service wanted to acquire this land and add it to the park. Despite the extensive archaeological records at the park, there really hasn't been much of an effort on their part in the past to interpret American Indian history to park visitors. Park staff, I think, see this site as an opportunity to more fully embrace the prehistory of the park, engage those tribes and educate the public about the history of Native people and their relationship to the Black Hills.
These are some of the monitors and volunteers that worked with us last year. The park plans to interpret the buffalo jump to the public. That's one of the reasons that we've been able to conduct the research that we have at the park so far, because they realize they needed to know more about it if they were going to interpret it. While it's an excellent opportunity to tell a story of the prehistoric lifeways in the hills, as archeologists we must also make sure we provide accurate information for interpretation as well as protect research from damage from visitors. For that reason we worked very closely with park planners to determine the best locations for interpretive signing and other features like trails, visitor facilities like parking lots and restrooms. And that's an ongoing process.
Along those lines, the park has held several consultation meetings with multiple tribes to discuss their plans for interpretation and visitor use. Again they also have invited tribal monitors to work with us in doing our investigation. Unfortunately we didn't have anybody join us in 2012 but we did have three folks from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe that worked with us last year. Their assistance and input, has been valuable to our investigations. Going forward we'll continue to work with the tribes as we discover more about the site and the park plans to interpret it. The park does plan to have the tribes help develop interpretive materials for signs or displays. The park wants to make sure that their story is being told the way that they want the story to be told. I think that's going to be a great opportunity. I think the opportunity to really interpret this kind of site to the public is going to be a very valuable visitor experience.
We've already sort of begun the public education. We held a public media day in 2012 as well as a public day. We also had a public day in 2014, we had a lot of visitors come out to the site. It's also been a subject of several news articles and a TV station video last year. A lot of the progress we've made is due to the great help of volunteers and the crew so I just, in closing, want to thank the volunteers that came and worked with us and the crew that have worked with us over both years on this project.
I'll just kind of close with one more little video of the jump itself. It was very nice of Google Earth to have a photograph that has cattle in it. They can sort of be our surrogate buffalo. While I show you this I'll also point out that the park has contracted with the tribes for two different traditional cultural property studies of the area so that is also going to be, I think, invaluable to our understanding of this thing.
So thank you very much, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have .
Karen: Anne, thanks for that very interesting talk. Do we have any questions? Wow I think you nailed it Anne. I have a couple of questions. I'm sorry that I didn't interrupt you at the time, but when you were showing us the distribution of the different types of cultural resources, it looked like there was a concentration of dung tools on top of the plateau. Do I have that right?
Anne: I can go back. Yes. There's a couple different areas where we have concentrations of ... Was it that one you were ... looking at this one, or?
Karen: No, it was an earlier one. Also - that one might work just as well to demonstrate.
Anne: Yeah there's several different areas where we have concentrations, maybe this is one of the ones you were thinking of, concentrations of artifacts that ... I mean this one where there's all the green and yellow and blue dots, that's an area where it's sort of eroded out. There are also other areas where you can see where there's a lot of exposed bedrock. Some of those concentrations are more of a result of visibility, I think, than activity. But we were finding in these areas up on the ridges, where the bedrock areas are, and the higher points, that's where we were finding a lot of scrapers. We think that that's where they were doing hide processing, taking advantage of the higher areas, angles of the sun, and air movements to dry hides.
Karen: Ah, okay. How interesting. Did you see any shift, or do you have enough resolution to be able to see different parts of the landscape being used at different times in the past, or is the scale too broad to discriminate that way?
Anne: Yeah, I think mostly we're lacking dating information probably to assess whether different parts were being used at different times. I think the site was being revisited time and again, maybe on an annual basis, or maybe less often than that. But I think groups were moving through at different times. Likely, depending on the size of the group that was there, they may have set up their tipis in one area one year and taken advantage of a different area another year. I had hoped to try to recover some regular carbon samples from hearth features in the stone circles but we haven't had time yet to excavate any of those. The only radiocarbon dates we have are from a hearth which is down on the valley floor and, of course, the hearth that Agenbroad excavated which is also at the bone bed, and then the actual bison bone from the bone bed.
I think we need some more dating information to look at what different areas were used at different times.
Karen: Was this site previously known to the tribes that you worked with?
Anne: That's a good question. I've had some individuals tell me that they were aware of the site and the tribe is aware of that site and that it's in their tribal knowledge, but other groups that have gone out there have not made that kind of indication, so I think to some it might have been.
Karen: That's very interesting. I hadn't thought about archaeologists being able to augment or reinforce or even inform tribes about their own tribal history.
Anne: Yeah I think that's one of the things I kind of want to work on going forward because I'm learning about other protohistoric period sites in the park. I'm really hoping to work with the tribes more in terms of what do we know and what do they know and how can that inform and enhance their knowledge of their history in the park area.
Karen: Wow, what an interesting project. What do you have planned for the coming year?
Anne: We're going to do more inventory in Beaver Creek Canyon. The Park, of course, wants to open up the entire addition to visitor youth and so they have a draft visitor use plan. But we want to inventory as much as we can before they put trails in and start opening it up to back country camping so we know what areas might need to be protected or closed off.
Karen: Are there any other questions for Anne? All right, well thank you very much. I'm going to ask everybody to just stand down for a minute while I swap out the presentations and I have to stop and start our recording again so I'll be right back.
Description
Anne Vawser, 10/15/2015, ArcheoThursday
Duration
29 minutes, 48 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
10/15/2015
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