Dig unearths 9,500 years of native inhabitants in Wyoming
Underneath a white tent near Game Creek along Highway 89/191, University of Wyoming archeology student Bryon Schroeder sits in a 6- foot-deep hole troweling out the winding path of a rodent burrow through a square of gray earth.
Schroeder excavates the burrows first so the rodent-churned dirt doesn’t contaminate the cake layers of history that jut out at perfect right angles from the walls and floor like an M.C. Escher drawing.
On one wall, the charred, fractured stones of a partially exposed roasting pit are visible at waist level. Given its location in the strata, the pit likely dates back 3,000 to 5,000 years, when it probably was used to roast tubers such as sego lily.
On the floor, another square of earth was scraped away to expose the tops of river cobbles.
“That’s the ice age,” says Rich Adams, a senior archeologist from the office of the Wyoming State Archeologist. “Right there, those river cobbles, that’s probably pre-human habitation of Jackson Hole.”
While some might think of Jackson Hole as untrammeled before a handful of trappers made their way here in the early 1800s, the written history of the region is just a postscript on the 10,000 years or so that prehistoric and Native American tribes lived in this region.
This site, discovered in 2001 when the Wyoming Department of Transportation decided to widen the highway, adds a wealth of information to that narrative.
Adams and senior archeologist Mike Page, the leader for this dig, have directed the unearthing of artifacts that give clues as to who visited the site and when. A small army of archeologists sifts through every square inch of dirt. That dirt is then “water screened,” a technique that sifts material to detect artifacts as small as one-eighth of an inch wide....
Read entire article at Jacksonville News (WY)
Schroeder excavates the burrows first so the rodent-churned dirt doesn’t contaminate the cake layers of history that jut out at perfect right angles from the walls and floor like an M.C. Escher drawing.
On one wall, the charred, fractured stones of a partially exposed roasting pit are visible at waist level. Given its location in the strata, the pit likely dates back 3,000 to 5,000 years, when it probably was used to roast tubers such as sego lily.
On the floor, another square of earth was scraped away to expose the tops of river cobbles.
“That’s the ice age,” says Rich Adams, a senior archeologist from the office of the Wyoming State Archeologist. “Right there, those river cobbles, that’s probably pre-human habitation of Jackson Hole.”
While some might think of Jackson Hole as untrammeled before a handful of trappers made their way here in the early 1800s, the written history of the region is just a postscript on the 10,000 years or so that prehistoric and Native American tribes lived in this region.
This site, discovered in 2001 when the Wyoming Department of Transportation decided to widen the highway, adds a wealth of information to that narrative.
Adams and senior archeologist Mike Page, the leader for this dig, have directed the unearthing of artifacts that give clues as to who visited the site and when. A small army of archeologists sifts through every square inch of dirt. That dirt is then “water screened,” a technique that sifts material to detect artifacts as small as one-eighth of an inch wide....