THE DIRT THIS WEEK: UVU Archaeology Interns in Range Creek

This week Utah Valley University archaeology interns worked in Range Creek-- mapping, GPS'ing, FS'ing, backfilling, excavating, screening for artifacts, visiting rock art and granary sites, and helping CEU close down the site for the season. UVU Honors Program Coordinator Allen Hill brought interns Chantel, Cami, Jana, Rebekah, Leslie, Candace, Madison, Daniel, Kali and Camber for three days of work and fun.

We talked about the Fremont culture, and Range Creek Fremont in particular, while we backfilled the Appliqué House structure at the Little Village, site 42Cb2316. With this crew it only took about 2 hours to completely refill the approximately four by five meter excavation area of the southeast 1/3 of the 1000-1200 year old Fremont house that CEU spent several months gridding, excavating, mapping and photographing, then had a look at the "tripod man" rock art site before setting up camp for the evening. The students cooked dinner and made cheesecake and a wonderful fire-- with good company and conversation.

 

In spite of evening and morning campfires it was COLD. The first night plummeted to 27 degrees with frost and ice-- a very long night.... The next day we moved down the canyon to site 42Em15, the Burnout. This is the largest Fremont village in Range Creek, with approximately 14 pithouses, several stone "towers" and midden deposits, and the ruins of an historic 'still.

The students took turns rotating through the different tasks, and learned to identify and map artifacts and archaeological features using a Topcom total station, use the prism, record artifact and feature locations on a professional grade GPS, assign Field Specimen numbers to artifacts, record the three types of field data for our paper records, and excavate and screen for artifacts. These students are amazing! In addition to recovering lithic and ceramic artifacts, and charcoal and small pieces of debitage from the excavation unit, Leslie found a whole, classic Fremont clay pipe.

On the way back to camp we looked at rock art and a large granary site, and talked more about the Fremont, and possible links to other Native Americans in this region and the Southwest, particularly the Hopi. In the evening there was another wonderful campfire, cheesecake and snickers, and a great discussion of highlights and challenges, poetry and things we were grateful for, and lots of madness and snapping.

That night was much warmer, a toasty 34 degrees! The students were up and breaking camp early and back on site for more mapping, GPS'ing, artifact cataloging, backfilling, and building raised walkways for visitor pathways across the site.

Wow. Thank you UVU honors students! I am very impressed with this program and all the participants, and hope you will come back again next year.

 

Renee Barlow, Ph.D.

Curator of Archaeology

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum

451 East 400 North, Price, Utah  84501

phone/voicemail 435-613-5290

New blog from Range Creek: deep cultural deposits

 In the last week we excavated a dark black, cultural stratum in the south portion of one of the pithouses at the Burnout site in Range Creek, and built about 40 feet of walkway so visitors can walk across the  site and past the excavation without walking on artifacts or cultural features. Thanks to Sutherlands for donating about $120 worth of lumber cuts to CEU!

  

 

Volunteers Kerk and Ron helped out at the site. Kerk found a gorgeous stone bead, and Ron found a nearly complete, beautiful projectile point. (Kerk also made a fantastic dutch oven peach cobbler at camp for dessert and breakfast!) We removed the layer of adobe, charcoal and cultural debris from the collapsed roof, then began excavating the thick, black layer of sandy sediment beneath, with dense artifacts from the house interior. It appears to have burned so hot that there is little solid wood charcoal left from the wooden beams and withes in the roof, just the blackish sediment. We did find a few pieces of charcoal, including one near the bottom of the level, that may yield an informative radiocarbon date.

Artifacts are abundant in this level, especially small pieces of lithic debitage and broken lithic tools from nearly a dozen different toolstone sources. We recovered nearly 500 specimens during two days of excavation, including a nearly whole projectile point and several smaller projectile fragments, a biface, part of a mano/grinding stone, three beads, broken animal bones from deer-size animals and birds, and a handful of ceramics-- including the rim of a Tsegi orangeware bowl imported from the Pueblo/Hitsatsinom culture region in Arizona.

Renee Barlow, Ph.D.

Curator of Archaeology

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum

451 East 400 North, Price, Utah  84501

phone/voicemail 435-613-5290

Range Creek Again...

This week the CEU archaeology class took a field trip into Range Creek. We toured the "Applique House" excavation at the small Fremont Village called 42Cb2316, visited several rock art and granary sites lower in the canyon, and then visited the current excavation that we just began at the "Burnout Village," site 42Em15.

The students looked at the excavation and the lithics and ceramic surface artifacts marked for mapping, and learned to identify the remains of classic Fremont pithouses. Dorian identified a lithic artifact near the excavation that had not yet been flagged, and the whole crew looked at two new probable cultural "features," or concentrations of artifacts with dark, ashy deposits that may be associated with a pithouse and/or midden.

 

The excavation and analyses continue, with more lithics, ceramics and adobe, and what promises to be a very interesting, dark cultural level beneath the probable adobe roof-fall level. Looks like we will have an intact floor for next week's excavators to uncover.

Next week.... flintknapping to learn prehistoric tool production techniques.

Renee Barlow, Ph.D.

Curator of Archaeology

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum

451 East 400 North, Price, Utah  84501

phone/voicemail 435-613-5290

CEU Archaeology Lab

We have four new archaeology students working in the lab at CEU cleaning artifacts and learning the basics of lithic analyses. Sarah, Darius, Mariel and Ron are learning to process the lithic, ceramic and ground stone artifacts recovered from Range Creek this summer, and will also work with the faunal remains and plant macrofossils later in the semester. This week they are identifying different types of lithic material found in Range Creek, (such as obsidian vs. chalcedony, chert or quartzite), stage of reduction (percussion flakes with cortex vs. small biface reduction and sharpening flakes made with antler tools), and tool types, such as bifaces, projectile points, scrapers or utilized flakes. The data these students collect from the artifacts will help us identify the different activities that were going on in the pithouse during two different Fremont occupations 1000 and 1200 years ago, and also help us track a possible shift in exchange networks or land use during this time.

Back in Range Creek

Note David Cassidy, CVAS volunteer, with new friend Lucky.

Later in the week we began mapping, setting up an excavation grid, and excavating at the Burnout Village in Range Creek. The Burnout Village is the largest Fremont site in Range Creek, with at least fourteen Fremont pithouses, the remains of at least two stone masonry Fremont "towers," and the foundation of an historic distillery. CVAS volunteer David Cassidy and CEU archaeology student Ron LaBorde helped with mapping, shoveling, trowel work and screening for artifacts. We are putting test units in several pithouses, and have already found a layer with adobe chunks in the first, indicating a thick roof fall level, possibly capping a well-preserved floor. Artifacts found so far include lithic debitage, ceramic sherds and lots of adobe--several chunks still have impression of fingerprints in them from the people who built this habitation about one thousand to eight hundred years ago.

The weather fluctuated between hot and sunny and 90-plus degrees during the middle of the day, and cool and rainy afternoons with nights in the 40s. We left as the rain started again, and the big storm covered the canyon, but will return this weekend to continue excavating. Stay tuned for more exciting discoveries.....

Renee Barlow, Ph.D.

Curator of Archaeology

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum

451 East 400 North, Price, Utah  84501

phone/voicemail 435-613-5290

The Dirt ....... August 2009 Edition with Lucky, the blind, 3-legged bighorn sheep

During the last several weeks I have been continuing field research in Range Creek, and also preparing a collection donated to the museum by Virgene and Mark Hansen, the wife and son of the late Keith Hansen.  Barb Benson (nicknamed B2) has been helping me catalogue and begin the conservation and accessioning of these artifacts. We are very grateful to the Hansen family for their donation, which includes many artifacts previously on display at the museum, and some of the best examples of Fremont artifacts from eastern Utah, some still labeled with their original accession numbers.

 

 

The decision to deposit these artifacts at the College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum was difficult, but the Hansen Family decided it would be best to keep the artifacts together in a collection, in a location near the private lands where they were collected, and in a facility where they could be preserved and exhibited for the benefit of the people of eastern Utah. We are very impressed with how carefully many of these artifacts have been cared for, and will do our best to curate them for the public "in perpetuity.

  

Bill Heffner, paleontology assistant, and Lloyd Logan, education director, helped with the cataloguing and transfer of metates and manos to the museum. We are very grateful for their assistance and good company during the procedure. It was a lot of fun, and Virgene Hansen treated us to lunch from the local drive-inn. I had a great chocolate malt.

 

Range Creek

In Range Creek I recorded four additional cliff granaries, and did some excavating in Applique House at the Little Village site. The first rappel took me deep into a side canyon of Range Creek, accompanied by my new friend "Lucky," the three-legged bighorn sheep. Lucky is blind, so he wasn't much help with spotting the granary or with the rope set-up, but he was able to make the hike and rap' the 150 foot cliff with me. We collected maize, wood, and sediment samples from three granaries, and are hoping for several dates and pollen assays.

 

The second rap' was a 200 foot drop to record a spectacular cliff granary, and then an additional 50 foot rap' to get to get from the ledge below it past the next set of cliffs to the ground. After setting a single rope backed up on several very secure natural anchors, and using a self-belay device to record the adobe and masonry granary sans roof, I used a double rope/ATC set-up and rapped from a Douglas Fir tree on the lower ledge below the site. After several tries, I finally succeeding in pulling the rope behind me, as taught by Utah County Search and Rescue teams I worked with in Range Creek in 2004/05.

 

This week I also recorded several Archaic localities found by Craig Royce, an instructor at Pinnacle Academy. Mr. Royce has a keen eye for identifying artifacts and prehistoric remains, and is particularly good at identifying diagnostic projectile points from the early to mid- Holocene in the San Rafael Swell and throughout eastern Utah.

I am still conducting excavations in Range Creek, and looking for one or two additional volunteers for September 10-12 and September 24-26. If you are interested in helping out, contact me for details at renee.barlow@ceu.edu, or leave a message with your contact info and the best times to contact you at 435-613-5290. Please call early.  I am a little overwhelmed since I am teaching an archaeology class at the college and I am also still going out into the field and camping 2-4 days per week-- with no cell phone or internet service-- so I will return you call or email as soon as I am back in town and get your message.

Renee Barlow, Ph.D.

Curator of Archaeology

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum

451 East 400 North, Price, Utah  84501

phone/voicemail 435-613-5290

 

The Dirt on Archaeology: California Crew!

This week Elizabeth Seymour and Robert Nash, graduate students at the University of California, Davis, and Christine Zuhlsdorf, graduate student at UCLA, surveyed and sampled sites in Range Creek. The hiking was straight up, usually hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, and always on rough terrain and through heavy brush.

   

The weather was mostly hot and beautiful with bright blue skies, and we heard the howling of the coyotes near camp in the early morning. We reported a fire to dispatch on our first day, after Christine spotted the black smoke billowing on the horizon in the distance.

Robert found a new granary with several maize cobs and large timbers, and we cored a half dozen timbers in the granary on the ledge of the flute site. Elizabeth drilled the best cores-- two complete samples with good outsides (for cutting/death dates) through the center (for birth dates) of the trees. We also found another artifact on the same ledge as the flute site-- a carved wooden handle with hafting element that fits with the wooden shovel we discovered last November!

We were going to complete excavation of the 1200 year-old Fremont floor on Sunday, but were rained out when a big storm rolled in. So, after giving a jump to a family with a Cadillac SUV that wouldn't start, we headed up to the pass in the rain before the road was too wet to travel. 

renee

Renee Barlow, Ph.D.

Curator of Archaeology

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum

451 East 400 North, Price, Utah  84501

phone/voicemail 435-613-5290

The Dirt on Archaeology: Gar Fish and the Lost Fremont Sites

We returned to excavate a thin layer of cultural sediments above the lower, 1200 year old floor on two grid units. The crew consisted of CVAS member Marvin Evans and CEU students Jake Anderson and Sarah Botkin. We only recovered a single lithic artifact from the floor, but Jake and Sarah found it while being filmed, and we took quite a few samples from the floor for pollen, phytolith, and macrofossil analyses for microscopic evidence of the foods they were storing and eating at the site. I am hoping for maize pollen!

We had lots of visitors on site. Rick Shaw from the Sun Advocate, Josie Luke from EmeryTelcom TV, and Janna Monson from KUSA and KASL radio stations examined the excavation at "Applique House" and toured some of the other sites in Range Creek. It was a wonderful excursion until the museum suburban broke down! Luckily, we got a tow back up the canyon, courtesy of Josie Luke and her beautiful new SUV. We also had a great visit from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, led by Bill Bates, the Region Manager in Price, and Mark Connolly, the main security officer in Range Creek.

We also recorded several Fremont sites near Nine Mile Canyon-- including a amall pithouse village with pottery and ground stone, and a large site with maize, three granaries and three rock art panels-- and looked at several additional sites that we will be recording during the next month. Thank you Marvin Evans and Tom and Jeannie McCourt!

Tom McCourt made the most exciting discovery of the week... fossilized scales from a prehistoric gar fish! These fish were predators adapted to shallow, still, murky water. They can be up to 3 meters long, weigh hundreds of pounds, and have been around for about 60-100 million years. Wow!!

Renee Barlow, Ph.D.

Curator of Archaeology

College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum

451 East 400 North, Price, Utah 84501

phone/voicemail 435-613-5290