Another Range Creek Adventure

This week we spent four days in Range Creek discovering and recording new sites. The fall colors were beautiful, with maple, sumac, aspen and cottonwoods turning florescent orange, red and gold, and purple asters, wild sunflower and rabbitbrush in full bloom.

Our crew of six over the weekend included volunteers Casey Dooms and Randi Jo Martin, and CEU students Jen Zivkovich, Gary Ortega and Gordon Craft. Casey drove all the way from his new digs in Cedar City (bad pun intended) to help out with the project, and he and Randi are both former CEU students from Price. Thank you Casey and Randi!

Fremont mano in Range Creek

We recorded a new Fremont farming village even higher in elevation than "Appliqué House," with another probable masonry structure on the edge of a natural terrace at the top of the site, and a beautiful pithouse with upright slab walls on the next terrace below it. We named it the "Mano Site" since we initially found a perfect two-hand Fremont mano made of purple quartzite imported from the Vernal area. Although it is less than a hundred meters from Appliqué House, which yielded dozens of Fremont appliqué ceramics, there are no appliqué sherds on the mano site. In fact, there are no appliqué ceramics on any site in Range Creek other than Appliqué House.

We first revisited Appliqué House so that the new students could see the site. Jen, Gary and Gordon are hard at work cleaning, labeling and analyzing the Appliqué House ceramics, lithics and groundstone in the lab at CEU, and this helped them put the artifacts into context. The most difficult part of the exercise was learning to recognize artifacts on the ground, but by the second day most were able to identify ceramics and chipped stone lithics, and distinguish these from natural stones and colluvial debris.

Fremont structure at the top of the "Mano Site"

We worked at the Mano Site Saturday and Sunday, where we recorded, photographed and sketched five bifaces, a Cottonwood triangular projectile point, two hammerstones, the perfect mano, three ceramics below the pithouse and second terrace (which Jen refit, forming part of an Emery grayware jar that was polished on the exterior and scraped on the interior), three metate fragments around and below the wall of the possible circular masonry structure, or "Fremont Pueblo" at the top of the site, a handful of other ceramics, and dozens of lithic debitage flakes that included white, gray, red, purple and brown cherts, translucent chalcedony, and gray quartzite.

Fremont pithouse on a natural terrace at the "Mano Site"

We also took a trip down the canyon to visit the rock art and granaries at Nelson Canyon and look at "Burnout Village," where we will begin excavations next spring.

Petroglyphs on monolith south of the confluence with Nelson Canyon

Camping was an adventure on Saturday night, as a thunder/lightning storm moved in and flooded the camp, literally. Jen's tent was blown over in the storm, and Gary ignored the gear list and didn't even bring a tent. He insisted that he had spent many nights camped in colder temperatures and worse conditions when he worked on fire crews, and that he didn't need one. He lit a campfire between storms, and we told stories and roasted Jiffy Pop over the coals. The clouds cleared for a while and we saw Venus and some beautiful stars, and the Milky Way was as bright as I had ever seen it.

We also recorded a new granary 700 feet above Range Creek, in the sandstone ridge high above camp, and began documenting a rockshelter site with charcoal and lithic artifacts 500 feet above camp. This is the best time to visit Range Creek!

Red adobe granary 700 ft above Range Creek

Rockshelter with artifacts and charcoal.

K. Renee Barlow

CEU Excavations at Range Creek & Etc.

We are continuing investigations at a small 1000 year-old Fremont village in the north end of Range Creek, and working on other archaeological projects in the San Rafael Swell, Nine Mile Canyon and the Price River Canyon. In Range Creek we finished excavating a three by one meter area to the floor of what appears to be a very large circular masonry one-room structure, or "Fremont pueblo" that we nicknamed "Appliqué House." The structure appears to have been approximately eight to twelve meters in diameter. It was occupied around AD 1000, most likely during the hot summer months. Dr. Reese Barrick and Amber Schweiger visited the site and helped screen and find artifacts, and we have recovered grayware ceramics, appliqué ceramics, mano fragments, stone and ceramic pendants, a hammerstone, lithic waste flakes, a projectile point, a biface fragment, charcoal, animal bone and a Fremont stone ball, with some artifacts clustered on the floor near a small ash-filled hearth. We also recovered samples for Carbon-14 dating and sediment analyses. We will continue excavating Appliqué House during the 2009 CEU archaeological field school next summer, and will start excavations at the "Burnout Village," later this month.



Last week we excavated a deep one-by-one meter test pit on the floodplain below "Appliqué House." The goal of these small tests units placed just off-site is to recover sediment that is approximately 1000 years old that may yield evidence of maize farming, and possibly prehistoric irrigation or farming features near Range Creek. We dug through several levels of rocks, silts, sands and charcoal lenses, and collected sediment samples for pollen, phytolith and chemical analyses from approximately 1.5 meters below the current ground surface.



Hopi Visit
We also met with the Director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office and four Hopi elders, who were very excited about the Range Creek flute and other artifacts in the museum. They feel that the Fremont of this region may be part of their ancestral clans, and would like to visit Range Creek with us to look at rock art.

The Cliff Green Site
This week we recorded a new Fremont site near one of the Dinosaur Quarries in the San Rafael desert. The site was literally washing away towards a small side drainage, and included multiple sherds from a single, small Emery gray jar that had been dropped or cached at the site, two stone cores, part of a biface and several pieces of chipped stone.



Upcoming Conference Presentations
We will be presenting a paper and a poster at the Great Basin Anthropological Conference in Portland. The paper is "The Fremont Granaries of Range Creek: Defensive Maize Storage on the Colorado Plateau." The poster is called "Archaeology of the San Rafael" and will include information multiple sites we are investigating as part of our newest CEU project: the San Rafael Archaeological Project.

The Archaeology of Range Creek
Located on the northern Colorado Plateau, Range Creek is one of the deep canyons of the Green River drainage. The terrain is rugged and steep, and heavily vegetated. Range Creek Canyon cuts through the Roan Cliffs on the West Tavaputs Plateau, and is a major tributary of the Green River with a confluence just below Desolation Canyon. The perennial creek and springs provide a constant, predictable supply of fresh water, and the Douglas fir forests, pinyon/juniper woodlands, lush riparian thickets and desert saltbush communities of Range Creek hosted a substantial prehistoric population of farmers and foragers.

The archaeological record of Range Creek is unique. After seven seasons of fieldwork approximately 400 archaeological sites have been discovered and documented, including more than 100 sites with rock art, 148 granaries, and dozens of small pithouse villages. The majority of sites are associated with the Fremont culture, and the people who produced them hunted and farmed maize, beans and squash throughout much of Utah and parts of Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming from approximately AD 400 to 1350. Archaic peoples who were part of the same culture that painted the beautiful Barrier Canyon pictographs in Horseshoe Canyon and Buckhorn Wash camped in the canyon and probably hunted sheep and deer on the ridges above the floodplain beginning between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago.



The earliest Fremont started farming in the canyon by about AD 400. From this time to about AD 800, these ancient people mostly used the lower canyon for hunting, collecting wild plants, and cultivating small plots of maize and gourds. They probably lived in small, mobile bands like the Paiute hunter-gatherers of southern Utah, planting seeds and crops at a half dozen locations in several different canyons. Later in the year they would return, harvesting their crops and wild plant foods and storing them in small juniper, sandstone slab and adobe-lined bins, or "cists" in the floors of caves and shallow alcoves.


Between AD 930 and AD 1040, the Fremont in Range Creek began faming the middle and upper reaches of the canyon and became a unique, local cultural entity. They inhabited dozens of small pithouse villages on the first rise above the canyon floor, stored their maize in large granaries on the cliffs, and built circular masonry rooms on prominent knolls above farms and villages. They painted shields, spirals, snakes, and figures of people in masks, and constructed a few village sites high on the ridges, 800 to 1700 feet above the canyon floor. They farmed corn, harvested local seeds and hunted bighorn sheep and deer. They mainly used local pottery and raw lithic materials from the area of the San Rafael Swell, Ivie Creek and the Muddy River, but also imported cherts, quartzite, obsidian and pottery from other Fremont regions, including areas near Vernal, Fillmore, and Richfield.



By AD 1160, agriculture in Range Creek was waning. The cliff granaries were abandoned by this time, and only a few, larger villages in the middle and lower portions of the canyon appear to have been occupied. Perhaps they lived year-round in the canyon, and stored their maize in the houses like some Fremont in other regions. In addition to the traditional small Fremont grayware jars, they used large trough-shaped grinding stones, decorated black-on-white bowls, large corrugated cooking jars, and Tsegi orangeware and polychrome pottery. They probably traded for some Kayenta Anasazi wares with Fremont or Anasazi neighbors to the south, along the Green River and Colorado River corridors. The Range Creek Fremont appear to have abandoned the canyon by AD 1200.

ciao-