Archaeology on the Trail
Image: Me holding our GPS in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park.
By Melanie Langa
B.A. History, 2016
Summer Intern at the Yellowstone National Park
Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.
The five weeks since my last blog post have flown by, and it’s hard to believe that my last weekend in the park is staring me in the face. I’m determined to make the most of it; I’ve made plans to get up early to look for wolves (the one Yellowstone critter I really want to see but haven’t yet) and circled at least five undone hikes on my trail map (we’ll see how many I can manage in the next three days.) Just as ten weeks is not nearly enough time to explore all the amazing trails, views and hideaways in Yellowstone, ten weeks is not nearly enough time to do more than scratch the surface of the scope of archaeology in the park. Every day I still discover more interesting files in the lab or hone my skills identifying obsidian flakes and stone tools at field sites. One experience in particular provided a chance to practice and apply all I’d learned during this internship thus far.
From July 29th to August 7th I assisted with a field project on a mountain at the eastern boundary of Yellowstone. Prior to coming to the park I’d spent time in the backcountry for backpacking or camping trips, but never for fieldwork and never for such an extended period of time. This site’s remoteness makes carrying out regular field tasks challenging. I was lucky enough to be able to tag along for all 48 miles: both the backpacking and the fieldwork portions of the expedition, and learned much as a result. Under the direction of Dan Eakin, who works for the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist and Dr. Staffan Peterson, the Yellowstone Park Archaeologist, who’s my supervisor this summer, our field crew surveyed a potential campsite for a group of Nez Perce fleeing the U.S. Cavalry in 1877.
Bands of Nez Perce, passed through Yellowstone National Park, only five years old at the time, during their flight from the army, which lasted from June to October of 1877. After refusing to move from their ancestral lands to a reservation in Idaho, the Nez Perce fought a series of skirmishes with the U.S., travelling more than 1000 miles in the process. The Nez Perce National Historic Trail commemorates these battles, but the exact route of the Nez Perce in this area is not known with certainty. Our investigation attempted to systematically map and gather further information about a site at which the Nez Perce may have camped at before their exit of the area recently designated as Yellowstone National Park, and subsequent capture at the Bear Paw Battle.
This archaeological site doesn’t look like a scene out of Indiana Jones. It’s not a big hole in the ground. We were looking for evidence of a camp where roughly 800 people and 2,000 horses spent two or three days. This means such evidence might be spread out over a large area and come in forms other than buried deposits. Past investigations at this site have focused on axe-cut tree stumps, which might have been used for fuel or shelter. This year, we mapped these axe-cut stumps, finding more in the process, and used metal detectors to survey areas around these stumps looking for further diagnostic evidence of a Nez Perce camp. Our survey this year added to the overall knowledge of the site, and returned some period artifacts not documented earlier.
I personally excavated a fork, a cartridge case, and some food cans potentially from 1877. Even after documentation of such finds, the challenge is building a case that these things are in fact from a particular occupation and not simply refuse from others passing through the park. Last season, the team took samples of some of the axe-cut stumps to date them based on the appearance of the rings. Several of the samples dated to the late growing season of 1877: exactly the time when the Nez Perce would have been in the area. Dating the tree samples provides good circumstantial evidence of the site’s significance. Another way to link found artifacts to the Nez Perce War of 1877 is through historic accounts of tourists that the Nez Perce encountered or travelers through the area that might have observed the site when more evidence of the camp would have been visible. It’s these kinds of processes that happen once the fieldwork is completed, and the tree samples and artifacts have been safely carried from the backcountry to the lab at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
Being immersed in a project for 10 days cemented my love of fieldwork and gave me a greater appreciation for the significance of the human impact on this landscape we think of as natural and wild. Even 24 miles from the nearest road, we uncovered trash from recent campfires along with artifacts from 140 years ago. Since returning, I’ve continued to notice these human influences even in my time off work. Friends that work in other capacities at Yellowstone bring me pictures of scrapers, projectile points and spoke shaves that they find in their work all over the park. Archaeology even found me when I took time off to spend the weekend with my brother. We hiked the Mt. Holmes trail in the Northwest corner of the park and I couldn’t help but notice the hundreds and hundreds of obsidian flakes along our way. As I savor my last week working in the park I have to remind myself to stop scanning the ground for artifacts and lift my eyes to admire the beautiful scenery. I guess there’s your evidence; I’ve learned a lot this summer, and thinking about archaeology has changed the way I personally engage with natural places like Yellowstone.
Read more at the Out West Blog for Summer Interns »
