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So Ohanapecosh is replacing its utility lines- the existing
utility lines, water lines, sewer lines, were put in in the late 1950s
and they're old and corroding. So we're testing all along the lines, about
nine thousand feet of that, with deep sort of probes
that will go down to about a meter and a half deep to see if in the process of
replacing those lines subsurface buried archaeological
properties might exist- prehistoric in particular we're interested in- and lo and behold
along that line we found four intact. These are the first
archaeological, pre-contact, prehistoric archaeological sites
ever documented at Mount Rainier, below two thousand feet. Mount Rainier
is famous, at least geologically and archaeologically too,
for having having stratified, layer-cake stratigraphy laid down over
thousands of years from repeated volcanic eruptions of Mount Rainier and St. Helens.
That allows us then when we can find chip-stone tool remains,
to relate them to the various volcanic events and get some rough idea how old they are.
It's really handy kind of technique to use and it works relatively well.
That's why we dig deep and use the ten-liter samples
and the nature of the volcanic layering in which they're found as we go down
and at Ohanapecosh we were fortunate enough on four of the-
I think initially a hundred- roughly a hundred- test units, four of them
had chip stone material. All of them appeared to be deep,
relatively deeply buried, below sixty centimeters, and below a volcanic event
from Mount St. Helens that dates to about thirty seven hundred years ago
and above a volcanic event from Mount Rainier that dates to sixty four hundred years
ago. This is interesting in a couple of ways. First of all, they're pretty old,
somewhere in that three thousand or so year range,
and second thing is that none of them seem to be- there's no sites
up higher in time. It implied that of the sample of four
that we were able to find that the landscape was used
to some extant at a period of time between
sixty four hundred years and thirty seven hundred years,
and that- from the sample of four- there wasn't any use of the area after that.
It's a small sample still, but it's the only sample we've had so far
so that was pretty interesting itself.
The coolest things we could find I think at the site, is not only
the things that we find but what they tell us about the past. So the things that we found
that I regard as particularly informatiive and particularly interesting
are two intact hearth features. Those are
camp fires that people sat around between three thousand and
six thousand or so years ago and did things.
You know hearths, camp fires, in prehistoric contexts that's where everything happens
It's their source of heat, source of light, source of conversation
manufacturing goes on there, cooking goes on there,
everything happens around the hearth
It's a big deal. Dwellings are located around heaths too cause they can take advantage
of that heat- temporary dwellings, permanent, whatever they are. So whenever you
can find a hearth, find a campfire, in subsurface context,
you've found something pretty cool
because of what it can tell you. It can tell you, firstly you've
got direct human involvement in the creation of that feature.
The wood that they burn in that hearth, it dates that hearth directly. So we can do
radiocarbon dating of that wood that was burned in that fire and we'll know within
a hundred years or so when that hearth was actually used. So we
can have the volcanic layering that gives us the three thousand year window
the radiocarbon will get it down to a hundred years
We have a pretty good understanding of
why Mount Rainier was important to people of the
prehistoric past. It was important largely because of productive resources
in upper elevation habitats. We've never had much focus
on lower- no indication of people focusing their attention on lower
elevation habitats though until now. So
that created a lot of interested research opportunities for us
in the park. For example, I was trying to understand
why Ohanapecosh would have been important. Was Ohanapecosh a salmon-bearing river
for example? Some folks were coming up, camping out there, exploiting salmon,
bringing them out, cleaning them, drying them, carrying them back somewhere else?
Where they transit stops on the way to higher elevation landscapes?
People can't just fly up there, they got to walk,
got to stay overnight some places possibly.
Was it useful during a period after vegetation was suppressed
by a burn or landslides or volcanic event or something like that
that made it useful for a short period of time? And all of those questions
we could address from the Ohanapecosh project. The kind of interests
in archeology that sustains you over the long run, has sustained me over
the long run as I getting to be an old guy here, is not so much the
artifacts, although they're cool themselves, but it's the puzzle,
it's what they can tell you about human use in the past. We're really trying to understand
how human beings used a place on the planet over a long period of time
and do it in a way that has some scientific validity to it, it's not just a story.
So it's very fun to find artifacts, don't get me wrong,
but what's really fun and what really lasts, it really does,
in the long run is these complex puzzles that you kind of work out
and brain games that you can play with these and try to develop an understanding
of how people use the planet, you know. And do it in a way that can be
scientifically rejected and improved, so
Ohanapecosh fits into that, fits in nicely, it's really cool.