Video
Ranger Brief: Ohanapecosh Archaeology Dig
Transcript
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 informative 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.
Description
Evidence of human use on Mount Rainier spans thousands of years. Park Archaeologist Greg Burtchard describes the discovery of four new pre-contact, prehistoric sites in the Ohanapecosh area. These sites date back to 3,700-6,400 years ago, and provide important insight about the connection between humans and Mount Rainier.
Description: Greg Burtchard, an older man wearing a blue sweater, sits in front of a full bookcase and describes the archaeology dig.
Duration
5 minutes, 38 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
02/06/2015
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