Nine Mile Canyon project opens earth & minds

EXCAVATION + PRESERVATION
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“That can’t be real.”
    That’s what Dr. Tim Riley, curator of archaeology at Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum, said when he first started his job there several years ago.
    He was talking about the wooden bow, discovered in Nine Mile Canyon and donated to the museum by private collector Keith Hansen.
    It sits inside a glass case, part of a Nine Mile Canyon exhibit created in the 1990s.
    “I’ve never seen a complete bow,” Riley told a group of local history buffs last week. “Well, we recently got some funding and one of the first things I wanted to do was test that bow.”
    Riley thought it was likely a fake, a replica perhaps from the 1950s, or something similar. Instead, to his amazement, the wooden bow, most likely made by a Fremont Indian, was discovered to be almost a thousand years old.
    “That bow is 1090 AD, when that tree died,” Riley said, referring to the wood used to make the bow. “It’s probably the only complete Fremont bow. The only one I’m aware of.
    “It’s here because of Nine Mile Canyon.”
   Riley made the remarks Saturday during a presentation revealing what archaeologists, local land managers and a coterie of high school students and community partners discovered during an excavation last fall inside Nine Mile Canyon.
    The classroom on the museum’s second floor was overflowing with people keen to learn what discoveries were made at Cottonwood Village, where over six weekends last fall participants excavated a Fremont pithouse structure.
    What they found signaled to archaeologists more evidence of some sort of shift in the Fremont culture; a shift the subtle outlines of which can be seen in changes in architecture and artistry.
    Jody J. Patterson is a principal investigator with Montgomery Archaeological Consultants Inc. He is well-versed in Nine Mile Canyon’s unique archaeological treasures.
    He joined Riley Saturday and explained a bit of the history of Nine Mile Canyon, what has been learned about the Fremont people so far, and what evidence he sees for the cultural alterations the natives began to make a thousand years ago.
    “The canyon has been studied by archaeologists for over a hundred years in various capacities. One of the earliest groups that came in was the Claflin-Emerson expedition and they came in and did kind of a whirlwind tour of the canyon and excavated some of the main sites,” Patterson told the audience.
The Claflin-Emerson expedition took place in the 1920s and 1930s and was followed by a number of increasingly more scientifically rigorous studies of the area. Before that, most work in the canyon consisted of looting and artifact hunting by people interested in filling private collections.
Increasing clarity about the Fremont people has grown over time. One significant modern example of this is how much discovery followed the Nine Mile road project, which allowed better access to the area and was completed in 2014.
“When they did the Nine Mile road project, we got a whole bunch of sites buried deeply in an alluvial context and we were able to get tons and tons of dates from these. Radiocarbon for what we consider most of the Fremont period, which lasts from AD 500 to about AD 1200, 1250, somewhere in there. Most of the structural sites inside the canyon and a good portion of the rock art all date to this particular period,” Patterson said.
Radiocarbon dating, coupled with relative dating methods, are how scientists are able to arrive at absolute time frames for artifacts and Fremont structures found at Nine Mile.
“Corn cobs are one of our favorite things to date. Although sometimes we do use larger pieces of wood,” Patterson said. “We know probably within 30 to 60 years of when that particular corn cob came off the plant.”
Only a few years ago, scientists were relying on technology that detected date ranges much further apart.
“A few years ago our range of dates was much bigger, 100, 200 and sometimes 300 years,” he said.
Patterson said no test results from the Cottonwood Village excavation are available yet. But he said based on previous work, he believes the date range will fall close to the later Fremont period.
“We have some good ideas on what we think that might date to, based on the type of architecture that’s there and some of the artifacts. We’re thinking it’s probably going to date to this later period, probably AD 1000 TO AD 1200 or so,” he said.
Patterson told the audience that prior to about AD 1000, there was a distinct type of pithouse that occurred in the canyon, very similar to pit structures found in the Uintah Basin, Dinosaur National Monument, the Cub Creek area.
Early structures, for example did not have rock walls or subdivided rooms.
After about AD 1000, however, there was a change in the architecture in the canyon, Patterson says, including more square shaped floor plans with walls to support a superstructure. The artistry changed as well. Projectile points and the type of ceramics shift during the period.
“We do have a shift in the canyon around AD 1000. We are still trying to figure out what that shift is. Is it people form the Castle Valley area moving in and displacing people that were already there? Or are the people who are living in Nine Mile being influenced from different regions of Utah at different times throughout that 800 year period.”
One of the things Patterson said archaeologists are finding in the area is that the sites in the canyon have been reoccupied and reused over and over. He described one site excavated that had three pit structures superimposed over one another.
Dating shows these structures and their ages cluster over a two or three hundred year period.
Archaeologists have also identified structures separate from pithouses that appear to be of simpler construction and might have been used as field houses, or areas where natives could rest in between daily stints of farming work.
“These were probably structures associated with agricultural fields,” Patterson said.
Similar structures were recently discovered near East Carbon.
“We’re not only getting ideas where they’re living. We’re getting ideas about where they’re working,” Patterson said.
Besides architecture, Patterson and Riley also led a discussion about beads, which are ubiquitous in the canyon area.
“We have beads made out of all sorts of interesting things. The most common beads are made out shale,” Patterson said. “We have a lot of bone beads. Bone beads aren’t as common as the shale. But we also have shell beads mostly coming from the Gulf of California.”
Beads were found during last fall’s excavation as well. However, work there is far from finished.
“As we are digging down we are trying to uncover the floor of our structure. At the end of our fifth weekend, we just got down to it. We haven’t excavated that floor yet. We are saving that for our next season.”
People involved in the work are excited because so far the Cottonwood Village site appears to show the advent of structures with partitioned rooms, something not seen before in the canyon.
“We see indications of a subroom within the structure and that’s fairly unique for the canyon,” Patterson said. “We don’t have any other structures excavated in the canyon that have partitioned rooms inside them.”
Ashley Leautaud, a senior at Carbon High School, was at the presentation on Saturday. She told the audience she participated in the excavation and then rejoined the archaeologists later to start cleaning and processing artifacts they discovered.
“I would go back in a heartbeat,’ she said. “I think that it was so much fun. I definitely would do it again.”
Riley said the process is only in the initial stages. Excavation will resume at Cottonwood Canyon later this year when the floor will be revealed. Evidence of a central hearth and post holes for the roof were already revealing themselves.
Riley says the museum plans to use the findings to update their Nine Mile exhibit.
The current exhibit dates to the 1990s. Much new information has been learned in two decades.
“It was a lot harder to get out there to see these sites in the 1990s,” Riley said.
One thing that likely won’t change with any new Nine Mile exhibit is the wooden bow.
Its place of prominence will remain.