Still digging it; Anthropologist/archaeologist leading effort to understand earliest residents of region

Posted 9/2/14

Todd is striving to correct a couple of fallacies: That the high country received only fleeting visitation by prehistoric people, and that their artifacts in the mountains are scarce. Bits of pottery and other artifacts suggest early Native …

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Still digging it; Anthropologist/archaeologist leading effort to understand earliest residents of region

Posted

A “retired” anthropologist and archaeologist still digs the career he didn’t really relinquish following his official retirement, and he is finding a slew of artifacts in the hills.

Larry Todd, 60, from Meeteetse, didn’t head to Florida, but instead to the mountains of northwestern Wyoming, where he examines archeological clues left behind hundreds and thousands of years ago by Wyoming’s first documented occupants.

Todd is striving to correct a couple of fallacies: That the high country received only fleeting visitation by prehistoric people, and that their artifacts in the mountains are scarce. Bits of pottery and other artifacts suggest early Native Americans occupied the high country for extended periods of time, he said during an presentation at the Draper Natural History Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody this spring.

Todd and company have searched the mountains since 2002, but his sites aren’t archeological digs. He calls them “surface surveys.”

The goal is to minimize the impact to the land. After documenting the items, they are returned, he said.

About 1 percent of the 500,000-acre project area has been surveyed since 2002. He prefers locations where recent wildfires passed. Fire burns away vegetation to unveil ancient treasures. Following a fire, 1,596 percent more objects are exposed.

“That’s a conservative estimate,” he said.

Todd displayed a photo of one burn where charred trees guard numerous seemingly random pin flags, like a survey plat gone mad. But the tiny pennants mark the location of an artifact or a piece of an artifact.

Researchers are averaging 38.4 objects per hectare, or 2.47 acres, at his sites.

Paleoindians — believed to be the first people in the Americas — lived in bands before tribes began to form, Todd said. In anthropology vocabulary, a band is a subgroup of a tribe.

Scientists believe the first North Americans crossed the Bering Land Bridge via Siberia 14,000 years ago. They were referred to as Paleoindians or ancient Indians, according to the Illinois State Museum.

Radio carbon dating tells what sort of animals were killed and when. In Sunlight Basin, hunters were taking Rocky Mountain sheep in the fall and bison in the winter. Whitebark pine nuts were consumed, and some fish. These early inhabitants were expert ecologists with knowledge of the seasonal resources available to them, Todd said.

The Colby Mammoth Kill Site in north-central Wyoming proves ancient hunters were taking mammoth 13,000 years ago. Mammoth occupied lower climes because the mountains would not have provided the quantity of forage a mammoth would need, Todd said.

Colby findings date from the tail end of the last ice age during the Pleistocene epoch, running 110,000 to 12,500 years ago. Todd’s findings from 2002 to the present are from approximately 10,000 years ago to the mid 1800s.

Etched objects found

The groups in the mountains were not just hunters. Shards of pottery from cooking pots have been discovered in the mountains, and “odd stuff,” including incised, or etched, ceramic objects suggest use beyond merely functional, he said.

“We’re seeing spots on the landscape being used over and over and over again,” Todd said. “This landscape has been used intensively for over 10,000 years.”

In the Wind River Mountains, researchers have discovered lodges that were topped by structures known as wickiups, tents topped by brush or branches and covered with hides.

In Dead Indian Creek, pit houses were found dating to 4,000 years ago. The Sunlight site is on the National Register of Historic Places, Todd said.

Two other nearby locations are on the National Register of Historic Places. They are the Horner Bison Kill Site, dating back 10,000 years, and the Mummy Cave, Todd said.

“Radiocarbon dates from the deposits in the cave range from 7,280 years B.C. to A.D. 1,580,” said the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office.

Glass trade beads became smaller over the years prior to and during European westward expansion, so Todd and his team are able to estimate the ages of beads found.

Lewis and Clark’s expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Coast, from 1803-06, suggests they were the first people of European extraction to cross the Rocky Mountains.

Trade beads from the early 1700s have been found here, hinting at Native American trade routes before Lewis and Clark, Todd said.

About 70 percent of the obsidian used around here by early inhabitants is from the Obsidian Cliffs in Yellowstone National Park. Some obsidian used here originates in Jackson, Idaho and Utah areas. The trading of obsidian existed thousands of years before Europeans arrived on the scene. Yellowstone obsidian was found in Ohio burial mounds dating 2,000 years ago, Todd said.

Sea shells have been found in this area, proving locals were trading for items far from northwest Wyoming, he said.

Northwestern Wyoming tribes began using conquistador-lineage horses in the 1700s by stealing and trading with the Ute Native American tribe. Lewis and Clark traded with the Shoshone tribe for horses, Todd said.

The Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico in the 1600s.

An ‘open-sky’ classroom

The “retired” professor is still teaching. Only his classroom is beneath open sky.

From 2002-09, Todd hosted summer archeology field classes for students from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo. Those students did contribute to the local economy.

“They at least helped the bar business if nothing else,” Todd said during his BBCW presentation, garnering a laugh.

Since 2009, student volunteers have been lending him an archaeological hand, and during the last two seasons, he has collaborated with Laura Scheiber, an anthropology professor from Indiana University in Bloomington.

He teamed with HistoriCorp to restore historic structures such as fire watch towers and Forest Service cabins. He also is working with the Park County Historical Preservation Commission.

Todd has taught archaeology at Denver and Boston universities, the University of Wyoming and Colorado State University. He currently teaches at Northwest College.

There are no photographs of the people who inhabited the land hundreds or thousands of years ago, but arrowheads, pottery and other artifacts do offer an illustration.

“This is the closest thing you’re going to see of snapshots from the past,” Todd said.

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