[OR_Archaeology] Artifacts from the Cascades give scientists a window on human activity in the area thousands of years ago

[Susan White]

ANCIENT NORTHWEST 
BY JEFFREY P. MAYOR THE NEWS TRIBUNE
● Published November 15, 2009 

 Archaeological digs in two Washington national parks continue to
reveal artifacts that debunk the myth that indigenous people didn’t
gather food and plants from the upper reaches of the Cascades. 

 A dig near Cascade Pass in North Cascades National Park has revealed
evidence that humans used that area 9,600 years ago. At Mount Rainier
National Park, a site on the northern slope of the mountain has produced
artifacts dating back 7,600 years.

“It documents, for the first time, human use at upper elevations
dating that far back,” said Greg Burtchard, Mount Rainier’s
archaeologist.

“One thing it does, it helps us understand the early time period.
Getting back to 9,600 years ago, that’s a time period for which we
know almost nothing,” said Bob Mierendorf, archaeologist at North
Cascades.

For years, people believed prehistoric Indians lived in lowland areas.
The argument was that the elevation, unpredictable weather and rugged
terrain made places such as Mount Rainier a poor option for
food-gathering and settlement, Burtchard said. 

But these sites are helping researchers refine theories on where, when
and why Indians traveled through the mountains.

Among the discoveries at the two sites - both about 5,400 feet in
elevation - are small stone blades used to make knives, sharp-edge
stones used to scrape animal hides, projectile points, stones from fire
rings, and animal bones and teeth.

“One of the big misconceptions is people don’t realize there were
Native American populations moving around in the highlands,” said
Bradford Andrews, visiting assistant professor of anthropology at
Pacific Lutheran University. “Wherever there are people today, there
were people in the past. Although today it’s more recreational, in the
past they were more worried about finding food to eat.”

“It really broadens our understanding of human use of the mountain
quite a bit,” Randy King, acting superintendent at Mount Rainier, said
of the discoveries.
 
“I think there is a fundamental need to understand people have been
part of this landscape for a long, long time,” King said. “You can
go to when this park was started in 1899 and think that is the start of
the human connection, but it isn’t.”

ESTABLISHING CONNECTIONS

A piece of white translucent stone no bigger than an adult’s
thumbnail, discovered in 2007, has become one of the most important
artifacts to come from the Mount Rainier site. The piece of chalcedony,
a silica mineral, is one of thousands of artifacts and pieces of debris
found by Burtchard and his team at a site near Buck Lake. 

It is the artifact that dates back 7,600 years, the oldest known
evidence of human use on the mountain. The previous oldest artifact
dates to 5,600 years ago.

An ancient Indian flaked off sharp pieces of the chalcedony from what
Burtchard described as a microblade core. Those razor-edged pieces were
glued to wood or bone with tree resin to make a knife.

“There is no doubt that the Indian people living around the mountain
today, that these were their ancestors,” Burtchard said.

The Buck Lake site was likely used by ancestors of today’s
Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and other local tribes, Burtchard said. The
Muckleshoots supported the Buck Lake research by supplying manpower,
material and use of a helicopter. Muckleshoot officials would not
comment for this story.

Evidence indicates that the Buck Lake site was used seasonally for
gathering plants and animals for food, Burtchard said. The Indians
likely lived in woven mat-and-wood frame structures or bark slab
structures. There is no evidence of permanent structures.

The seasonal-use theory is based on Mount Rainier’s weather.

“The best season for (gathering food) starts when the snow cover is
off in late June and July, to when the snow flies again in October,”
Burtchard said. “We have such heavy snowload that it made it a
seasonal use area.”

Burtchard said it is likely that small bands of Indians - men, women
and children - came to the mountain from lowland settlements near
Enumclaw, Greenwater and Packwood, along the Puyallup River and at the
confluence of the Nisqually and Mashel rivers. As the weather warmed,
the groups passed through the relatively resource-poor lower forests
heading for the upper meadows.

“I always assumed the primary use was resource acquisition, opposed
to sacred meanings,” Burtchard said of the 95 known archaeological
sites on the mountain.

Several factors led Indians to use a place like Buck Lake for thousands
of years before Europeans arrived in the Northwest, Burtchard said.

The trees provided protection from the elements. An eastern exposure
allows the sun to provide warmth in the morning.

With meadows immediately above the area, Indians had easy access to
plants and berries - such as elderberries, huckleberries and avalanche
lilies - and animals.

“The subalpine meadows, if you were interested in eating in the
summer, they were the place to be,” Burtchard said.

The site also is near ridges that lead up and around the mountain. The
ridges served as streets for Indians, allowing them to move up and
around the mountain to hunt for elk, mountain beaver, bear, grouse,
mountain goats and marmots.

“The ridges made it easy to carry animals back to the site,”
Burtchard said. “This was possibly a base camp, maybe a mixed age- and
gender-group setting, based on the volume and type of tools we
found.”

Not every site was a base camp. Burtchard believes a site near Sunrise
was used to process game, because they have found more tools for cutting
and scrapping rather than projectile points.
“At a base camp setting you would expect a wider variety of tools,”
he said.

As he traces the site’s evolution, Burtchard said it is likely the
earliest Indians, those living in the area 10,000 to about 4,500 years
ago, were more nomadic rather than settling along the mountain’s
salmon-bearing rivers.

“They didn’t need to because they didn’t have that many people to
feed. So they could travel around the region, moving as the resources
allowed,” he said. “Later, when populations get high, they had to
look for food sources that could be mass harvested, which is salmon.”

Even then, Buck Lake was used by generations of Indians.

“At Buck Lake, we have the early use,” Burtchard said, “but at
4,500 years ago that use increased until populations were reduced in the
1700s because of European diseases like smallpox, measles, whooping
cough.”

WHAT THE ARTIFACTS REVEAL
It takes a practiced eye to realize the value of the items found at
Buck Lake and other archaeological sites on the mountain. The vast
majority of the nearly 20,000 Buck Lake artifacts are not flashy museum
pieces. Most is debitage, the rocky chips and flakes left over when
creating stone tools.

“The problem is when people see the Christmas tree shaped stone of an
arrow point, it goes into their pocket 99 out of 100 times,” Burtchard
said.

While it might not look like much, that debris still tells an important
story.

“That tells us how the stone tools were made, where the stone was
coming from. That tells us how far they moved around or who they traded
with,” Andrews said. He studied the Buck Lake artifacts with the PLU
team for three years. Andrews is trying to detect any changes in
technology over time.
“That will help tell us how these people changed over time. Societies
are never static. We can see that in our own society. Things changed in
the past, albeit much slower,” Andrews said.

One thing that has surprised Andrews about the Buck Lake site has been
the sheer volume of material discovered. He has been to two other sites
on the mountain, and they contain maybe 5 percent of what has been found
at Buck Lake.

Andrews has focused his research on projectile points, including
atlatl, or spear-throwers, and arrow points, plus two-edged tools used
for chopping, tools used for scraping hides and processing plant foods.
They are made from material such as flint and obsidian. 

He said the obsidian, a volcanic glass, was probably brought in from
another area by trading with other Indians bands. The nearest regional
sources are in southern Washington and Oregon.

“That tells us about trade patterns and the distance people were
moving in their annual rounds,” he said.

In addition to studying the artifacts, Andrews crafts his own stone
tools, a form of experimental archaeology.

“I make them so I can look at the flakes I produced and look at how
they pattern out. Then I compare them to the artifacts,” he said.
“No one makes flake stone tools anymore, so we have to become the
modern analogy. And then we can make some educated guesses about what we
find.”

CLUES AND TIMELINES
While there are other archaeological sites around the mountain - 95 at
last count -Buck Lake is unique because of the lake itself. The lake is
fed by melt water and has no outlet stream, so anything that has fallen
into the lake has settled to the bottom, including pollen from plants
that grew in the area over the ages.

Examining lake bottom core samples almost 15.5 feet deep, Burtchard and
his crew have tracked environmental changes that might have affected
human use of the area. After two major volcanic eruptions, the core
samples show pollen levels dropped immediately afterwards as plants were
smothered in ash.

“You can tell when there were fires and changes in vegetation,”
Burtchard said.

Seeing the volcanic history unfold as archaeologists dug deeper adds to
the site’s unique character.

Looking at the pit walls, one can see layers of dirt interspersed with
six lighter layers, markers as if the wall were a timeline.

One near the surface is the volcanic deposit left behind when Mount St.
Helens erupted about 4,200 years ago. Until three years ago, all the
artifacts found at Buck Lake were above this layer.
A deeper layer was created by the eruption of ancient Mount Mazama in
Oregon, the event that led to the creation of Crater Lake about 7,400
years ago.

It was beneath the Mazama layer that the small microblade core was
discovered two years ago. Given the time frame of the Mazama deposit,
Burtchard knew they had made a significant find.
“You can get precise time control because you have these volcanic
events that you can date,” he said. “They create a timeline from
which you can gauge finds.”

A site near Sunrise has deposits from seven major events, including the
Osceola lahar about 5,700 years ago.

The North Cascades site also has volcanic layers, ash deposited from
eruptions at Mount Baker, Mount St. Helens, Glacier Peak and Mount
Mazama. 

The site has also produced other ash evidence, coming from cooking
pits.

“They’re small and not elaborate, but pretty clearly they were
cooking with hot stones. But I don’t know what they were cooking,”
Mierendorf said. “That implies more than just traveling through the
area.

“These are repeatedly used, including one individual pit used and
reused for all 9,600 years. I’ve never seen anything like that in 40
years of professional archaeology.”

Burtchard has the same reaction as he and his team continue to find
evidence of people living and gathering food on Mount Rainier so long
ago.

“It is one of the most important sites I’ve worked on. It allows us
to rebuild 8,000 years of environmental changes side by side with human
use.”

“It’s just a tremendous sense of discovery,” he said. “It’s
been sitting there 7,600 years and you were fortunate enough to find
it.

“Finding the item is a great discovery, but also what it means, that
people have been using that area for 7,600 years.”

Jeffrey P. Mayor: 253-597-8640
jeff.mayor at thenewstribune.com