Archaeologists find rare ancient campground

By Dan Daly, Journal Staff Writer | Sunday, August 29, 2004

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About 9,000 to 12,000 years ago, on the banks of a creek southeast of the Black Hills, ancient hunters found themselves a good place to camp.

They had water and cover, and they could see any approaching game or enemies. It was a place they could spend time working animal hides. They could also make and repair their tools and hunting equipment made from wood, bone and stone.

"My impression was that this place was ideally suited for access to water, game animals, stones suitable for working into tools, and had good visibility over the surrounding region," Jim Donohue of the state Archaeological Research Center in Rapid City said.

It is not known how many people camped here or how long they stayed. But they left behind enough evidence - bones, flint chips and an intriguing piece of a broken stone dart point - to offer archaeologists a rare glimpse into the lives of some of the Upper Great Plains' earliest known residents.

"We're onto something extremely rare," Donohue said.

Few archaeological sites this old and this intact have been found, he said. This one was discovered during a routine cultural resources survey that preceded construction of the Heartland Expressway. Although many Hills folks saw crews digging at the site, Donohue said he doesn't want to publicize the exact location for fear that freelance artifact hunters would disturb it.

The South Dakota State Historical Society's Archaeological Research Center, a division of the state Department of Tourism and State Development, contracted with the state Department of Transportation to help identify any historic sites or other cultural resources that could be lost to the expressway. Any time federal money is used to disturb the ground, such a survey must be completed.

The Heartland Expressway is the DOT's multi-year project to turn S.D. Highway 79 into a four-lane, divided highway from Rapid City south to at least as far as Maverick Junction, and perhaps the Nebraska state line.

Dave Graves of the DOT's Environmental Division said this particular stretch of the Heartland site is scheduled for construction in 2005. The archeological find will not stop or delay the Heartland project, officials said. However, it could change its design.

The survey crew also found a stone foundation for an old steam-engine- railroad-era water tank. The highway can be slightly rerouted to miss the railroad site, which is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

In 2001, during the first phase of the survey, Donohue and his crew walked the proposed route looking for land forms such as creek terraces that might yield deeply buried artifacts.

During phase 2, crews returned to the most promising sites to take a much closer look. They dug 1-meter-by-1-meter holes and sifted the soil in search of bone fragments, flint flakes or other evidence of human activity.

Archaeologists deal in human history - about the past 15,000 years. If they find evidence of dinosaur bones or fossils, Donohue and his team consult with a paleontologist.

For archaeologists, bone fragments or arrowheads by themselves hold little interest. But if the artifacts are relatively undisturbed, and if their age can be verified by radiocarbon dating, archaeologists start getting excited.

Initially, this site was one of the least promising of the places crews investigated, Donohue recalled. However, the first 1-meter-by-1-meter hole yielded an incredible 1,468 artifacts. "That was kind of a surprise," he said.

So they excavated nine 1-meter by-1 meter test holes and did 32 shovel tests at the site, which could cover nearly 26 acres. (The area that will be affected by the road project is about 2-1/2 acres.) Only one excavation yielded a "temporally diagnostic" artifact, which means it gave a clear indication of the time when it was made.

The crews ended up digging down nearly 12 feet. At various levels, they found stone artifacts buried at the same level with campfire charcoal and burned animal bones that could be carbon dated.

And one artifact, the dart-point base, has Donohue very excited. Its style of manufacture is similar to the Goshen type, an age of tool-making known as the Paleoindian Goshen-Plainview cultural complex.

When it came to making stone tools, ancient hunters at different periods in time had a distinct style of point manufacture, which archaeologists use to define and date cultural complexes.

The earliest well-documented complex is Clovis, first found near Clovis, N.M. Ancient hunters used this style of stone spearhead to hunt mammoths more than 13,000 years ago.

More recent tools have been categorized as Goshen and Folsom, then the Cody complex, which came after Goshen, and other late Paleoindian types. These point types are associated with hunters of extinct forms of bison but not mammoths.

Donohue pointed out, however, that these periods are not cut and dried. It isn't as if all the Clovis toolmakers got together one year and said, "OK, from now on, we're doing Goshen." Many Paleoindian point styles appear to overlap in time, indicating that different groups of people might have been exploiting the same environments at the same time or that single bands of people might have used different point styles at the same time.

Goshen is a point style first defined in the Hell Gap area of southeast Wyoming. It is generally believed to have been a style of tool-making point that was made 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.

At the Heartland site, radiocarbon dating of the soil and charcoal puts the age of the artifact find at 10,000 to 12,000 years old, which confirms that this is indeed evidence of the region's earliest known human activity.

More research into the artifacts here will also fill in some of the wide gaps in the archaeologists' portrait of Paleoindian life.

The climate then was likely cooler and greener than it is today. Cold-weather grasses abounded, and there were likely more spruce trees in the area, Donohue said. An extinct species of bison, and maybe mammoths, roamed the countryside.

But archaeologists know very little about the people who shared the land with these creatures. That, Donohue said, is why this archeological site along S.D. Highway 79 north of Hot Springs is so important.

Kill sites, such as Vore Buffalo Jump near Beulah, Wyo., are relatively easier to find, Donohue said. But deeply buried campsites, where ancient inhabitants spent time making tools, working hide and cooking meals, are a rare find.

So that brings us back to the original question - the Heartland Expressway. Phase 3 in the process is the mitigation phase: How to preserve the site?

This site is important for the information it contains, Donohue said. It doesn't necessarily have to be preserved in place. Because it isn't feasible to move the road project, there are two routes to take:

n If the DOT is going to build the highway as it was designed, a large area should be excavated before proceeding. The artifacts can be studied for future generations.

n Build the road over the site on a layer of fill dirt. The artifacts would be paved over, but they would be preserved beneath the concrete. Someday, the site could be excavated, perhaps by archaeologists armed with new methods or technology.

The effect of long-term burial of archeological sites under roads, however, is poorly understood, Donohue said. Changes in drainage and chemical runoff could have a disastrous effect on artifacts such as bones and plant remains.

If the DOT builds over the site, a smaller area could be excavated to create a baseline of study for later research.

"You need to do some work here so you know what the heck you are burying," Donohue said. "We have far more questions about this site after testing it than we can begin to answer from the limited amount of work completed to date."

Contact Dan Daly at 394-8421 or dan.daly@rapidcityjournal.com