Digging summer again

Department of Anthropology holds month-long field camp at site in western Nebraska for second consecutive summer.

June 16, 2004

For a month last summer, Emily Stroburg was on her hands and knees meticulously going through layer by layer of earth, centimeter by centimeter at Iowa State University's Department of Anthropology's field school in western Nebraska.

And for that entire time she didn't find even a single flake (bison artifact).

But that doesn't mean that she didn't have a good and educational worthwhile time.

"I had so much fun last year that I wanted to come back and see what was out here," the junior psychology and anthropology major said.

Stroburg will spend one of the three 10-day sessions at the Clary Ranch site near Ogallala, Neb., once again performing real archaeological fieldwork. She was one of 14 Iowa State students who are excavating the site in order to resolve several questions about the site's formational history, as well as reconstruct the local, basic and regional paleoecology. The site was first reported to professional archaeologists in 1970.

The Nebraska State Museum excavated some of the site, revealing exceptionally well-preserved bison bonebed and associated stone tools, dating back 8,500 to more than 10,000 years ago.

Last year, Iowa State, under the direction of Matt Hill, associate professor of anthropology, reopened the site. This year, the excavation is taking place at the same site, but in a slightly different location.

Hill, who recently received a two-year, $76,000 National Science Foundation grant for the project, has spent the parts of the past four summers at the Clary Ranch site.

The students in the field camp, who are receiving academic credit for their work, collect the raw data for the research project. The artifacts are then packed back to Iowa State for further analyzing.

Hill's ultimate research goal is to track organizational responses of Paleoindian hunter-gatherers to changes in food resource availability, distribution and predictability at the end of the last Ice Age.

Along with a collaborative team of academic researchers from Iowa State, North Carolina, Johns Hopkins, Iowa, Wyoming, Kansas, Wisconsin-LaCrosse and Northern Iowa, Hill has dated artifacts recovered last year at the Clary Ranch site to 10,200 calendar years ago.

Hill's collaborators are looking at the collected artifacts for precipitation patterns, past vegetation, microbiological information and geological information.

"I can do the archeology," Hill says. "But my collaborators can contextualize other information so that we can see and identify patterns in the humans in this time period."

Hill theorizes that the Paleoindian hunter gatherers used the Clary Ranch site as a butchering area. The prehistoric bison were more than likely mass killed in another location and then taken to the excavation site for processing. The site where the Iowa State students are working is located in an old stream bed.

At the excavation site, the student archeologists not only recover the artifacts but also map the entire excavation. That task has been made easier this year by a computer program developed by Joe Krisch, a computer science major who also participating in the excavation.

"Portable Archeology Database or PADs" has been installed in seven Palm hand-held computers enabling the students to quickly and efficiently map the location of each find.

"There was no computer program specifically for archeology and Joe has built this from the bottom up," Hill said.

"Once I got out in the field, see how the work goes and see the actual needs I have been able to improve it," Krisch said. "I anticipate when we have a break after the first session, I'll go back and make some changes in the program - just some details that will make it flow a little nicer."

But while at the Clary Ranch site, Krisch concentrates on the work in front of him. The students work on the common site from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., daily. In the late afternoon and early evening hours, they break into small groups to undertake a supervised field research project. Hill says that these projects are archaeological, experimental or actualistic in orientation.

Students also take a break from the excavation work to take GPS units out and map the entire Clary Ranch site.

And while it may look to be boring work, at least for Emily Stroburg, it is worth another trip to western Nebraska to spend part of her summer.

"I really like the detail work, how precise you have to be," she said. "It's definitely easier this time around. It makes a lot more sense to me. I'm able to recognize and identify the artifacts that we have found.

"And besides, I have already found two flakes this year."

To view a larger photo click on the thumbnail.