Dear HCN,
A major blow to Hells
Canyon prehistory has been soil erosion caused by over-grazing
domestic stock, mainly sheep. Soil provides the context and
something close to a set of rules or guidelines for making sense
out of archaeological remains.
Without the soil
that surrounds them, artifacts are like words in a language without
grammar. They become meaningless sounds.
And it’s
not just stone projectile points and the traces of ancient huts and
hearths that are lost. The same sediments often preserve a record
of the animals and plants that fed and equipped people over
thousands of years.
Last year we tested a site
that suffered heavy sheep grazing off and on since the 1880s. The
Forest Service was half convinced nothing had survived to manage,
but had us check it out to be sure.
By refining
our excavation techniques, we were able to locate the edges of a
7,000-year-old fishing camp whose existence no one suspected. The
site has already produced higher concentrations of identifiable
fish bones than any other open site on the Snake
River.
But these bones and hearths were found
only a foot below the present eroded surface; the trampled and
uprooted sediments that once held the secrets of the past 70
centuries are presumably still blowing in the wind. That’s a
depressing “loss of continuity” in some very useful information,
given all the uncertainties involved in salmon restoration plans
for the Snake River basin.
A rancher laments,
“…with sheep grazing prohibited, another wedge is driven between
the remembered past and the present and the future.” It is
impossible not to recognize the truth and feel the pain in those
words. People who work land are more serious than people who play
with it.
But there is also an unremembered past
around us, one not easy to recognize or preserve, a span of time so
huge we are still groping to find our way around inside it. The
latest issue of American Antiquity includes an article reporting
rock art images in the desert West have now been carbon-dated to
almost 20,000 years ago.
The same issue has
another article describing a valley in western Wyoming where new
refinements in radiocarbon and chemical dating show three
completely different rock art traditions were practiced at the same
time for hundreds of years. Imagine Michelangelo, Picasso, and Gary
Larson all scrawling away on the same cliff and you start to get
the idea.
If stone age artists could tolerate
that much diversity in how they represented the world around them,
maybe we can discover ways to work, play and study in the same
canyon.
Ken
Reid
Pullman,
Washington
The writer works
for Rain Shadow Research, Inc., 114 N. Grand Ave., Suite D,
Pullman, WA 99163. He has studied archaeological sites in Hells
Canyon since
1985.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sheep erase history.
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