Posts Tagged ‘Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project’
Elaine Hale, Yellowstone National Park archaeologist, helps Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project students Andrew Bowen of Kent State University and Ryan Sherburne of the University of Montana excavate a feature at the Fishing Bridge Point Site. The large volcanic boulder was likely used as a table or work area about 3,000 years ago. ( DOUGLAS H. MacDONALD photo )
Millennia before the first tourist pitched a tent at Yellowstone, Native Americans spent summers beside the region’s hot springs and bubbling pools, a University of Montana archaeological team has discovered.
“It’s always been a destination resort,” Hale, park archaeologist, tells Brett French of the Billings Gazette, here. “For at least 10,000 years people have been using the lake area.”
Adds Douglas MacDonald, a University of Montana archaeology professor, “The lake may have served as a crossroads of sorts for Native Americans from multiple regions.”
MacDonald and 13 graduate and undergrad students at UM are excavating parts of Yellowstone as part of the university’s Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project.
“The lake area was clearly an important warm-weather hunting and gathering grounds for Native Americans from all over the northwestern Great Plains, northern Great Basin and northern Rocky Mountains,” MacDonald tells French.
They’ve discovered, among other things, 5,800-year-old Early Archaic hearth and an area where people quarried obsidian for spear points traded as far east as present-day Ohio.
Gwen Floro
Tags: archaeology, buffalo post, Early Archaic period, Gwen Florio, Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project, Native American history, Native American news, University of Montana, Yellowstone National Park