Northwest College (NWC) and Indiana University (IU) announce their third cooperative program in archaeological field methods scheduled from May 21, 2007 to June 28, 2007. NWC and IU present a holistic, field-based program in the social history and human ecology of the northwestern High Plains and Middle Rocky Mountains with a special emphasis on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This program examines the changing material culture of Crow and Shoshone Indians during the transition from Pre-Contact Period nomadic hunting and gathering societies to a contemporary Reservation-based ranching culture. Fieldwork includes a combined program of remote sensing, total station and global positioning system (GPS) mapping, artifact analysis, and limited test excavations at sites in northwestern Wyoming and southern Montana. Special topics covered include regional geological and paleoenvironmental history, human-animal interactions, and rock art studies.  Admission is by application only.  Application deadline for Indiana University students is March 19, 2007.  Northwest College and other students may apply until May 1, 2007.

Research will be conducted in four 10-day sessions with four days off between each session.  Students can spend days off exploring Yellowstone National Park or hiking and camping in the nearby Bighorn, Beartooth, or Absaroka Mountains. Sessions 1 and 2 will be held at Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area (http://www.nps.gov/bica/). Base camp for this project is at the Ewing-Snell Ranch, a fully restored National Register of Historic Places landmark first established in 1896.  Bighorn Canyon and the Ewing-Snell base camp offer easy walking access to field sites from paved or gravel roads.  Session 3 will be held at a remote camp in the Shoshone National Forest Washakie Wilderness Area (http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/shoshone/).  The wilderness area base camp requires students to pack their personal gear approximately 5 miles over a 10,000-foot summit. A certified outfitter and pack string will deliver all field equipment and supplies to the camp. The wilderness component to this program affords few luxuries in a potentially harsh but stunning environment with amazing archaeology.  All students must participate in a USDA Forest Service sponsored “Bear Awareness” training program and carry bear spray at all times. Grizzly bears and potential bear encounters are a fact of camp life.  Enrollment will be limited to 12 students. Contact Judson Finley or Laura Scheiber for additional information.

Laura Scheiber (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) and Judson Finley (PhD Candidate, Washington State University) direct and teach the archaeological fieldschool. Laura is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the William R. Adams Zooarchaeology Laboratory at Indiana University. Her research interests include Late Prehistoric and Contact Period Plains archaeology, faunal analysis, and cultural identity as realized through social landscapes. Judson is Director of the NWC Summertime Program in Wyoming Archaeology. He is a geoarchaeologist specializing in rockshelter stratigraphy, fluvial geomorphology, and environmental change in the northern High Plains and Middle Rocky Mountains. Laura and Judson have worked together since 1992 and together have 35 years of archaeological experience in Wyoming and the surrounding Plains and Rocky Mountain states.

Stone circles are one of the few types of prehistoric architecture that survive on the Northwestern Plains.  They represent on-the-ground remnants of family organization, camp activities, and domestic life.  Early Plains ethnographers such as George Grinnell, Walter Campbell, and Robert Lowie documented the use of stones as weights around the base of Plains Indian tipis. When the tipis were moved, the stones often stayed in place, preserving to some extent the characteristics of the superstructure. Stone circle studies are important and somewhat unique in archaeological research because they allow researchers to focus on social and economic organization, use of space,ideology, and daily practice.

Archaeologists recognize the potential of stone circles to contribute to larger anthropological research questions. Despite this agreement, many sites are often dismissed because of their apparent lack of artifacts. After examining site forms from 2785 stone circle sites in the state of Wyoming, Scheiber determined that only 1.2% of the sites were securely dated through excavation and/or radiocarbon dates. After a substantial Plains Anthropologist memoir published in 1983, only a handful of articles have appeared in recent years. Based on site data collected during the last 50 years and on our initial 2005 field project at Bighorn Canyon, we believe that stone circle sites here are especially noteworthy in their number, distribution, and high potential for dating signatures. We would like to develop a long-term research program in which Bighorn Canyon can serve as a test case for interpretation of stone circle sites throughout the Plains, particularly for understanding Crow domestic life during a critical period of culture contact and culture change.

CRAFTING IDENTITIES ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER—HIGH ELEVATION
OCCUPATION IN THE GREATER YELLOWSTONE ECOSYSTEM

Historic cultures on the western frontier of North America reinvented and redefined their identities in the context of the westward expansion of Euroamericans. By examining the archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence of changes in material culture and technologies in the case of Shoshone campsites in the Absaroka Mountains, we can see the complexities of culture contact and change that challenge the assumption of a unidirectional acculturation. The picture that emerges is that of a people responding strategically to rapidly changing contexts, taking advantage of new itemsfor their material culture repertory while maintaining continuity with past traditions.

Over the last fifteen years, the study of culture contact between Native peoples, Euroamericans, and others has moved beyond traditional acculturation studies to incorporate issues of cultural transformation, ethnogenesis, cultural pluralism, resistance, and Native agency. The Plains of North America are well known as the land of Native Americans, mountain men, rendezvous, and military conflicts, yet theoretical contributions from culture contact studies have not been thoroughly applied in this region. We investigate the ways Native peoples of northern Wyoming and southern Montana formed social landscapes and maintained their ethnic identities during significant social and economic disruptions caused by European expansion into the western frontier. In this project, we explore the ways that Native Americans crafted material culture and reworked technologies and how these practices are related to the formation of new cultural identities during the contact period in North America.

During this project, we will investigate a series of Shoshone campsites associated with mountain sheep traps that were occupied in the area of the Absaroka Mountains now known as the Washakie Wilderness between A.D. 1600 and 1900. Because the indigenous residents of these sites were pushed into this remote mountainous location by expanding American Indian and Euroamerican populations, virtually nothing is known about them. Indeed, recent research suggests that the myth of the wild man popularized in western medieval literature plays a larger role in defining this small group of nomads than does actual evidence. The Absaroka Mountain sites are also significant because a forest fire that burned and removed the overlying vegetation of the sites recently impacted them revealing thousands of artifacts and features and providing us a rare and exceptional opportunity to examine daily life. Objects visible on the ground surface include hundreds of stone tools, dozens of small arrow points, scissor-cut metal cans, thousands of glass trade beads, historic period rifle cartridges, native-worked bottle glass, metal projectile points, ceramic cooking vessels, polished stones, and heavy amounts of sheep and elk food remains.  These materials are clustered into distinct activity areas, such as tool manufacture, animal butchery and bone processing, cooking facilities, and craft production. This is important because it reveals information about the relationships among the artifacts and the spatiality of everyday practice. The exceptional range of aboriginal and introduced materials is the only example of its kind in the west and possibly in the country.

This project will expand the discussion of culture contact in North America by focusing on long-term culture change and continuity from pre-contact (pre AD 1700) to initial contact (AD 1700-1860) to early reservation (AD 1860-1900) periods. Repeated reoccupation of the same place allows us to consider how people chose to continue to use old materials, substitute new materials, or incorporate new materials in unique ways in a frontier situation. The Absaroka sites play a key role in understanding culture change and continuity prior to and following initial contact with Euroamerican explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Given the late dates of some artifacts, which clearly have a Native American affiliation, the sites also contribute to understanding continued use of the landscape following the initiation of the reservation period. The Wind River Reservation was established in 1868.  The mountain Shoshones who visited the area at the end of the 19th century may have left the Wind River Reservation temporarily or may have been escaping reservation life by hiding in the remote high country. The archaeological evidence will give us a better understanding of this critical juncture in the lives of Indian people.

During summer 2007, the research team will examine 1) campsite use and reuse during precontact-early contact-reservation transitions, 2) activity change through time at conical lodge dwellings and their associated work spaces (tool manufacture, craft production, animal processing, and cooking), and 3) the adoption and adaptation of Euroamerican technology into indigenous technology. This information will allow us to further address the role of northwestern Wyoming’s wilderness landscape in structuring Shoshone social history.

FACULTY PROFILES

Judson B. Finley is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Washington State University and is director of the Summertime Program in Wyoming Archaeology at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming.  Judson has 15 years of field and research experience working on the Northern Plains and Middle Rocky Mountains. He holds a BA in Anthropology (1996) from the University of Wyoming and an MA in Anthropology from Washington State University (2001) where he wrote a thesis exploring Late Holocene geoarchaeology and paleoenvironments of the Bighorn Mountains.  Since 2000 he has directed field studies in the Bighorn Mountains, developing an educational program in Wyoming archaeology through Northwest College that brings archaeological field opportunities to the residents of northwestern Wyoming’s many small communities.  He was assistant editor of American Antiquity from 2001-2002, visiting professor of anthropology at Northwest College from 2002-2003, and currently teaches classes through Washington State University’s Distance Degree Program. His membership in professional organizations includes the Society for American Anthropology, the Plains Anthropological Society, and the Wyoming Archaeological Society. A list of representative publications include the following:

• Finley, Judson B., Marcel Kornfeld, Chris Finley, Brian N. Andrews, George Frison, and Mike Bies (2005)  Rockshelter Archaeology and Geoarchaeology in the Bighorn Mountains.  Plains Anthropologist. In Press.
• Finley, Judson B. (2005)  Holocene Stratigraphy and Site Formation Processes of the Medicine Lodge Creek Site. In The Medicine Lodge Creek Site, Wyoming, edited by George C. Frison.  University of Wyoming Press. In Review
• Larson, Mary Lou, and Judson B. Finley (2004)  Analytical Nodules: Retrospect and Prospect.  In Aggregate Analyses in Lithic Studies, edited by C.T. Hall and M.L. Larson.  University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
• Finley, Judson B., Marcel Kornfeld, George Frison, and Chris Finley (2003)  Below Folsom at Two Moon Shelter, Wyoming.  Current Research in the Pleistocene 20, Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University, College Station.

Laura L. Scheiber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University and is the director of the William R. Adams Zooarchaeology Laboratory. She has 16 years of field and research experience working on the Northwestern and Central Plains.  She has a BA and MA in Anthropology from the University of Wyoming, where she wrote her Master’s thesis entitled “Prehistoric Domestic Architecture on the Northwestern High Plains: A Temporal Analysis of Stone Circles in Wyoming.” She also holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted research resulting in her 2001 dissertation which addressed issues of daily practice and culture contact on the North American High Plains. She recently initiated a new archaeological research project with Judson Finley in northern Wyoming/southern Montana focused on interpretation of historical landscapes in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. As part of this project during the summer of 2005 they documented prehistoric sites along the Bad Pass Trail on the Big Horn Canyon National Recreation Area and assessed damage due to grazing, looting, and erosion (Finley et al. 2005).  Professor Scheiber has taught archaeological field schools in Wyoming for 15 years and is the author of over 30 papers delivered at professional conferences. She is currently the Vice-President of the Plains Anthropological Society and is also working on a co-edited book for the University of Colorado Press entitled, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains. At Indiana University, she is affiliated with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, the Center for Archaeology and the Public Interest, and the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. She is a member of the Society for American Archaeology, World Archaeological Congress, and American Anthropological Association. Relevant publications include the following:

• Scheiber, Laura L. and Charles A. Reher. The Donovan Site (5LO204): An Upper Republican Animal Processing Camp on the High Plains. Accepted to Plains Anthropologist for February 2008 issue.
• Scheiber, Laura L. (2006) Skeletal Biology: Plains. In Handbook of North American Indians: Environment, Population, and Origins, Volume 3, edited by Douglas Ubelaker, pp. 595-609. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
• Scheiber, Laura L. (2006) The Late Prehistoric on the High Plains of Western Kansas. In Kansas Archeology, edited by Robert J. Hoard and William E. Banks, pp. 133-150. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence.
• Scheiber, Laura L. (2005) Late Prehistoric Bison Hide Production and Hunter-Gatherer Identities on the North American Plains. In Gender and Hide Production, edited by Lisa Frink and Kathryn Weedman, pp. 57-75. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California. In Gender and Archaeology Series, edited by Sarah M. Nelson.
• Scheiber, Laura L. and George W. Gill (1997) Bioarcheology of the Northwestern Plains. In Bioarcheology of the North Central United States, edited by Douglas W. Owsley and Jerome C. Rose, pp. 88-114. Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Series, No. 49.
• Scheiber, Laura L. (1994) A Probable Early Nineteenth Century Crow Burial: The Pitchfork Rockshelter Reexamined. Plains Anthropologist 39(147):37-51.