Context Podcast Digital Collection

Doug Exton: Thank you so much for joining us for today's connected Conversation. A program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, Idaho Humanities. Org. I'd like to remind all that you may submit any questions using the Q&A feature or the chat feature located at the bottom of your screen.

And with me today is Judson Finley from Utah State University. It's an honor to have you with us today. And I turn it over to you.

Judson Finley: Great. Well, thank you very much for having me. And, this is, really nice to be with you all. It's a little unusual for me in the sense that I can't see any of you right now. So, so hello to all of you out there, and I look forward to hearing from you. So my name is Judson Finley.

I am associate professor of anthropology here at Utah State University. I'm also the department head of sociology and anthropology here at Utah State University. And I thought I'd begin just by introducing myself a little bit. I grew up in, you know, really in this tri state region that is, kind of the intersection of southeastern Idaho, northeastern Utah, and southwestern Wyoming, mostly in Wyoming.

So I think that there are some lessons to be had with that as well. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. So again, what I'm going to talk about is, the Fremont archeological record, specifically in northeastern Utah's Uinta Basin. All right. And I hope that some of you all have had a chance to visit Dinosaur National Monument.

Maybe been there just to to to sight see, maybe been there to raft on the Green or the Yampa. But it's a really, really cool place. And I feel really lucky to be, to be working there. Now, the national park Service kind of tapped me to do some work initially, looking at rock art. Right?

Because there's so much rock art in Dinosaur National Monument and really across the state of Utah and I agreed because of course, I would be foolish not to, you know, not to spend some time looking at, at rock art. But I find that as I've done more and more work with rock art, people are always asking me, they want to know, what does it mean, right?

What does that rock art mean? This is a site called the Rochester Panel, which is down in the San Rafael Swell south of price, Utah. It's a really, really cool panel. And I like to show this one just because it's so deeply complicated and it's a good I think, illustrate version of me saying, I don't know, I don't know what the rock art means.

All right. So, this was the panel that I was showing here, which is the Rochester panel. And again, it's it's a really, really cool, panel. There's a lot and a lot of things going on here. This kind of rainbow thing. But also what looks like a bunch of monsters and, you know, this crazy line that runs all the way through it.

There's a lot of what we would consider to be classic Fremont rock art in this panel. So again, suffice it to say that that this is my way of saying I don't really know what rock art means, but what I can do as an archeologist is learn something about the context of the lives of the people who made that rock art.

And that's what I want to talk to you guys about today. Okay, so now Fremont is also relevant in southeastern Idaho because it really does spread all the way up into the Snake River plain and into southwestern Wyoming. But let me begin, because we're talking about agriculture, just to kind of give you, a map that shows somewhat of a timeline of the evolution of the development of maize agriculture in western North America.

All right. We see the earliest evidence of of maize agriculture down just north of Tucson about 50, 700 years ago. All right. And that's about maybe 20 to 2500 years after maize was first domesticated in central Mexico. All right. So the thing to remember about maize is that it's a tropical grass, right? It's one of the most evolutionarily successful species on planet Earth, along with pigs.

Right. But it's a tropical grass that has been domesticated to grow in all different kinds of environments. All right. So what you see here is this kind of progression of maize as it moves further north. And people were selecting for traits that would allow it to be grown in environments that were cooler, drier with shorter growing seasons. Right.

Right. And so they were able to move maize agriculture off of their floodplains and other well environments up onto the dry mesa tops of Cedar Mesa. And it's from there that we start to see the spread of maize all the way north up into northern Utah. By about 1700 years ago, right around AD 300, we see the first evidence of maize agriculture.

And this is in my project area in Dinosaur National Monument, right up in northern Utah. All right. Now, bear in mind that people were growing corn all the way up here onto the northern slopes of the winter range and all the way out here around the Great Salt Lake. Right. You get to much further north of that, and you can't grow maize at all.

You get into southwestern Wyoming and all southwestern Wyoming is good for is, alfalfa. Right. And you get out here into, into the Snake River plain. And of course, you can grow, maize, but it's very specific. Selected maize, genetically engineered maize. That requires a lot of water. Okay. All right. So just kind of keep that timeframe in mind.

These are transitional forager farmers. And that archeological record pretty much well, all across this area spans this timeframe from about 8300 to 1300. I really like this this cartoon right here. This is from, a Utah archeology Awareness week several years ago that really encapsulates what the Hallmark Fremont cultural traits are, right? They're maize agriculturalists. They lived in pit house villages.

Right. These kind of unfired clay figurines that look a lot like the rock. Our imagery. And we also see some of the iconography that's present in these, figurines and the rock art replicated in the archeological record. So we kind of get the sense that people, this style of clothing and decoration that they wore very much mimics these figurines.

And, and the, the rock art. Okay. Now remember that maize comes out of the American Southwest. Ultimately it comes out of Mesoamerica. So it's really important to to contextualize the Fremont archeological record as being a southwestern phenomena. Right. And so we talk about the Utah, the Uinta Basin as being the absolute northern periphery, and that the Fremont world has kind of been characterized more broadly as being the northern periphery of the American Southwest, kind of like the, you know, characterized as that kind of the backwater area of of farmers.

Right. Both the social and environmental conditions. And for me, as an archeologist, I've come to understand that this is a perspective that we can really reconstruct within the context of human generations. And that's not something we can do oftentimes in the archeological record, because you have to realize that the archeological record is a very coarse grained reconstruction of past lives that operates on the order of several hundred years.

Right. So what we're attempting to do is squeeze time down. We're very obsessed with time in my team, and we do that using what we refer to as Bayesian chronological modeling and then also dendrochronology. So we'll talk a little bit more about that later on. But I'm not going to get too bogged down in those kinds of details with you guys.

All right, so here's the boundary of the monument right here in red. It was formed initially in 1915 to protect the, the Carnegie quarry, the dinosaur quarry that Earl Douglas found and expanded in 1938 to cover all of the kind of the wild and scenic river corridors of the green River right here. And the Yampa, all right.

And there was an effort in the 1950s to try to to build several dams here as part of the Colorado River storage project. And I think we all know where that would have ended up at, especially today had that gone through. But you really have to see this country to believe it. It's really spectacular. This is again, one of the northernmost networks of Fremont Mesa agriculturalists that we know.

I've been working in a couple of areas, the Jones whole area right in here, and then the Cub Creek area right in here. And that's what I want to kind of talk to you guys and introduce you to, this is just a composite set of photos looking at the the Jones whole area. All right. And it gets a lot of visitation because river rafters and other people come in here.

And this exposed, slick rock is really important because it directs all of the the runoff, both in rain and snow down into these valley bottoms. And this is what people were taking advantage of. Really beautiful waterfall called Ely Creek Water. Falls or Ely Falls. This is all spring fed, right? So all of this water that's coming down this, this channel right here is what's ultimately running off of that sandstone and getting trapped in the valley bottoms and and push down to the bottom.

A really ideal situation if you're a transitional forager farmer. All right, so, just a Google Earth kind of overview image looking down onto Jones hole. And again, this is, Ely Creek coming down in here and Jones whole running right down in here. You can drive in and park at the fish hatchery right here and hike down two miles.

Right. And it also reflects a lot of heat and light and the water that pools up, down in this, the bottom of this floodplain creates essentially a really, really nice agricultural niche. Right? It's well watered. It's warmer because of the exposed sandstone. So you get a little bit of a shield from early frosts or late frosts. So this is really important in in maize cultivation.

And so I like to think of this area as being a Fremont farm. So if you ever visit Jones Hole, just remember to yourself that you're, you're, you're seeing a Fremont farm that's about a thousand years old. Red circles here represent rock art sites, and, yellow circles represent granaries. Now, remember both rock art and granaries are part of the kind of quintessential material culture of Fremont.

So I'm going to show you, some photos of this, this granary right here. I just want to say I love the National Park Service because they pay me and my students to go out, wander around and find archeological sites and document archeological sites. And it's a really, really tough job. Because you get to see things like this.

All right. Now, I worked for about three years before I finally found this site. I knew it was out there somewhere, but half the, you know, half the process is the journey of figuring out how to find it. And once you find it, it's really easy to to come to. This is a Fremont granary, all right. And what you see here is basically the the wooden superstructure of, a wattle and Dodd, what we refer to as a mud Adobe or you call structure, where people were basically just taking these sticks, lashing them together.

Right. You can still see the lashes on here. And when you get in close, you can you can still see the, the knots that people tied a thousand years ago. And that to me is like, those are like snapshots in time that I love. Likewise over here you can see where somebody took a handful of mud and smeared it on the wall.

And so you see their fingerprints preserved in this. All right. This was basically a, a two bean storage chamber that you would have reached down through the top to, to to put corn and other kinds of things like that in. Right. We think of these as being largely corn storage features. But I wanted to show you this is a reminder that these represent much more than just food storage.

Right. These are gear storage places as well. This is a composite fishhook that came out of that granary that I showed you. Right. So here's a piece of wood. It's been carved, burned, bound together with this worked bone barb and then sealed with, with a pine pitch. Right. This is basically like, if you're a lure, Fisher, this is kind of like, you know, a prehistoric panther Martin or a spinning Rapala.

Right? Because it's it's got the little spots on it to make it look like a minnow as it's, as it's cruising through the water. But just bear in mind that this location is easily three miles from the green River. We actually like for miles, about two miles from Jones Hole. So people are storing all different kinds of stuff in granaries.

And that's the that's kind of the key point that I wanted to to make there. Again, this area was used mostly between about 8811 hundred. All right. So now I want to show you the Cub Creek area. And this is where I've been doing a lot of my work, over the last several years. In fact, I just finished, about two weeks ago.

But the green River comes through here. Jones Hole is right up here. The area that I was just showing you, and the river comes through and comes out. It's split mountain right in here. Right. And this whole area is just a really remarkable archeological landscape. All right. And it's been well known in archeological literature from the 1950s and 1960s when, a man named Dave Breton from the University of Colorado did some work here.

And then it really fell off the radar screen. And part of my task was to really figure out what what was going on at Cub Creek and kind of what it what it meant. Archeologically but again, just to remind you, right, that this is all, this kind of Google Earth aerial image doesn't really do the landscape justice.

It's really, really dramatic landscape. But you get a sense of the, again, the exposed sandstone, all of these box canyons that come down off of, Split Mountain are channeling all of that water and sediment right down into these little, areas out in here, all of which are well watered, well protected, and make excellent gardening locations. And so what we know is that this is the area that people were when they first came into the area, about 1700 years ago, I'm going to say probably from the Mesa Verde region.

It's, well, water. This is all, you know, cottonwood groves that are that are growing right down in here and then split Mountain in the background. All right. Now just, another, you know, kind of I think this is a really cool image. I've been walking by this, for the last couple years, and I finally snapped a picture of it.

It was just one of those things that dawned on me one day. This is near Jose Morris cabin. And Jose was this. You know, she was the daughter of one of the first settlers into this area called Browns Park in the 1880s. And, she lived until 1964 on this cabin out in Dinosaur National Monument. And so this is right next to her property.

But this shows you what people were doing during the historic period. Right. This is an earthen dam, and they constructed it specifically to trap the water that was running down the chute and just maintain a pond right here. Right. And you can see how thick the grass and sedges are right in here. And that just gives you a sense of how watered, how well watered these landforms are.

Again, just a landscape view looking into the area of Josie's cabin. You see Split Mountain coming down right here. And all of this kind of green, base. This is not irrigated right now. This is all just spring fed. All right. So again, really, really good agricultural opportunities. And the archeological record that drew me there is these pit houses right.

And so this is a photo of one of the pit houses that the University of Colorado team excavated in the 1950s. Excuse me, 1960s. And, there's about maybe 40 of these pit houses that were excavated. And at this point in time, up until my work, we didn't have any sense of how old these pit houses were. And some people speculated they were about 1718 hundred years old.

Some people thought they were maybe a thousand years old. We just didn't really have any idea. So that's kind of been part of my my task. All right. So now looking back over my last several years of work, this is kind of how the landscape breaks down right? Yellow represents the yellow dots all represent storage localities, granaries, other kinds of things like that, that all seem to be positioned along the base of of Split Mountain, right in here.

More storage sites up here that we just started to discover this summer. That's a really interesting new discovery for us. These, red sites are what we refer to as roasting sites. So if you if you're collecting a lot of maize and other kind of food stuffs like pinyon pine, yampa root, other kinds of, of good roots like sago lily and other things like that, seeds roasting, all of those things up.

All right. So really four major categories of of sites in here. And besides the locations, our primary objective has been to radiocarbon dating sites. So what I'm going to show you right now is that, is a what we refer to as a multi plot. All right. And what I'm going to do is just compare what we refer to as these upland roasting sites with the pit house sites.

All right. And all you really need to know is that these upland sites span that classic time period from about 8300 to 1300, right. We're focused on what we refer to as short lived annuals. So things like maize, twigs from granaries and other things like that that really help us refine the accuracy of our reconstructions of time right up here to about 1300.

All right. And then down here is, the chronology that we have from the pit House village. And this was a real big surprise for us. And what hopefully you can take away from this is that the ages of these pit houses are really, really tightly constrained. Right? This was a very, very brief event. It wasn't people living in pit houses for a thousand years.

Right. What it was, was people adopting maize agriculture, working out a system that was successful using that system for several hundred years, then settling into a village for some period of time before ending that village occupation and going back to the old way of doing things right. So this is really not what we expected in the archeological record.

All right. What we're actually looking at is tree ring width and tree rings respond to trees respond to precipitation in the sense that when they get a good water year, the tree ring width will be wide. And when it's a dry year, it'll be narrow. All right, most tree ring reconstructions if you if you really dig in to this span the last maybe 500 years to about 800 years.

All right. And so this is pretty well known throughout the western US this last 500 to 800 years. But that really puts us in at the very end of the Fremont record. And so I challenged my friend Justin here to build a 2000 year precipitation reconstruction. And he thought that was a really great idea. And we worked it out.

Again, each of these represents an annual, represents annual variation, right? So when we look at the year to year record, it's really, really noisy. And so what we oftentimes do is we'll smooth these records out. So we'll take a running average. Blue here represents a 50 year running average. Red represents a 100 year running average. So we're basically we're just taking the noise of the year to year record.

And we're smoothing it out. All right. The black line that runs through the center is the historical mean. All right. So we use historical mean conditions as a way to calibrate our tree ring record, and project it back into time. And so we can really think about deviations in relationship to the historical mean. And in this case it goes the historical mean and goes back to about 1890.

All right. And and again, you just kind of have to think about like we have some really, really wet years, like 2019, 2018. We're really, really wet years. 2020 and now 2021 are shaping up to be really, really dry years. Right. So we've got a lot of variability from year to year in those, in those records.

Right? So really think about agriculture as being a strategy for adjusting to droughts. So what I want to show you is that we have peak variability right here at about 8300. So environmental conditions were least predictable right around 8300. And that's really important to our reconstruction. This bottom chart is the one that really gives people headaches. This is what's referred to as a wavelet analysis.

This is what defines the last 2000 years, except for this period right in here from about 8750 to 1050. All right. And that dominant variability regime completely breaks down and disappears from the precipitation record. All right. Now, what's driving that in this particular case is a strengthening of the El Nino Southern Oscillation system. All right. So there's really cool relationships here between again what's going on in the equatorial Pacific.

All right. That continues through until the end of the Fremont period here at about 83,300. But what, again, is really surprising to us is that very narrow window when that village phase was occupied from A.D. roughly 840 to 1080, corresponds or occurred during this period when variability broke down. All right. Now, what that means from a practical perspective is that precipitation delivery became more predictable from year to year.

They settle down into a more permanent landscape, style. They're building houses, they're storing, they're doing all of the things that we expect out of a society that's intensified their production of of agricultural products for a very brief period of time. All right. Because as soon as this variability regime returns at 1050, it's within a couple of decades that the the village and Cub Creek was completely abandoned.

How do you solve disputes in your community? And more importantly, how do you solve disputes between communities? Because inevitably there's inequality that emerges amongst these communities and that leads to conflict. All right. And I would say this is really the important thing that the Fremont archeological record has to contribute to what we know about one of the most important events in human history, which is the transition to agriculture, that we can understand in a very, very great level of detail, chronologically and environmentally, what those conditions look like, that these early societies formed.

Doug Exton: And awesome. Thank you so much for that wonderful presentation. I really like to you touched not only on the culture, but you also hit the climate. I spoke to you because I definitely think that plays a key role. You know, like you said. And then our first question is, was there any involvement either by, Native American individuals or tribes in your research so far and have they been able to, you know, kind of add, you know, their historic story or something into that.

But we just haven't reached that stage where we're doing direct collaboration with the tribes yet. But hopefully that's going to kind of come as part of this National Science Foundation award.

Doug Exton: Awesome. And then obviously, each culture is unique and their experiences are all different. But is the story of the Fremont people in terms of, you know, a very narrow window of village settlements? Is that similar to other, tribes or culture cultures in the area?

Doug Exton: So and then how did the Fremont people influence the land? Because we talked a lot about how the land kind of directed how they would live. So besides the that, down, you know, the land and then also the rock paintings, were there any other evidence of how they modified the land to suit them?

And there's a lot of questions about the environmental conditions under which arroyos form and how people influence the formation of, of arroyos and, and likewise, how they affect people. Right. And because if you're a floodplain agriculturalists and the floodplain cuts it down and entrenches, then you're in trouble. You can't get water to your crops anymore. So we started to explore that because there's some pretty real expectations of these environmental conditions.

Particularly the shift in variable and precipitation variability should trigger, under the right geo morphic conditions, a down cutting of the stream and so we've been looking to demonstrate that. But then I started that work in October. What we started to to realize pretty quickly is that the these geological environments have a lot of evidence of fire. And so we looked at another site this summer and we're just right on the on the edges of the data right now.

But, you know, and we're talking about massive amounts of sedimentation. I found some Fremont, materials that are almost 4.5m below the surface, and they're less than they're about a thousand years old. So that's a lot of sediment deposition in that amount of time. So what we see is a lot of stratified evidence of burning of the landscape.

It will enrich the soil. And then you grow your crops until the yields start to decline. And then you move on to a different area, let the vegetation grow back and repeat this cycle. And so that's kind of what we refer to as it's kind of classic slash and burn horticulture. And so that's something that we're really starting to see now.

And it's not something we've thought a lot about, but it's certainly something we're going to be looking at more closely. Because again, people were very, very they knew how to manage these landscapes. These were very, very carefully managed landscapes for, fire and water.

Doug Exton: Not that's awesome. They were able to take, you know, that stratification and really, you know, come up with these stories of how these people lived, how they were able to, you know, adapt to that landscape. Yeah. Because to me, if just looking at that landscape, I would not think, you know, a whole civilization and culture be able to thrive in that environment.

Just a quick glance, because to me it looks very arid.

And then you show them, you know, a 4.5m sequence about 15ft of fire history that spans the last 2000 years and say, this place needs to burn. You need it. You need to light this place on fire.

Doug Exton: Yeah. Or can you tell anyone that? And it's probably not going to be an easy conversation to have.

Doug Exton: Awesome. Well, thank you again.

For the lesson of the archeological record.

Yeah, know. And I think it's really interesting, you know, seeing that slow shift back into, you know, that more cyclical approach, you know, kind of embracing how fire can actually be good in terms of the landscape.

Judson Finley: Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see what kind of decisions we make moving into the future. And, you know, archeology oftentimes is regarded as a novelty, meaning that we find cool things. Right? And so, you know, like, for example, Cooper's very archeological site up there on the, on the salmon River is one of the oldest dated archeological sites in North America now.

Right. That's super, super cool. That gets a lot of attention, right? Yes. We learn that people were here a long time ago, but we don't learn a lot about how archeology can inform our landscape, cultural and natural resource management policies today. And I hope that this kind of work is really a kind of guide for that.

Doug Exton: And hopefully it will be and unfortunately are out of time today. So I just wanted to say thank you again for all the information and the wonderful presentation. Thank you to everyone that attended.

I would like to see your faces. But, thanks for having me.

Doug Exton: Yeah, have a good one.

Judson Finley: You too.