Field Notes

State Archaeologist Stan Wilmoth (from the SHPO Office) shows a piece of obsidian as an example of the sort of lithic material one sometimes finds at prehistoric sites. Stan agrees that high school students can gather field data that is important and useful. The information Harlo students gathered will be placed in the state data base of archaeological sites.

Finding Today's Real Work
In the Land

Archaeology on the Cooney and Leary Ranches by students
in Nancy Widdicombe's Senior English classes,
Mike Murphy's history classes,
and Gary Olsen's ag classes.

April 24 and 25, 2004

Field Report by Michael L Umphrey

Girls place flagging near tipi rings, locating sites for further data collection. This is the Cooney Brothers Ranch, about 15 miles south of Harlowton, with the Crazy Mountains in the background. Info on visiting the Crazies.

Photography note: This was taken by getting quite far from the girls and then zooming in with the telephoto. This "compresses" the distance and makes the mountains seem very close.

On Friday, students visited three sites on the Cooney Brothers Ranch about 15 miles south of Harlowton. They visited a ravine on a high ridge where an ancient wickiup remains, a buffalo jump, and an ancient camp site where tipi rings are still visible (although the stones are quite deep, covered with wind-blown sediment). On Saturday 10 volunteer students traveled west about 20 miles to Gene and Evelyn Leary's Lazy Daisy Ranch where they used their skills to document several tipi rings and three sets of alignment stone.

The teachers in Harlo have been working on getting the day organized for most of the year. Besides getting agreement from the ranchers and planning which sites to visit, Nancy worked through Marcella Sherfy to arrange to have the State Archaeologist, Stan Wilmoth, come to help teach students and to assure that the data they collect gets added to the State Historic Preservation Office data set for future researchers.

Archaeology is work—like ranching, logging, or hunting—that gives people a purpose for observing and acting in the landscape. Here students form a new ring at the site of an ancient tipi ring while Stan Wilmoth, with arms full of survey flagging, gives directions.

Stan made a preliminary visit earlier in the year with Marcella to inspect the sites and to decide how best to approach the work with students. He brought not just the equipment needed, but two other archaeologists—Damon Murdo from SHPO and Melissa Ray, a recent University of Montana graduate who is completing at internship at SHPO.

Four wheel drive vehicles were needed to get to all the sites, so the kids spent part of the day in the best of Montana traditions, riding in the back of pickup trucks through the landscape.

Earlier people visited these sites in their quest for good hunting, good water, and good grass for their horses.

Ag teacher Gary Olsen (center, green cap) works with archaeologist Stan Wilmoth, teacher Mike Murphy, and Jesse Merrit, to record the site of an ancient wickiup.

Gary teaches the use of GPS and GIS mapping in his ag classes, so several students were quite proficient in logging the location of archaeological features. The data they recorded will be added to the State Historic Preservation Office's data bases.

Today, young Montanans visit these sites in their quest for knowledge and understanding of the past. The skills they learn do not involve chipping obsidian into points or enticing bison off cliffs, or, for that matter, converting grass into well-marbled beef or getting trees to mills.

Instead, they learn to convert distributions of rocks into maps through geographic positioning system (GPS) and geographic information system (GIS) technology, and then to read the patterns that emerge. It's one way they learn to create knowledge by forming questions, collecting data, and using conceptual tools to manipulate the data in order to analyze what is found.

These are the basic steps in most research, but GPS and GIS technology make the process especially vivid for students.

In a world rushing headlong toward an uncertain future, it can do no harm for young persons to stand at a site where young people stood hundreds and thousands of years ago and to ponder what those other persons would have wanted, how the world might have seemed to them, and what it means to be a person in such a world.

The wickiup is located under a cliff with good shelter from the wind, and in a deep ravine that would be difficult to see from any direction. It is a good place to hide stolen horses.

And it can do them much good to learn to use the tools we use to recover lost worlds. The modern world is largely made of data collection, information processing, and conceptual models such as those used by archaeologists. If the buffalo return (and they may—a herd of a few dozen can be seen roaming the hillsides on the Leary Ranch), they will roam not just the ancient hills and ravines but also a conceptual framework built of formulas, maps, and models created and sustained by a new generation of Montanans who see in the past abundance of the wild prairie not just a lost world but also a vision for the future, and who have the skills needed to bring visions to pass in a global economy and a data-driven civilization.

  In addition to photographing the wickiup and recording its location with GPS, students took and recorded careful measurements.
Wikiups were covered with boughs or skin and provided shelter from the elements.  In the days before guns, the shelter also served as  a fort, providing good protection from enemy arrows.