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KPVI Channel 6 reporter Aaron Kunz posted the following set of stories featuring the College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs Archaeology Department. Visit the KPVI site for videos and the complete series.

Reporter: Aaron Kunz
Posted: July 30, 2008 11:52 AM
Unearthing Idaho Part 2

During the first installment of our series called “Unearthing Idaho” we learned about the role a museum plays in the field of science.

But before anything can be put on display or studied. it has to be found.

I was invited to one of those archeological dig sites to see how the process is done.

Dr. Mark Plew, BSU Professor: “Through the Department of Anthropology every summer, we offer a six week archeological field school as they are known. Where we bring students, particularly graduate students out into the field and basically it’s a first introduction of field archeology.”

Students in Dr. Mark Plew’s class at Boise State University have to be committed; they will spend six weeks during the hot Idaho summer in the dirt. This class has chosen to dig on the west end of Three Island Crossing State Park near Glenn’s Ferry.

Dr. Mark Plew: “One of the interesting things about this particular site is that Boise State’s field school started 22 years ago in 1986 and we worked at this very site for two years. Very prominent, very important site where we found a structure, some storage pits, this site produced the largest quantity of fish remains of any site along the Snake River.”

After the school closed the site, professors like Dr. Plew had a nagging feeling. Did they find everything, did they cover enough ground. Now, 22 years later, Dr. Plew and his students are digging on the eastern end of the original archeological site.

Dr. Mark Plew: “We actually have archeological evidence of a structure, we think may be a residence. It was sort of a brush wicky up with posts and so forth, typical of the area as we know it historically. Structures of that sort have been found very rarely along the Snake River. So it’s very important from that sort of view because it tells us about the degree of mobility of the people living here.”

A big part of the process is using small shovels or trowels to peel away layers of dirt. Each layer tells a story, the students catalogue everything they find. Marked off by the square meter and written down.

Student: “Over here is an artifact that we’ve found marked as an ‘A’. Here is a rock that we’ve found, here is a root that we’ve found. So we mark everything that we find because as we are digging we are destroying.”

Each depth tells the group whether this area was under water, used for farming, or left untouched. They can even tell to some degree the length of time a person used the land by what they find and what they don’t find.

Dr. Mark Plew: “When we find structures, we find storage pits. It’s very useful in terms of identifying those differences and it appears this site is indicative of a somewhat more tethered pattern of settlement, so it’s very interesting and very important from that point of view.”

Student: “…and make sure that everything is exactly as we found it when marking that for the future, and then just in the back every single unit has there own page, so for every unit that we have out here we can go back, we can look at every single layer. As we go through, as I’ve said before is like every ten centimeters, and we can see how things are changing, what we’re finding, and that’s all here.”

Dr. Mark Plew: “Because we deal with a record that has a really long time depth. Archeologists are really the only scientists that are in a position to talk about long term cultural change. And that has a lot of implications in the modern world as we face food shortages globally, people start to move back into subsistent strategies.”

“Talk about global warming, archeologists are not in a position to only talk about climate change, but to talk about how people have fit to that climate change over really long periods of time.”

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