Via Wyoming News Exchange
DOUGLAS — Five-gallon buckets edged the top of the front wall, waiting to be filled with the brown earth excavated from the hole carved into the dry, hard-packed Converse County soil.
The hole, covered by a big white tent, was patterned by different levels of large squares, where kneeling university students scraped the ground out gently, searching for clues about the Clovis period mammoth hunters who may have camped at this site some 12,000-plus years ago.
University of Wyoming researchers and their colleagues from other institutions have been studying this area for 11 years, according to Michigan State University Assistant Professor Madeline Mackie.
That area is the La Prele Mammoth Dig Site out WYO 93, just eight miles from Douglas on a private ranch.
Mackie earned both her master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Wyoming.
“So, I’m one of the principal investigators on the site, along with Todd Surovell, Bob Kelly, who’s standing at the mapping thing right there (she gestures to her left of the hole where Kelly stands at the edge of the dig), who just retired from the University of Wyoming, then Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archaeologist, and Matt O’Brien, who’s a professor at Cal State Chico.”
In February, UW announced that a 12,940-year-old bead carved from the bone of a hare, complete with human hand-carved grooves on the outside, was excavated in 2016 from an ongoing dig at the La Prele Mammoth Site.
A sub-adult Columbian mammoth’s remains are preserved at the site, and there are multiple signs of human campsites during the time the animal was butchered. The site the students were digging July 10 is one of four mammoth hunter campsites being studied.
However, 2024 is the last season for the archeological work at the site.
Mackie said the project has been underway for 11 years, and the researchers have spent nine years unearthing 45,000 or more prehistoric artifacts from the area.
“We have collected a massive amount of data. It’s time to start putting all of that together and that takes a lot of time, too,” she said. “We’re not finished.”
Searching for answers
Every last bit of dirt dug from the grids within the site is mapped.
“A bucket of dirt equates to approximately 50 centimeters by 50 centimeters deep. So that’s about the equation . . . that’s kind of the area (we’re talking about),” Mackie said “Reagan (one of the students involved in the dig) is mapping an artifact he found in-place. So anything we find that’s in place, we map it down to the centimeter. Then all of the dirt that (is) collected out of that area is put into a bucket and then (it is) sifted through what is basically window mesh, looking to see if there’s any additional artifacts in there.
“The mesh is small. We get artifacts down to a sixteenth of an inch. And, we have tens of thousands of artifacts from the site. The vast majority of them are teeny,” she explained.
Mackie said it is impossible to know for certain exactly how many people lived at this particular campsite.
“It’s a little hard to say for sure because there’s still places we don’t know (about). There’s more archaeology in this terrace that dates to this time period that we haven’t excavated. It’s always really hard to say how many people used a campfire in the past. How many people are associated with that?” she asked rhetorically.
At this point, the archeologists have found at least four of the heart-centered sites at the La Prele dig.
“But, you know, right now we’re seeing that we have at least four of these centered areas and if those are all … say, households or something along those lines, that tells us there are at least a few different families or groups coming in (to this area). So it’s hard to say exactly how many people were here, but definitely more than a few,” she said.
Washing dirt
As the buckets are filled, they are then carried a few yards down a hillside to a washing station set up next to La Prele Creek.
Under a bright yellow sun canopy, graduate students Alex Dorosin, Clifford White and Chi Han are washing and screening dirt from the buckets.
At nearly 10 a.m., the temperature is already in the 90s, predicted to be close to 100 at the day’s high point. Still, the young men make the work look like fun as they laugh and joke with each other, their eyes never leaving the dirt piles they’re working in front of them.
They are hoping to discover some sort of evidence, a “find” that continues to prove the existence of prehistoric man and mammals in Converse County.
“This is why we wash and screen the dirt, using tiny, tiny screen, because we can catch stuff like this. Yeah, it’s really hard to find stuff,” Mackie said.
But that’s exactly what the researchers have been doing for the last decade here — finding incredible “stuff.”
Dig classes in session
There were multiple archeological sessions at the dig this summer.
According to Mackie, the university has posted archaeological field tours here about seven times over the last 11 years. A “huge number” of students have been trained on the site, she said, including about 15 from the UW Archaeological Field School during the last session, and currently, 17 students, most of whom are undergraduate students.
She said the current crew has been at the dig site since June 13; crews usually work about 10 days in a row before taking a few days off, but most of the current crew has yet to leave the dig.
“(There’s) a lot of University of Wyoming graduate students,” said Mackie. “We also have some Southern Methodist University graduate students, and then we also have volunteers that are out here as well. This session we have two professors from Rhode Island who are University of Wyoming alumni.”
Connecting the dots
The last team on site was scheduled to depart July 17. After its departure, an enormous excavator will begin pushing earth back into the dig, covering it up like it was never there.
“It takes years because we have to have the studies. A lot of researchers like myself and Bob and Todd, we have stuff we specialize in and we’ll find sites that kind of can answer those questions,” said Mackie. “That’s why we’re here.
“We’ve been working (outside of) Douglas for 11 years, mostly out here every summer. It’s been a great place to be,” she added. “Now it’s time to put it all together.”
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