Time Team America S01E04 Range Creek, Utah

so I'm driving as carefully as I can on this extremely rocky mountain road in Utah but I'm on my way to this incredible archaeological site I'm heading over there to a remote canyon you might have heard of it it's called range Creek it's got some of the best undisturbed Native American archaeology in the United States now there are villages down there in range Creek that are virtually untouched because of a local rancher who kept them secret for over 50 years but now archeologists have the rare opportunity to come in here and learn about the Fremont Indians who survived in this wild environment over a thousand years ago so over the next three days time team is going to be here to uncover the story of range Creek in the Fremont Indians and who knows we might even uncover clues about why they mysteriously disappeared you're the third person to touch that in a thousand years first thing we're gonna do is dr. Anna canyon looks from above the smell of life located southeast of Salt Lake City Utah range Creek is one of the richest most pristine archaeological sites in the US for 50 years who is protected from intruders burr wrench or Waldo Wilcox who sold the canyon to the trust for public lands in 2001 range Creek was then deeded to the state of Utah it's one of the most remote and rugged canyons in the state and to get here it takes our team nearly four hours to Caravan end-time team is a group of archaeologists that descend on a site for three days with special expertise and high-tech tools not available on most archeological digs our goal is to significantly advance the work on that site hopefully answering some key questions and leaving behind a blueprint for work to be done in the future I'm the team artist my job is to draw what we think the archaeological finds look like but I'm also the host here to explain what's going on let me start by introducing the rest of the team dr. Adrien hannus is a professor of anthropology at Augustana College in South Dakota dr. Joe Watkins is the director of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and is a member of the Choctaw Nation Eric Deetz is an archaeologist with 30 years experience excavating sites in various parts of the country dr. julie schablitsky is on the research faculty at the University of Oregon and our digging team leader Chelsea Rose is an archaeology graduate student at Sonoma State University they're the regulars but they're also specialists who joined the team at each site we visit you'll meet them later day one and as the gate opens on range Creek we enter a lost world hidden among these cliffs are villages an art to remain untouched as if the Fremont Indians who lived in this Kent a thousand years ago just recently walked away they were a civilization of farmers hunters and gatherers who managed to survive in this harsh desert climate time team has the rare privilege of walking in their footsteps and to help with the ongoing research into the lives of these mysterious people why they came to these canyons and why they left we still don't know their ruins are the only evidence they were here although we've got four-wheel drive without cell phone coverage or clear radio signals we begin to realize how far away we are I don't know where everyone is Joe I don't know maybe they're in a hurry to get started well there's Duncan Duncan Metcalfe is a lead archaeologist for range Creek it's Duncan who invited us here to help with the dig if you look up on this cliff face you can see this group of trees that are about three chords the way up and just a little bit right of them there's this wonderful pictograph looks like a television screen we joke about it as range Creek we have one television and one channel and actually only one seeing on the one channel it's amazing that it's almost in perfect condition and hard to believe it's over a thousand years old the other is we have a granary and it's pretty hard to find I don't see it at first but as it blends in so well with cliff but then there it is it's the texture that your eyes starts to catch yeah well it's incredible to think they use these for food storage climbing up there with their corn and like the painting it's in beautiful condition another example of how well the artifacts are preserved here Duncan wants to point out locomotive rock which is the site of another Fremont village how did they get up there I've read a lot about range Creek in the archaeology and this is just the tip of the iceberg where's the rest of it right it's all through the canyon but where I need some help is big village and that's down about six miles so follow me while you as an archaeologist to be invited to a place like range Creek is packed with so many artifacts has a dream come true well he knows this road big village is several winding miles from our campsite located on a plateau overlooking the valley it's called big village because of all of these rock rings the remains of Fremont pit houses Duncan an associate professor at the University of Utah conducts a field school here every summer his students have been here digging for two weeks they'll be glad for some extra help we're bringing in lots of technology that will speed things up the first step is to create a geophysical survey what lies below the ground looks like they're moving pretty quickly as well they're at work we're starting to extend back okay all right here we go our geophysics team dr. Meg Watters and Bryan Haley are using magnetometry a form of geophysics imaging used to pick up data from under the ground first they scan a specific area then analyze the data for what Meg calls anomalies possible evidence of human activity buried below the ground a geophys survey gives us a kind of underground map and this map tells us where to dig with so many sites to choose from the team asks why duncan chose to dig here mainly because we had a fair amount of diversity in the types of structures and so one of the things that we want to get a handle on is an idea about the types and amount of architectural variability the big village site is made up of a variety of circular houses there were dug partly into the ground and called pit houses these rock rings were used to support their roofs they vary in size but the biggest and perhaps most important one is located here recently however Duncan dug a unit in this open area to investigate an ancient trash heap when he found evidence of a structure without rock rings it was a big surprise if it's a pit house it's different from the others Duncan wants time team to investigate this mystery structure he also wants to see what our geophysics technology can detect underground because this would help him understand the layout and size of the big village site excavation is a very slow process and so if any clue that I can get from the magnetometer or any of the other remote sensing type will be just a huge gain for me Meghan Bryan have finished their first survey and are on their way down the incident room to process their data one of the goals of the dig is to get a better understanding of the grain reefs on the cliff walls so we're going to climb up to one with a professional climber Larry Coates has climbed all over this canyon and discovered greeneries and some of the highest peaks how does he think they got up there you know maybe the most accurate depiction would be somebody with their hand on a stick coming out of a crack okay it's used as a tool and then the other hand on a hold on a natural hole and their feet kind of spread out across natural holes so something that would look like a rock climber because absolutely I've even figured out what holds they used at times just to make the move so they were absolutely excellent rock climbers not only are we going to climb to a granary but we're also going to try and build one to get a better understanding of how they were made before we came into the site Julie and Joe went by the College of Eastern Utah prehistoric museum to see some of the incredible art has been found in range Creek ranae Barlow an expert on the Fremont is going to show us some of the clay dolls found in a cave in the 1950s I rent you're Charles pilling they're called the pilling figurines they turn out to be a thousand years old and are just some of the most fabulous Fremont figurines that I've ever been found it looks as if there's both men and women represented here usually the Fremont figurines common male and female pairs you can see on this female figure she has hair bobs she has a belt and an apron or a kilt like garment and the male has a breech cloth which is typical of male figurines but they both had the painted faces and that's also classic with the Fremont Renee thinks they may have been toys or fertility objects or both Joe is fascinated by this thousand-year-old toy Papoose but one thing you notice that this piece of hide here looks like a fawn skin a baby deer and this rodent head down here it also looks small so they may be using children species again to help tie this into protecting the child itself it's the dry desert heat that preserves these artifacts so well renee things that's likely there are lots of other amazing artifacts hidden in these canyons waiting to be found when we came upon range Creek and it came into the possession of the state it was like discovering a huge library of unread books really and it's been protected because of its remoteness and because of the zealousness of the landowner previous landowner and protecting his his property so the archaeology here is just phenomenal and it's and its pristine it's been well cared for how long have you been working here since 2002 when I came in with the former landowner just before the land exchange took place and he drove me and another archaeologist through this Canyon and showed us things he waved his arms look up on that Ridge there's Indian signs all over and about halfway through the afternoon I realized this wasn't just another Canyon this was a pretty remarkable place was it perhaps a national treasure and it contains a lot of information contains their the record of a of people who lived here lived and died and flourished and perished in a place that now we have a good opportunity to try and tell that story and it's very exciting to be able to have an opportunity to do that is Adrian up at the site meg this is Adrian hi Adrian I just wanted to report to you that we've just worked up the data and I believe we see a number of things in it fantastic the heat is unbelievable here it's a hundred degrees out and on top of that meg is pregnant despite it all she's excited now there are a few things that stand out to me very clearly one which Duncan I'm hoping you might be very excited about this is what I believe is a pit house circle mm-hmm coming around like this meg reads the G of his results like a radiologist reads an x-ray she thinks the white markings point to something buried below ground it looks like there's evidence of a pit house circle here circling Duncan's trench in the middle of the site whether there is a wall here are just some trace of a wall only digging can tell Meg also see something else just outside the circle this is very interesting to me this is high magnetic field signal so to me that might be something like pits or or some sort of humic debris that's on the ground that's collected along that side of the house or some activity I'm gonna interrupt with humic debris humic debris is kind of a man-made debris or like rotting reputation those things that have that have decayed but are still actually in the soil okay another humic debris is evidence of possible human habitation adding that to Meg's wall and the absence of a rock ring it's starting to seem like Duncan really has come up with a mystery structure that is different than the other pit houses on the site our strategy will be to open a new unit here to find the humic debris and then dig an extension to Duncan's unit here and here to see if we can find the wall we're putting this one by one over this black blob and it's this one right exactly okay charcoal staining on the top yeah it looks like you're getting right into it easy you better take one of these okay Jeff one of our digging team is also an amateur rock he agreed to join Larry on his climb to the granary this is sort of what I was visualizing based on conversation for you two looks probably a pretty close approximation to what what would have gone on this how you guys would be climbing no nothing like that all right a little more control we'll drop down from above and anchored to some trees on top okay sighting what we hadn't counted on though was the weather Wow Jeff this isn't looking too good no better I'm gonna leave this on yeah I think we better save this for another few hours and see what happens okay in all seriousness series the danger here really isn't arraigned it's the like okay so Korean I heard that last year there was a thunder Sherman and it actually caused a fire and lightning struck right basically where we're standing around here pretty close I was a little further down canyon but really close to here um it burned about 200 acres it was a fire that really took off in a hurry Fire has been part of the cycle here for thousands of years sometimes it's good for the archeologists and it clears up all this cover is that we can go back into an area that we have intensively surveyed and in the case of this burn we found I think six new sites last summer it takes a while but the sky finally clears so we're able to get back to work Adrian and Chelsea are investigating what they think might be a midden or ancient trash heap trash heaps are a great place to find buried artifacts so much for that rain all the soil that comes out of the trenches is sift through screens so they can find the smallest artifacts where do you find Adrian is pleased the first things out of the trench are small bits of stone left over from ancient tool-making this material is pretty nice reduction material it's really quite Micro flake so they were doing some finished work on some stone tools and then this is a piece of bone these tiny pieces were chips from larger stones as they were shaped into tools like arrowheads it looks like meg was right this must be a mitten a trash heap left to us by the Fremont it's getting late in the day but Larry and Jeff start their climb back at the site we're pushing on to the dig as quickly as we can and trying to ignore the heat you know cuprum oh my gosh I push this nice little room then we got the here's the handle piece of the handle it's one spalled off yeah sure Wow cool these bits of pottery are from a traditional grey ware pitcher made by Fremont Indian over a thousand years ago that probably doubled the amount of pottery we found in the excavation really yeah hot spot from this woman was very cool but it's Adrian who scores the best find of the day now is that truly an arrowhead like that would have been on the arrow mm-hmm and it's serrated uh-huh that's beautiful TV it is and with that I've killed a road or was it like fur birds oh no this would be for large game like a deer yes the Fremont made these points small for speed and accuracy they would wound their prey then track them down you would not even think that could go through a deer head oh it would oh it would penetrate oh really razor-sharp down the canyon Jeff and Larry are about to start their descent to the cliffside granary okay extreme team Jeff we're here were you how you doing guy oh my god you look like an ad up there you see the difference between the expert and the modest one I got a rope Larry to stand in there where I put my shawl ridge up here now he's gonna go down and then you'll hear a scream oh well looks good got a lot more respect for those free monitors what'd you guys do that yes yeah I do it once maybe twice all right just getting down now how you feelin Jeff not bad not bad Oh good as you get down here you're gonna be hanging out from The Granary event and I'm just gonna pull you right over real gently and I'll actually let you get past me a little bit and then I'll bring you in ah Anna okay one more time hey guys you got it yeah so Jeff what do you see okay unbelievable they have twine it's probably a sapling maybe a sapling that's tied around to keep the roof structure in it's pretty impressive to see something that was tied thousand years ago it really is I mean but let Larry tell you a little bit more I'm still breathing hard there are still roots support beams in place these beams that you see sticking out or actually the horizontal supports for the roof some of the original lashing as Jeff was mentioning is in place some of the original mud with fingerprints in it is still visible here there's a capstone lying on the ledge here the circular stone that would have covered the hole on top of the granary there's actually some rock art some concentric circles on the rock and red up above my head and I've never seen that before I gotta go in the drawing now I guess yeah yeah you know they were talking about how your drawing looked like it was spot-on with those support posts and everything that's cool yes they're on the petroglyphs and you'll have it perfect all right are you collecting samples ten-four and I think we're gonna work on these samples so we'll get back with you we'll give these soil samples to our paleobotanist who can analyze exactly what's in them we'll get those results later back at the site we're closing down for the day although we haven't solved the puzzle the mystery structure but what we have found is tantalizing so what are we getting we've got a tremendous amount of Barney in this site I mean every place you look the specials are walking around this charcoal everything kokin out everywhere yeah the burning could have been from the structure Catching Fire or since we found pottery here it may have been a fire pit for baking powder and good produce a tremendous amount of charcoal whatever the fire was we'll have to wait until tomorrow to learn more end of day one with some success and lots of unanswered questions we head back to camp already making our plans for tomorrow day two in range Creek we're going to search for some pristine Fremont rock art just going to start his granary we're going to push on with our search for Duncan's mystery structure but the first thing we're gonna do definite Telekom dirt yeah the canyon looks from above Larry is thrilled for this chance to see the Fremont sights he's climbed to from the air and perhaps a spot some new sights this has got to be the best way to see some of these amazing structures and for some of them the only way locomotive rocks coming up ahead and there's a beautiful greenery on the far corner so right here right under this overhang as we swing her on the corner keep a sharp lookout and you're going to see a beautiful greenery right now oh my gosh beautiful one of you this is just breaking up there in the experience of my life incredibly these granaries are just the start of what the Fremont built among these Peaks right down there that's the fortress not only do they store food up here some of them lived in these Heights - yeah those are pit houses oh my gosh and the rock stack along these the cliff edge here on the left side they're perched ready to be pushed oh my gosh there move into these cliffs seemed to have been provoked by drought and their need to protect a dwindling food supply from intruders and perhaps from each other this business apartment in the sky deluxe apartment in the sky another pet house big big storage facility and situated right next to this amazing arch and again there are these defensive structures right on top how did they do it the only water was a thousand feet below in the canyon floor somebody would have had to climb up and down several times a day the joke in the archaeology circles that's what the grand is Mozza grandkid work once you're about ten and you're a laborer while I was up in the air Jeff began building a granary like the one he saw yesterday for safety reasons he's not going try to build it up on a canyon wall but in every other respect we'll be as authentic as possible Joel boon garden an expert in the Fremont will work with Jeff over the next two days the first task is to gather rocks for the walls and dirt and water to make mortar they're going to base the size of their ground read on the one from the cliff about four feet high and three feet wide unlike the Fremont sites high in a cliffs big village is built on a plateau close to range creeks water and arable land Duncan hopes the dig will tell him something more by the pressures that drove the Fremont into the cliffs at big village work has begun again to try to make sense of the mystery structure the center of the site while at Chelsea's unit more pottery flakes are coming up to add to our collection meanwhile a group of us are headed further into the canyon to photograph some amazing rock art to record this art while still in good condition and help with Duncan's research we're going to scan it with the latest in 3d imaging technology oh wow here they are oh these are beautiful yeah they are these are typical Fremont figures the Fremont created these images by pecking into the wall with pieces of stone you can still see the individual peck marks they look almost exactly like the figurines I saw earlier this week in a museum right and those figurines were actually found in nearby in this same Canyon really really but the difference between the figurines are that you had a pair male and female figures and here we really look at it another topic I think one interpretation is that they're shaman figures people with more power that can access the supernatural to bring benefits to their community and notice the necklaces I mean necklaces are often a sign of power and then some kind of wavy line connecting these two it's almost like lightening the images themselves would have empower this this location make this a special place as a sketch artist I'm going to record these images the old-fashioned way while Ken records them with the latest technology Ken's work will take a while sitting here now I imagine that these images would have looked even more imposing at night by firelight what did it mean to the Fremont to walk up and touch these drawings a thousand years ago it's early afternoon on day two and I head back to the dig site to see what's happening eric is still trying to find the pit house wall that's meant to be in this unit what I would imagine we'll find is more a difference in soil it's not going to be like these other ones that are stone line because if with stones we probably see it while geophys exists a wall like these eric says it might not be a solid object for something more diffuse perhaps the remains of a wooden structure that burned down we have a charcoal layer here and we have a different layer here for my completely untrained eye this looks like you're following sort of subtle color differences in the soil texture texture you can if you listen that sounds pretty hard but in here it's oh yeah oh yeah so what do you hope will come out of this next dig down we hope to find actually just the actual edge of the pit house that contact between the cultural material in the middle and the non cultural features outside the pit house circle on the geophys plot then isn't really a wall it's where the soil wood charcoal inside the structure meets a natural soil outside thanks I'm going to leave them to it and check in with Chelsea and Linda Linda is the pollen expert we brought in to help us analyze what we're finding well I'm looking for a plant evidence of the foods that people ate and immittance a wonderful place to look because since this is trash this is what people threw away so the mitten the best place to get your grocery list for the people who lived here Linda's going to look at our pollen sample from the granary later then I see my chance to get a geophys lesson the basic idea meg says is that they're measuring different magnetic sensitivities in the soil burn soil for example has a much higher magnetic reading than regular soil is it something that I could get a taste of it all absolutely no yeah sure if we can get all the metal off easy then yeah all right already grommets in your hat zippers in your pants so I need to collect a grade my boxers right now view yeah getting accurate readings is harder than it looks when you release that green button when you hit the grid right here by the time you get to the end there should be 8 feet and her last one will be a double beep to tell you that the lines actually done okay alright alright can we get a shot great one two three how's it going good hey guys even though they're using a wheelbarrow and buckets instead of wicker baskets they're building the granary with Fremont materials mimicking ancient building techniques in this way is called experimental archaeology do all of these granaries that you find in this canyon seem to have a back wall supporting them yeah it makes it easier because you've got something solid right so function as a back wall and you can sort of build out from that the idea is to try to think like a Fremont Indian it gives us another way of you know learning about these people and understanding their situation in this Canyon you know what what it took to make a living here and these granary seem to represent the optimal behavior for them so whatever their situation was this was the solution the Fremont range over almost all of Utah and their grannies haven't found all through this area exactly what their situation was and why this was a solution our questions Duncan has been thinking about for years you find that organisms break themselves typically into two strategies one's called larder hoarding and larder hoarding is when you grab all the resources you want and you bring them and you defend them you stock your pantry you stocking the pantry and you're prepared to fight for those the other type is called scatter hoarding and rather than bringing them into a central location you actually split them up gives you greater security if you lose some of them right not putting all of your eggs in one basket absolutely um so when we first started thinking about the granaries and range Creek I was thinking it was a type of scatter hoarding scatter hoarders are animals that can't defend it okay so you either have a competitor that can take it away from you mm-hmm um or you're not there mmm and I think that may be one of the clues to range Creek could be in other words the populations were gathering this in storing it and then dispersing for parts of the year absolutely and the best time for running and gathering is this right after harvest right yeah so what are you gonna do with let's say you got a cubic meter of corn you're not calling it around with you while you're going nuts no obviously not so you store it someplace what you can do is to put it in these locations that are hard to reach they're hard they're visible so anyone who's trying to steal your food is one helpless for a relatively long period of time while they're climbing up it um can you leave your 12 year old son with a bow and arrow you tell everybody you left her to 12 year old son with you do it or not with a bow and arrow and he can monitor 12 or 13 of the granaries that are around here by himself and the rest of the group you get out of the canyon go where hunting and gathering is the best you guys doing late in the morning meg brings up the latest G of his results voila there we go so this is what we did today this this section up and what's really of interest to me is this feature right here meg has extended the survey the results show a lot more archaeology spread across the site essentially there are two different features we would like to dig the first is this pit house this seems to have a heart in the middle and maybe a rubbish pit here while the other feature is over here show signs of village activity but no pit houses both sites hold promise but we're running out of time which do we dig now if I was Duncan I think I would be excited about this one we can see the pit house it's got a hearth in the inside it'd be great but it's not going to be a stop depresses newsflash whereas this might be a different kind of feature that relates like you said to a different kind of activity either you know kiln or food processing or something like that so Joe what do you think umm I'd go for the pit house we recognize that okay GF is works here what we can do is we can look at this pit house put something in quickly find the center be able to mark that come back to it next year Duncan agrees with so little time left the pit house is the better choice without warning Eric and Joe grabbed me they found something pretty special I've been the screen in the soil as you know all the all the soils come out everything gets screened to get on the smaller fines me give you a little archaeology 101 here all right that's great give you a midterm here there's something in here it's a cultural the rest is just garbage and see if you could spot it pretty quick so is there several things or is it one thing just one thing that's pretty definite you lose it when you see it all right well oh is that right there yeah oh my gosh you go you pick it up that's right oh my gosh that nice that's beautiful it's about 1,000 to 1,200 years ago it's called a side notch projectile point see the notches in the side instead of in the mace so calling you're the third person who touched that in a thousand years some of your thousand years ago roughly dropped that and then you know were the next people to find oh my gosh that was first oh my god you pea doesn't bite you laughing you go for the throat while Chelsea and Adrian get a last dig site going finds keep turning up in the big trench or we're looking for the mystery structure rocks like this that have just been inhibiting our digging we've been chucking him off to the side and I was just trying to get this out of the way for Luke to do some digging and lo and behold when I got turns over it's about just splittin 3-star being very careful but it's part of a fragment of a facing I'm a talking fragment you can see the packing right here well I would definitely bag this separately excited good job you guys yeah well Meg this is a fragment of the Matata it's a grinding basin they would use another stone on top they would put corn in here they would grind it it could be probably maybe about that size it could be larger we know they use these because the teeth would ground down so much from bits and tiny pieces of grain and sand get caught up in the cornmeal and then as they ate it they cheated it actually flattened off their teeth the temperature here is over a hundred degrees and we've been in the Sun all day but it's worth the effort when you get a very special find and just as we approach the end of the day Adrienne does find something very special oh I've got the rest of whatever it was that you guys were looking for here oh my gosh nice mono really did that come from here no up here the other unit so this would have been what went into then the grinding stone yes right Joe right if you look at it it'll be prepared by pecking it speaking of pecking it and not to one-up you know this is what just came out of this absolutely not to one-up you this is the battering stone no this is a river cobble a cobble is a stone used to shape the metate and the mono it's a terrific find and more evidence of habitation connected to Duncan's a mystery structure but right now all this talk of food is making me hungry time to get back to camp focaccia okay one Caesar salad the best part of the day day three our last day in range Creek and our time is running out Chelsea is trying to get a fix on the evidence of burning Jeff is rushing to finish his Fremont granary and we'll see results from the 3d scans of the rock article bud but most importantly this is our last day to solve the riddle of Duncan's mystery structure first I want to see how Chelsea's doing with her new unit up here Sergeyev has extended their survey as we get close you'll see this ring of rocks it's pretty obvious on top of the ground but that's not what GF is looking at they're going below that and finding the strange blob anomaly that may have been a large post hole or something burnt is that correct we've been taking it down we're about 20 centimeters down we've noticed the soil change and we're gonna keep going and see what we can find down to the big trench where they found the metate and pitcher there's a breakthrough in the mystery structure this edge right here is where the geophysics picked up it's probably the edge of the pit house and now Shannon's gonna remove the rest of this fill see what has underneath here see if there's any more evidence the building may be structural elements or something like that the bit of wall they found is here at the eastern edge of the trench just that they thought it's a change in the soil rather than a solid object another success for geophys but to find out what kind and size a structure it was they have to find at least a bit of wall on the other side of the trench to measure it if Luke picks up a wall over there then we should be able to make a nice arc finding anything at all that might suggest and arcing around of this not yet to get a better idea what these pit houses looked like I'm going to make a drawing they're probably a rough wood right yeah it would be probably a maybe a Juniper Duncan says these pit houses would have been shallow maybe a foot and a half deep then on top of a rock base the walls would go up how high would those go up no one likes to crouch so I'm assuming that they're about six feet support being through the walls and roof will go up near the center ok then there'd be a cross beam it also cross the other ones so you'd have a sort of a square on top all right so there would be a ladder so basically they would climb up here and come in through the top then for interior features they had a central fire pit it's a fire pit underneath the ladder mmm okay so if it's going through the ladder through this this entryway that's actually surfing's both the entrance people come in and the exit for smoke to go out yeah they also had a ventilator shaft dug at floor level to keep the air circulating and use the branches from the timber to hang their tools and weapons back in 1975 I built a pit house really down in Taos Valley I lived in one for nine months did flint knapping pottery-making before magnet that's making making arrowheads all right in the summer time you don't spend a lot of time indoors because you do all your work on the roof outside you need the light in the winter time as the light gets less and less you find that even if you're doing something inside you follow the sunlight and if you're grinding pottery or if you're grinding corn you want to be near this deflector chef okay because when you're doing that you get warm real quickly so you want this cool air to come in so a lot of times Matata are near that ventilator shaft Oh interesting living in one of these is it's not as bad as you think because it stays warmer in the winter and it's cooler in the summer the earth is a very good insulator so it gave me a real good understanding of these people's lives it was slowly absolutely Jeff and Joel we're working to get the granary finished by the end of the day you gotta have any smaller sticks in between these yeah I'm gonna go ahead and bind these together here all right then we run some smaller screeners into here muttered all in on the ends and then just fill in the gaps with smaller sticks maybe some bark stuff like that and then stick layer mud over the top did you notice if there was some stripped bark intermixed with that and the one that they were still tied yeah so that lasted a long time I guess being wet and when you tie it it's gonna stickin in it it was in the mud yeah and as I say the the mud plate pushed probably halfway down onto these logs so there was the impressions where we noticed that was about an inch apart or a finger I guess basically a finger apartment yeah and you know it seems like just from watching this thing dry that the fingerprints themselves may actually help huh in the construction that sort of allows it to dry and slower if you don't mind I'm gonna hop up on this rock and get a bird's-eye view from the top that's right Wow you get a different perspective up here that would hold what six bushels maybe I would think more than that okay Jeff what have you learned from all this that it's a lot of work and I think it would have taken quite a few people you know especially when they're putting the greeneries all the way up on these cliffs you know you have to bring everything up your water the dirt and then finding the stones you know somebody maybe would have stayed halfway up right and another person would have brought to them and then he could have carried the rest of the way because if you went all the way up and then all the way back down and it would be it's definitely a group the middle of day three then a great day so far you're wondering why I'm standing still because ken is actually doing a laser scan of the entire excavation site and I'm in it so Ken can I move now yeah couple more minutes till we get jealous can okay when Ken's finished he'll have scanned the entire site so Duncan will have an even more complete record where we are is the Digg ins 3:00 p.m. and time for our final push if we're going to solve the puzzle the mystery structure we have to do it soon we've extended the trench over here 1 meter to head out this way to hopefully catch the back wall of the pit house ok and when we measured it it should we found out that it should show up kind of right back over in here so we've just been very carefully shovel shaving this down so we might pick up any subtleties and then hit that wall and what we were doing that we encountered this charcoal bit and everything right here in the profile and then when we started pulling it back there's a little bit of it that's right here too so kind of in a line I see that there's a bit more yeah so it's kind of curious that that seemed to be a nice linear stain that that was starting to form perhaps this could be a beam to the pit house when it came down I'm amazed over and over how these small bits of things can be recognized as beams and tools and pit houses and I'm also amazed and the notes everybody takes so every time you excavate you're destroying a site we're never going to have this dirt in those layers in that position ever again ok so by taking it excruciating ly redundant nodes you're capturing as much as you can so we take as many photographs and field specimens and notes so that we can at least on paper reconstruct what we no longer have physically present with time running out we check in with Linda to see what she's found out about the granary sample Larry and Jeff collected so this is the first piece of charcoal from the granary and it looks like it must be part of the roof so I'm just looking to see what they constructed the roof from and it's quite obviously a piece of conifer and the the conifers around here mostly Douglas fir Oh in order to process the other samples Linda's collected she's going to have to take them back to her lab but we know already is that the granaries held corn which was a very big part of the Fremont diet corn looked like this was very different from what we have today yeah Colin come on over you have to check this out put it what is that what this could be is a blank for a piece of jewelry of some type it looks like slate and some my experience in Wyoming has shown that objects like this can be fashioned into a pendant for example you found many of these Rachelle I don't know of anything like that it's been found in range Creek really that's exciting yeah really exciting find it's such an unusual object the Julie checks with Joe who specializes in this period and has experience in a nearby southwest well I can see how it might be what in what might be considered a pendant maybe down in the southwest the first thing I would think of when I saw this would be a pot lid you know just something to keep the dirt out of the pot yeah that makes sense because we did find a lot of pottery sherds with it as well definitely a beautiful artifact to begin with a great piece since just been making a Fremont granary all day I wanted to see what he would have looked like a thousand years ago Joe describes what he might have been wearing based on fines made over the years a lot of what we know are based on the rock art panels as well as the peelings figurines okay he probably would be wearing a breach cloth a breach cloud something that would come down to about mid thigh okay um hair probably about shoulder length the men would wear what we've seen necklace of beads generally the ones we've seen at least the figurines again have two strands they wore moccasins moccasins probably come up to about the ankle what are you doing we're creating what is it this is Fremont yeah Christa's really as to a wiz on the computer and she took a photograph of him and the background and just gave me his arms and head and I'm filling in the rest as if you were a Fremont man it suits you Jeff heads back to work to help Joel finish the granary they put the capstone on and make paint as they would have a thousand years ago so they can replicate the painting high on the canyon wall can we get out of here yeah let's go get a cold one all right as we reach the end of the day several of us gather in the incident room to get a look at Ken's 3d scans this is what we saw yesterday you can see you can kind of barely make out you know there are definitely some some anthropomorphise but then some additional human figures pop out and we did not see this at all yesterday and this one over here really wasn't clear at all and today we can see that it's a real Fremont figure with a typical headdress and has displayed fingers and so this clarifies that a lot and even more impressive or the scans the dig site itself this is a record of the archaeology on the surface rock out here was amazing absolutely amazing and we can see the contours we can see everything about it the trees around of course you can see the details on the rock that's phenomenal that truly is and there's where you're actually we're doing the digging earlier and we can go right into that so now you can go scan entire Canyon absolutely that's open that's nothing mean to talk to you all right there's just enough time to catch up with Chelsey who's investigating an area burning on the edge of this pit house so the burned feature the post hole was supposed to be in here somewhere and so coming down as we remove rocks there was two big rocks in the way so maybe the anomaly still isn't here but we just weren't able to access it but we do think it's cultural this is not this is natural this is cultural okay and actually I have a good thing you brought that up I had a question you know if this was excavated by humans how would they have moved this dirt this is not easy stuff to work with they'd have used what is called a digging stick it's a long pointed stick that they would have jammed into the ground and then pried the dirt out with and and moved the dirt with her hands they would pull it out with her hands put it in baskets toss it to the side maybe toss it out here that is back-breaking work would have been yeah Wow so this was a hot and dirty job but at least we weren't using sticks on them so as our three days come to an end how much have we been able to help Duncan our geophysics team has been able to map the entire big village site and Duncan tells me this alone will give him targets to investigate over the next few years in the center of the site we uncovered more evidence of the mystery structure and located one of the walls but more work will be needed to establish how big it is with the help of 3d graphics we can envision what this mystery structure might have looked like what we know is that this was a different style of hid house from the others because was made without a rock ring to support its walls 1,000 years ago if you've been walking towards it you'd have seen a mound of baked mud that stood about five feet above the ground the way in was through the roof and down a ladder into a single cluttered room maybe 20 feet across here depending on the weather an entire family would work cook and sleep it was a home designed for their desert environment after three days we've also got a much better understanding of how the granaries were built and what they were used for it's no question they represent an ingenious strategy for survival in this harsh desert environment nevertheless experts theorize a severe drought combined with pressure from other tribes coming in must have finally forced the Fremont to abandon this area and move on all in all it's been a great three days and it's a real privilege to leave Duncan with new data that can help him to eventually piece together the full story of the people who lived here in range Creek a thousand years ago thank you so much for letting us come inviting us here has been a pleasure and we look forward to working with you again it's been a pleasure for me and I've learned a lot so thank you thank you on the next time Team America unearth a Wild West Cavalry fort you're walking on the west wall once this is taken down just a few inches your males see those walls we're probably late 1860's rate discover what frontier life was really like his room as the sergeant's room and what the soldiers left behind a libation dig into archaeology with time team America you

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

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Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: QHEB2seOsis

Length: 54min 12sec (3252 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2013