Dig unearths 9,500 years of native inhabitants
Artifacts tell stories of hunters “enamored with mountains.”
By Cory Hatch, Jackson Hole News and Guide, September 15, 2010 [here]
Underneath a white tent near Game Creek along Highway 89/191, University of Wyoming archeology student Bryon Schroeder sits in a 6- foot-deep hole troweling out the winding path of a rodent burrow through a square of gray earth.
Schroeder excavates the burrows first so the rodent-churned dirt doesn’t contaminate the cake layers of history that jut out at perfect right angles from the walls and floor like an M.C. Escher drawing.
On one wall, the charred, fractured stones of a partially exposed roasting pit are visible at waist level. Given its location in the strata, the pit likely dates back 3,000 to 5,000 years, when it probably was used to roast tubers such as sego lily. …
While some might think of Jackson Hole as untrammeled before a handful of trappers made their way here in the early 1800s, the written history of the region is just a postscript on the 10,000 years or so that prehistoric and Native American tribes lived in this region. … [more]