Cowboy Rest Creek Locality 1: Dacite Quarry
Amanda Taylor and Stephanie Dorenbosch
Today Stephanie and I were determined to find that the suspicious half-circle of rocks in our one-by-one meter excavation unit was a 10,000 year-old hearth. Our extrasensory archaeological perception told us that in our pit we would find charcoal and organic remains. Naturally, we would then come upon a perfectly intact camel skeleton with a fluted point stuck through its ribs – indisputable evidence that early Great Basin inhabitants hunted megafauna. The perfectly measured square of nylon string before us looked infinitely promising.
The sun was already turning the landscape around us into a blinding haze of tan and white; however, we enthusiastically set up our one-by-one test pit and began recording and collecting from the surface layer. Oddly orange-colored gravel and dacite flakes flew through the air and into our buckets. We uncovered and examined scarred cobbles, and large and small flakes (and flakes that were probably just rocks). Although after about a half-hour of decidedly inorganic artifacts our optimism about the charcoal began to wane, we knew that if we had an ancient hearth in front of us, the evidence would be just beneath the surface...
Five centimeters later, as we inhaled the powdery sand billowing off our sifter, we began to accept the possibility that our pile of rocks had no cultural significance. We had found only a few dacite flakes and a few thousand rocks. As our troweling began to seem more a formality than a method to discovery, we experienced a common field phenomenon: as the sun gets higher – and hotter – the conversation becomes more deeply philosophical and intelligent. We discussed and analyzed the possibilities for dinner that night, and quickly moved on to the pros and cons of each flavor of freezie-pop.
2:30 p.m. Level three completed. Five more centimeters down. Six dacite flakes discovered. We hit a hard layer of calcite that abruptly ended our pipe dream. There was no depression or interruption where the "hearth" should have been, and the stratigraphy on the wall of our pit that bisected the apparently accidental circular grouping of rocks showed a uniform layer of sand and a paler calcite layer about ten centimeters below the surface. Needless to say, no camel.
Caitlyn insisted that we only had to dig down a few more meters to discover "a camel in the middle of a Native American village like that scene in From Dusk Till Dawn," but our visions of finding anything that would tell us about the daily life of paleoindians were over. Resigned to our fate and covered with sand and gravel, we filled in our pit and headed back to camp.
Although we learned from our excavation that a "hearth" can really be just a pile of rocks, we sense that tomorrow on survey we’re going to find a mammoth with a spear through its head, preserved on its moment of death by a gigantic mudslide. And a lost city.
By Amanda Taylor and Stephanie Dorenbosch
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