Requires the Flash plug-in
Archaeology students rough it on the Lost Coast, sorting through ancient trash heaps
This past summer I led a field school course in the King Range National Conservation Area — also known as the Lost Coast — in southern Humboldt County, Calif.
Our crew consisted of 15 undergraduate students, three teaching assistants, a Native American cultural monitor and me, a third-year doctoral student in California archaeology. Students from UC Davis, other California colleges, New York, Florida, Wisconsin and New Mexico attended our program, officially called the UC Davis Northwestern California Archaeological Field School.
We worked to salvage six archaeological sites along the 30-mile stretch of the Lost Coast. The data we recovered will make up part of my dissertation research on the hunting of marine mammals by Native Californians.
We drove five hours from Davis to the north coast, were shuttled to a trailhead and hiked six miles to our first base camp, carrying everything we would need for the next three weeks. Three horses, three goats and a dog followed us with our kitchen supplies and food. Some people had never camped before. We had little contact with the outside world.
Lessons from ancient trash heaps
The sites that we were working on were shell middens — ancient trash heaps — that contained shell, bone, charcoal and the tools that people used to process the food they ate. As we systematically dug our holes, passing the sand through wire mesh and picking out cultural remains, we began to get a sense of what people were eating.
We saw evidence of deer, elk, small and large fish, sea lions, mussels, clams, barnacles and other shellfish. We did not, however, find much in the way of material culture beyond things related to food.
Students who had taken classes in anthropology and archaeology were puzzled by the lack of material goods in the sites. Articles they had read about the native Californians who had lived in the area extolled great wealth and status items: shell beads, obsidian (volcanic glass) blades two feet long and elaborate dance costumes.
We were simply not finding these things. The most likely explanation of their absence came more from the experience of living on the coast than in anything that we pulled from the ground.
Bear raids our pantry
A bear helping itself to things in our pantry forced us to ration food during the second week at our base camp. As we went to bed each night feeling hungrier than we were used to, we gained an appreciation for the difficulty of making a living off the rugged coast.
The amount of food that we were getting was comparable to the amount that native inhabitants of the area would likely have had. We began to understand why we found evidence of processing for anything in the area that was edible.
We saw that the only way to survive on the coast was to eat everything available: obviously, fish and large mammals, but also barnacles, abalone and aquatic snails. We also saw the difficulty of getting shellfish or fish in the frigid waters of the north coast. And we realized the skill that would be necessary to hunt deer or rabbits in the thick vegetation of the coastal scrub.
‘We saw that the only way to survive on the coast was to eat everything available: obviously, fish and large mammals, but also barnacles, abalone and aquatic snails.’
UC Davis graduate student Adie Whitaker
At the end of our three weeks, we each hiked out a few pounds lighter, carrying all of our possessions on our back.
It became obvious why we found little in the way of non-food related artifacts: It was simply too hard to get them out to the coast. With mountains rising 3,000 feet from the ocean in less than five miles and nothing to walk on but soft sand, we appreciated the difficulty of moving around, even with the bare essentials.
Analyzing what we found
Back in Davis, we have begun to analyze the materials we brought back from the field, cleaning, sorting and counting artifacts and bones. Several students will help see the process through to the end, when the collections from the summer will be curated for the UC Davis Anthropology Museum.
On the home page: UC Davis Northwestern California Archaeological Field School finished three weeks with tales to tell about their big dig. (Douglas Hutt Jr./UC Davis photo)
Most students will likely go on to study other things and pursue careers outside of archaeology; others, however, already plan to take their experience from the summer and use it to work for private archaeological firms or continue on to graduate school in archaeology.
I must now move on to analysis and to writing my dissertation. Next summer will likely be spent in an air-conditioned office in Davis in front of my computer. While I'm writing I will no doubt be pushed to finish by the thought of new projects and future summers in the field.