Minutes from September 6th, 2011 Meeting:
The Loveland Archaeological Society met at the Pulliam Community Building September 6, 2011. President Andy Coca called the meeting to order at 7:15 p.m. There were 39 members and guests present. Guests were Henry Karre, Sandy Hess, Nancy Anderson, Ted and Faye Croswell and Carol Bishop. Gregory Strum is a new member.
The minutes of the August meeting were approved. Treasurer Sharon Lundt reported $4369.11 in the checking account.
Andy discussed the Stone Age Fair, which will be Saturday, September 24th, 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and Sunday, September 25th, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Drawing for the door prizes will be 4:00 p.m. Sunday. Set-up for the fair will be the afternoon of September 23rd, followed by a potluck about 6:00 p.m. All members are encouraged to attend. Bring your own service and a dish to share. Be generous as the exhibitors, who arrive on Friday, will be our guests. The club will furnish fried chicken. We need ALL the volunteers we can get to help with the fair. Whatever time(s) you can help will be appreciated. Gary Yeager asked for help with the selling of door prize tickets. We also need members to bring exhibits to fill in tables left empty when exhibitors from a distance have to leave early on Sunday. All exhibits must be taken out of the building during clean-up on Sunday as there is no place for storage.
Jess Cross, a long time member of the club passed away recently as did Dr. George Frison’s wife, June Frison.
Andy read a note from Lloyd and Marian Ludwig announcing their move to Montrose, Colorado.
Alvin Plucker won the find of the month. Mike Walsh was the judge.
The drawing brought in $37.00 with the following results:
DONOR ITEM Winner(s)
Carol Ekhoff Wyoming Wildlife Magazines Eugene Eisenbarth, Bryan Morgan
Gordon Smith 100 Great Archaeological Discoveries Sharon Lundt
Tom DuBovos Overstreet’s Arrowhead s #5 Eugene Eisenbarth
Rick Miller National Archaeological Society Shirt Mike Walsh
Steve Campbell Pottery shards, white sage Mike Burch, Karen Swanson
Margaret Harris George Stuart Knife Bryan Morgan
Jack Crandall Scraper David Selzler
Donor Unknown 2 Key Chains Steve Campbell, Alvin Plucker
We enjoyed refreshments furnished by Andy Coca, Craig Murray and Jim Dinneback. Pam Whelden presented a very interesting program on the Basketmaker culture of the Four Corners area.
SEE YOU AT THE FAIR!
Jean Steinhoff, Secretary
MEETING NOTES:
DATE: October 4, 2011 Business meeting starts at 7:15 p.m.
PLACE: Pulliam Community Building, Loveland
PROGRAM: Stephen Schell will present a program on the Fremont Expedition
REFRESHMENTS: Ekhoff, Roberts, Steinhoff
LAS September 2011 Headlines:
Researchers study mammoth bones found on Kansas farm
By Associated Press
Researchers say that by examining mammoth bones that were recently found in west-central Kansas, they hope to determine how the animal died and learn more about the earliest humans in the region.
The bones were discovered during construction on a Scott County farm. Researchers say they could date back to the earliest New World civilization.
It's the latest of several discoveries that have included the fossils of giant mammoths, the extinct, prehistoric cousin to the elephant that once roamed the region.
Researchers at the University of Kansas say there is evidence that the mammoth may have been killed by the region's earliest inhabitants. The conjecture is preliminary, but University of Kansas Professor Rolfe Mandel said the find will lead to further study of the bones to see how and when the mammoth died.
"If you remember back to your high school days, the Clovis people followed the mammoth (into North America)," Mandel said of the hunter-gatherers who lived here roughly 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. He said he and his colleagues are trying to find the earliest evidence of humans.
Archaeologists have exposed Clovis-era remains at only one other Kansas site, near Kanorado in Sherman County.
Mandel is director of the University of Kansas' Odyssey Archaeological Research Fund, an endowed program trying to find the earliest evidence of humans on the Great Plains. He and a small group of archaeologists and students visited the Scott County site last week.
After the bones were found on their farm during construction, Mike and Debbie Scheuerman alerted the Natural Resources Conservation Service, said Jack Ray, a research archaeologist with Missouri State University who is also working with the Odyssey program.
The group helped unearth six rib bones, a lower leg bone and a scapula, or shoulder blade, Ray said. The bones will undergo carbon dating at the university before they are sent to a museum in Denver.
About 50 yards away, the crew also found stone flakes where these early Americans may have sharpened knives or made spear points, Ray said.
Continued research may shed light on whether the bones and the artifacts are connected and whether humans killed the animal, Ray said.
There are signs that could lead toward the latter, including that the artifacts were found nearby and that the two sites were buried at the same depth. The bones were also found in the uplands instead of the lowlands near a creek or water body, a typical place a mammoth might die, Ray said.
"That kind of suggests there were humans nearby and that they might have been camped nearby," Ray said. "That is just a possibility."
He said researchers plan to return next year to gather more information.
Archaeology dig seeks clues to Nebraska’s prehistoric past
By Mike Tobias, Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, August 10th, 2011
Frontier County, NE – A reservoir in McCook, Nebraska is opening a window into the state’s prehistoric past.
Matt Marvin and Steve Sarich are digging and sifting. Marvin is using a shovel to remove dirt from their excavation site, a half centimeter at a time. Sarich is carefully sifting the dirt through a screen. They’re standing amidst grass, weeds and dead reeds, fighting flies, ticks and sometimes 100 degree heat in the middle of the drained Hugh Butler Lake, north of McCook. There’s no Indiana Jones glamour in this real archaeology world.
“It’s not really shoveling as it is shaving,” Marvin said. “You want to make sure that if there is anything, like for instance the hearth that we found, you’ll be able to see it.”
The hearth is at the bottom of a shoulder-deep, L-shaped hole.
“It’s a fireplace, or where they placed a fire, right on the surface of the earth, and it’s discolored the soil to kind of an orange, pumpkin-orange color,” said Alan Osborn, the white-haired curator of anthropology at the University of Nebraska State Museum and leader of this project. “And within it are chunks of bison bone, charcoal, other flakes of stone and so forth from resharpening tools. So that was a food preparation area, probably.”
Osborn said this hearth is a sign that roaming hunter-gatherers stopped here, near Red Willow Creek, sometime between 200 B.C. and 1200 A.D. Osborn and his crew have been working here since early July. Marvin, who is from Lincoln, and Sarich, a native of Milwaukee, Wis., are undergraduate anthropology majors at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Bran Mims, from Virginia, is a graduate student at East Carolina University. Steve Reynolds is an Omaha native who previously worked on the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Bethsaida Project in Israel.
Osborn says they’re here because earlier surveys found signs of prehistoric life in this area.
“This area was littered with bison bone, prehistoric stone tools and chipping debris, as well as a number of little concentrations of rock that are probably hearths,” he said. “Either for roasting plants and or for processing bone grease from the bison.”
Osborn said the small finds provide perspective on the day-to-day life of the people who spent time here long ago.
“So they were bringing in their tools, cutting up bison, processing plants perhaps, and having to resharpen their implements all the time,” said Osborn, who has worked on digs like this almost every summer since 1966. “The bones that we did find on the surface reflect bones that a lot of times were associated with the low-quality parts of bison: the back, the backbone, legs that don’t have any meat on them. So that may reflect they were scavenging a dead bison or a bison that had died a natural death pretty recently.”
“A bone can tell you not only what the animal was, its age, sex sometimes, what it was eating, but it can also reflect the climate and the environment in which the people lived, so there are ways of knowing what was going on,” he added.
The prehistoric people who stopped here were constantly moving. Osborn said he believes they may have been following bison or connecting with family members. They were few in number. By the 15th century, there were just a couple hundred thousand people spread out over the Great Plains.
“The Great Plains is a million square miles, and we’ve come in and put in six 3-by-3-foot holes trying to find something, and we did. And that’s almost a miracle, I guess,” he said. “In terms of probabilities, it should be pretty low. But we’re able to zero in on some of these sites pretty successfully, and we don’t come home with trunks of treasure. But small boxes of fragments of bone and flakes of stone have really a lot more to tell us than archeologists used to assume.”
This repetitive, sometimes tedious detective work is “incredibly fun,” according to Osborn. And incredibly important, because of the light it sheds on the way that humans lived for most of our existence.
“These kinds of folks that lived here who were hunter-gatherers dominated the earth, lived on the earth for 99 percent of human evolution,” Osborn said. “They were sitting near streams, collecting firewood, killing animals, getting through the winter, traveling, and that helped kind of flesh out that whole 99 percent of the story that is still pretty underappreciated.”
Osborn and his crew finished this year’s work at Hugh Butler Lake on Aug. 6. They plan to continue this archeological survey over the next four years.
LAS Find of the Month, September 2011:
Members can bring an artifact to be entered into the competition at the monthly meeting, which will be judged based on the following rules:
1. Must be a member of LAS in good standing.
2. The artifact must be a personal find.
3. It must have been found within the specified time frame, i.e., within the month prior to the meeting.
4. The artifact doesn’t have to be a Colorado find—all that matters is that it was found in the last month.
The Find of the Month for September 2011 was made by Alvin Plucker.
Type: Scottsbluff
Material: Hartville Uplift
Location: Weld County
LAS News and Upcoming Events:
September 24-25, 2011 2011 Loveland Stone Age Fair. A flyer is included, but if you have any questions
you may phone Kevin Zeeck at 303-682-0471 after 6:30 PM, MDT
(), or Janet Wagner at 970-278-4049. As a reminder, there is
no buying, selling, or trading of authentic artifacts, and no soliciting to buy, sell, or
trade. For more information go to http//www.stoneagefair.com.
October 4, 2011 October meeting. Guest speaker: Stephen Schell.
Mr. Stephen Schell, local author and educator, will give a 30-45 minute presentation
on General John C. Fremont, early Colorado explorer.
- Sponsor of the Annual Loveland Stone Age Fair -
www.stoneagefair.com
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