Tag: archaeology

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The Mammoth Man

By Jerry Wilson

Editor’s Note: Volunteers have come and gone in the Mammoth Site’s 40 years of operation, but Larry Agenbroad was always there. He became the site’s principal investigator shortly after the first tusk was unearthed in 1974 until his death on Friday, Oct. 31 in Hot Springs. Though the bones had been there for millions of years, Dr. Agenbroad helped open a new and unique window to prehistoric history that South Dakotans and countless visitors from around the world have enjoyed. A memorial service is scheduled for Nov. 15 at 10 a.m., at the Mueller Civic Center in Hot Springs. A version of this story appeared in the May/June 2005 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

It was just another plateau on the western rim of Hot Springs gulch, a great place for new homes, with a fabulous view. But when a bulldozer blade scraped the edge off a massive tusk in 1974, Philip and Elenora Anderson called Dr. Larry Agenbroad, then a professor at Chadron State College in Nebraska. Initial investigation indicated that the tusk belonged to a long-extinct mammoth. The Andersons stopped the bulldozers and gave scientists three years to explore the site. Today the Hot Springs Mammoth Site is regarded as the world’s premier place to see and learn about the extinct giants of the elephant world.

“When we began in 1975, we had a roaring budget of $500,” Agenbroad said.”One day we uncovered a big skull. That night a full moon came up over Battle Mountain and moonlight shined through the eye sockets, and I haven’t looked back.”

The skeletons of coyotes, wolves, camels, llamas and a short-faced bear‚Ä® have all been dug from the sinkhole too, but the creature that gave the place its name was an animal so big that its name means huge. Bones lie at least 67 feet deep, so there are many more years of excavation ahead. So far the Mammoth Site has yielded 61 mammoths, the biggest creatures since the dinosaurs. There is literally no other place like this on Earth.

The Andersons and the scientists decided to leave everything they dug up on site. In many cases, one skeleton lies atop another, and the upper bones have been displaced to get at what lies below. But where possible, the bones lie”in situ,” locked in the sandstone that formed around them after they died 26 millennia ago, the last of a species 2 million years old.

Agenbroad said pelvic measurements taken in 1989 indicated that all but one of the mammoths are males, and other tests indicate most were between 12 and 29 years old; in mammoth years, they were”teenybopper males,” he said, ostracized from the herd, and as teenagers sometimes do, they got into trouble; they ventured into the sinkhole to feast on vegetation surrounding the thermal pool. The shale around the edges was”slick as snot on a glass doorknob,” and the giant creatures could not climb out. Most likely they died in spring, Agenbroad said, when they had two choices: sweep the snow off the grass with their tusks, or take easy pickings by the pool.”Having raised teenage boys, I know teenagers are allergic to snow shovels,” he said,”so they took the latter.” He thinks the animals fell in over a period of about 750 years, maybe one each decade or so.

The sinkhole is covered by a 23,000-square-foot laminated beam building. Excavators can work anytime, and the paleontological dig is open to visitors, regardless of weather or time of year.

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Discovering The Verendrye Plate

By Bernie Hunhoff

Hattie Foster, center, and George O’Reilly, right, were two of the young people who found the Verendrye plate on the hills above Fort Pierre. Also shown is Leslie Stroup, left. South Dakota State Historical Society photo.

Two hundred and seventy years ago, French explorers named Verendrye buried a lead plate on a hill. They were among the first white men to set foot in a land that would later be known as South Dakota.

One hundred years ago, Ethel Parish and two friends found the plate while playing on a sunny February day on a hill over Fort Pierre. Their discovery caused historians to rethink their accounts of white man’s arrival in this region. The plate captured the imaginations of South Dakotans then, and it has remained one of the state’s most treasured museum pieces ever since.

When we visited her in 1989, Ethel Parish Hepner Roberts remembered the day well. She was enjoying an afternoon outdoors with Harriet”Hattie” Foster and George O’Reilly.”It was a Sunday and it was nice and warm, just a little snow,” she recalled.”Hattie happened to notice something sticking out of the ground. She kicked it with her toe but it wouldn’t budge.”

Their curiosity piqued, the youths dug until they unearthed a flat, rectangular plate.”George scraped off the gumbo with his knife and we saw the writing on it. If we had studied our history, we should have probably known what it was. But we just threw it down and went on playing.”

The three agreed that George would try to sell it for scrap at the local print shop, where lead was always in demand for the hungry letterpress. Fortunately, on his way home that Sunday evening, he crossed paths with two state legislators, Elmer Anderson of Willow Lake and George White of Kennebec. George told them about the unusual plate and together they returned to the hill and brought the mysterious piece to town.

Doane Robinson, superintendent of the State Historical Society, was promptly notified. Mr. Robinson, a noted historian and researcher, had studied and written of the La Verendrye expedition. Almost immediately, he recognized the origin of the dirty tablet.

“On Monday, some men came to our schoolhouse and took us to the Sylvan Hotel in Pierre, where they questioned us about what we found and how we happened to find it,” said Mrs. Roberts. She did not recall who asked the questions, but one of the men was surely the inquisitive Mr. Robinson.

Historians had long disputed the route of the famous La Verendryes. Some claimed the explorers never came as far south as present-day South Dakota, but Mr. Robinson argued that they had. Of course, he felt his version of the Verendrye route was proved by the physical evidence of the plate, which was mentioned in a journal kept during the expedition.

One side of the historic artifact.

The journal entry states,”I placed on an eminence near the fort (their camp) a tablet of lead, with the arms and inscription of the king and a pyramid of stones for Monsieur Le General; I said to the savages, who did not know of the tablet of lead I had placed in the earth, that I was placing these stones as a memorial of those who had come to their country.”

As news of the schoolchildren’s discovery was publicized in 1913, it rekindled interest in the dramatic events that led to the settling of the West. Since the plate identified a major landmark of the Verendrye travels, historians reopened their files on the exploration. Still, controversy continued. Some said, for example, that the plate may have been discovered in the 18th or 19th century by Indians and moved to the Fort Pierre hilltop.

Mr. Robinson minced no words in responding to that theory. He wrote, “To suggest that this plate might have been planted at a distant point, recovered by Indians and carried to the mouth of the Bad River (at Fort Pierre) there to be fortuitously dropped upon this eminence (Verendrye Hill) precisely complying with the conditions of the record is a refinement of criticism approaching absurdity.”

History books written since that sunny February Sunday in 1913 note that while the Verendryes were probably not the first white men to arrive here — most historians believe French fur traders made brief excursions within the state’s borders perhaps as early as 1679 — the three children’s discovery provided a marker that symbolizes a new era on this part of the Western prairie.

In 1989, Ethel Parish Roberts had a chance to hold the plate for the first time since 1913.

Finding the plate had little impact on Ethel Parish’s young life. It was just another episode in an adventure that began in 1905 when her parents, Ivan and Amanda Rosetta Parish, came from Wisconsin to South Dakota. Her father worked for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and he accepted an assignment as stationmaster and track repairman at Teton, South Dakota. After a few years at Teton, Mr. Parish filed as a homesteader on a claim near Hayes. By 1913, the Parish family had moved again, to the cow town of Fort Pierre.

She and her five brothers and sisters enjoyed their freedoms, They picked wild plums, grapes and buffalo berries. They found two coyote cubs and played with them just as if they were dogs, “until they got older and grew mean. One day they just disappeared… imagine my father had something to do with that.” She remembered picking wildflowers that grew in the hills — but not the gorgeous blooms on the cactus. “They were untouchable, we learned that.” She and the other children watched cowboys load and unload cattle at the stockyards, and one of the men taught her to speak some of the Sioux language. At age 90, she still remembered how to count to ten in the Dakotas’ native tongue.

With all the excitement of pioneer living, Ethel Parish didn’t give a lot of thought to the lead plate she had found with her friends. Shortly after the discovery, her father moved the family south to Vilas, a tiny Miner County town. She got a job in Bill Hepner’s general store and soon their relationship blossomed beyond employer-employee. Bill and Ethel married in 1916 and they honeymooned by auto in the northern Black Hills, at a time when the mountains were not yet accommodating to tourists. Together, they ran the Vilas store, selling groceries, farm implements, hardware and even friction-driven Metz automobiles. Bill was also the postmaster and he operated the telephone exchange. As their four children grew older, they helped run the family business, “especially the candy counter,” she chuckled. After Bill died in 1969, Ethel continued to serve as the Vilas postmaster for several years. In 1971, she married Levi Roberts, a longtime family friend. He died in 1974 and she lived alone at Vilas until she moved to the Good Samaritan Nursing Home at nearby Howard in the mid 1980s.

Ethel never saw friends George and Hattie after she left Fort Pierre as a 14-year-old. When the South Dakota State Legislature appropriated $700 to purchase the Verendrye plate from the finders, no one knew where she’d gone. The money was awarded to the others — George received $500, Hattie just $200.

Ethel also lost credit for the find. Although townspeople knew there was a third teenager on the hill, the name was not always remembered accurately and other Fort Pierre youngsters occasionally were listed with George and Hattie. She was not invited to a 1933 dedication in Fort Pierre of a monument marking the spot where she had found the Verendrye plate, nor was she in attendance at a 1943 ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the Verendrye expedition.

The state’s lack of interest in her association with the discovery meant little to her, she said. But when Ethel’s children grew to adulthood and found their mother was not being properly recognized for her role, they told state officials of the mix-up. Today you can see the Verendrye plate that Ethel, Hattie and George found so long ago at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1989 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.

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Mystery Mosaics in Hughes County

By Katie Hunhoff

Mysteries are rare these days in South Dakota’s hill country. Nearly every square foot of grass has been explored by hunters, ranchers, farmers, historians and archaeologists. Although most everything has been identified, a few finds still baffle researchers — like the stone mosaics of snakes and turtles on bluffs above the Missouri and James rivers. The snake outlines stretch several hundred feet and are made of boulders the size of footballs and bowling balls. The turtle effigies are smaller; they could fit inside a single car garage.

We explored the mystery of the effigies in 2003. Ray Salathe, a cattle rancher, told us he drove over a stone snake pattern many times before realizing what it was.”We didn’t know it was a snake until we got to looking things over,” he said. Salathe never learned who placed the stones in the shape of a snake, even after archaeologists and historians visited his ranch and nearby buttes to study the rocks.”They figure the Indians made them,” he said.”Some think the war parties camped up there because it is so high you can see forever and there’s a spring for water right below the hill. I’ve heard the theory that the stones had something to do with honoring an Indian chief who was killed there. How true it is, I don’t know. Neither does anyone else.”

Eighteen miles northwest of Salathe’s ranch lies Medicine Knoll, which is home to both turtle and snake outlines. The butte that rises about 400 feet above the town of Blunt in Hughes County held special significance to the late Vine Deloria Jr., a respected scholar and author. His great-grandfather, Saswe, survived a surreal experience at Medicine Knoll with rattlesnakes while on a vision quest in 1831.

Saswe had been praying night and day for two days without food or water. On the afternoon of the third day, he was no longer visible on the hill. His mother became frightened and asked a cousin, Brown Bear, to see if Saswe had fainted. As Brown Bear rode to the top of Medicine Butte, his horse became nervous so he tried to turn back. Suddenly the horse and rider found themselves surrounded by hundreds of snakes.

Determined to find his cousin, Brown Bear swung his rope at the snakes to open a path. He found a large bundle of snakes writhing back and forth over Saswe’s prostrate body. He figured he had fainted and the snakes, finding his warm body, had swarmed over him and killed him.

Brown Bear returned to camp to tell what he had seen. The family was devastated and mourning began. But suddenly Saswe walked into the camp. When asked about the snakes he was perplexed, remembering nothing about them. The account was among the 19th century stories passed down within Deloria’s family. Saswe grew to be a respected Yanktonai Chief, so his vision quest added even more mystery to the snake mosaics on Medicine Butte.

According to the Deloria family history, the rattlesnake effigy was already in place on the butte in 1831 when Saswe did his vision quest. Deloria says to the best of his knowledge, the origins of the mosaics are unknown.”Nobody I know in the scholarly world or the Indian worlds can say for certain how old they are or who made them or even why they made them.”

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History Hunters

Can we stop the illegal artifact trade?

By John Andrews

 

Faith Spotted Eagle, a Yankton Sioux tribal elder, is an outspoken protector of sacred sites and burial grounds. Artifact looting is a common problem at sites such as those on South Dakota reservations and along the Missouri River valley.

Faith Spotted Eagle was fishing with her father the first time she saw artifact hunters searching the banks of the Missouri River.”My dad was disgusted,” Spotted Eagle says.”He looked at me and said, ‘You know, my girl, you’re going to have to do something about this someday.’ I was only 12 years old. I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ But that stayed with me.”

The memory rushed back one morning in 1999 as Spotted Eagle traveled Highway 18 toward the Yankton Sioux Reservation.”I was coming across the dam and I had this weird feeling,” she remembers.”We call it nagi ksapa, which means spirit smart. It’s an awareness, or a sixth sense. I could feel my father’s presence, and I knew something was going on.”

When she arrived, Spotted Eagle learned that the remains of at least 35 of her ancestors buried along the Missouri River at White Swan had been exposed by lowered water levels, and looters were plundering the graves. She and members of the Yankton Sioux Tribe set up a spiritual camp at the site where they prayed and held sweat lodges. They obtained a temporary restraining order that prevented the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from raising the water until the remains could be gathered and re-interred on higher ground. The process took three months but looters lingered. Once, while Spotted Eagle walked a remote country road, two men in a car stopped and asked directions to White Swan. They said they were divers.

Ten years after White Swan, Spotted Eagle sees boats lurking near the old gravesites. Looting still happens regularly on the Yankton reservation and on other public lands in South Dakota. Millions of years ago prehistoric creatures roamed the Great Plains. Humans arrived about 12,000 years ago. The bones and artifacts they left behind can be worth a lot of money in today’s artifact trade, a worldwide industry that is as lucrative as it is illegal.

Some parts of South Dakota are archaeologically richer than others, but valuable artifacts can be found everywhere within the state’s borders, according to Michael Fosha, assistant state archaeologist with the Archaeological Research Center in Rapid City.”There’s an incredible wealth and diversity of material that can be recovered in South Dakota,” Fosha says.

Bone tools, groundstone materials (like atlatl weights, arrowpoints, scrapers and other specialized tools) as well as artifacts made from shell can be found.”The shell items can be quite exotic,” Fosha says,”all the way from large shell mask gorgets made out of conch shell to small shells etched with human-like forms or animals. They might even be carved themselves into shell beads to be worn as decoration.”

Looters search for”anything and everything” on the Cheyenne River Reservation, says Donna Rae Petersen, the tribe’s cultural programs administrator. Like Spotted Eagle she was young when her mother and great-grandmother took her to the Missouri River to watch as men working on the dams sifted through the exposed graves of her ancestors. It’s the same all along the Missouri River shoreline, a popular destination for artifact hunters because South Dakota’s earliest inhabitants settled in the river valley.”The Missouri River has been here a long time,” says Richard Harnois, senior field archaeologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Pierre.”People have populated the river for 12,000 years. When people live in an area like that for that long, it leaves a lot of stuff behind. That creates the archaeological sites that these people are interested in.

“Some of these guys are what we call human vacuum cleaners,” Harnois says.”They go out and just suck up everything they find, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.”

More experienced hunters are selective. They know what to take and what to leave.”As they’re digging, they go to their favorite sites, knowing what age the artifacts are and what they hope to obtain,” Fosha says.”They have a good eye for what’s valuable.” Those items include ceramic pots that are intact or can be easily reassembled, large conch shell masks, pipes and arrow points depending on quality and age.

Artifacts and fossils on private land are not protected but federal laws prohibit removing them from public lands. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (passed in 1979) bans removal of funerary objects, sacred items and human remains from public or Indian land without a permit. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) provides a way to return those artifacts to the tribes if they are uncovered. But looting along the river occurred long before their enactment.”It started with families out digging this stuff, taking it home and hanging it on their walls,” Harnois says.”So there’s this background of collecting that goes back a long way that leads people to think it’s not a bad thing to go out and do this.”

Scavengers know exactly what they’re doing, while others are simply unaware of the laws.”A lot of times, they’re not really trying to be felons,” Fosha says.”They just happen across an artifact, they find it of great interest and they pick it up and take it home. It’s still illegal, but quite a bit of it is not knowing it’s illegal.”

Others consider themselves amateur archaeologists and work with professionals like Fosha when they make discoveries on their land.”We certainly encourage them to give us the information, but we don’t necessarily encourage them to go out and dig things up,” Fosha says. When that happens, artifacts lose their context. It’s more difficult for archaeologists to assess an artifact’s importance if they don’t know exactly where it was found and what other items, if any, surrounded it.

People have been prosecuted under those laws in South Dakota, but Marty Jackley, South Dakota’s attorney general and former U.S. Attorney for South Dakota, says looters are being caught with more items than ever. In January, five men — four South Dakotans and one from Wisconsin — were indicted on artifact trafficking charges, accused of taking more than 10,000 artifacts (including human remains, funerary objects and pottery), mostly from the Missouri River valley. All pled guilty except one: Scott Matteson of Fort Pierre. Matteson is a lifelong collector who turned his 7,000-piece collection into the Mobile Museum of the Prehistoric Plains Indians, which authorities seized in December 2008. South Dakota might be the most diverse state in North America when it comes to fossils, says Darrin Pagnac, a vertebrate paleontologist at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. That lures fossil poachers, particularly to Badlands National Park and publicly owned lands in northwestern South Dakota, the two fossil hotspots in western South Dakota. Pagnac says his field research team finds at least one looted site every summer.”One of the first hints is holes where they shouldn’t be,” Pagnac says.”The second good clue is bits of plaster lying around, because that’s how we excavate the fossils. We wrap them in burlap soaked in Plaster of Paris. It’s almost impossible to do that completely cleanly, so it drips and little chunks of it fall. And sometimes we’ll find trash and tools.

“They’re looking for the most spectacular specimens they can find. They want pristine skull elements, teeth, or complete skulls. Anything that looks impressive that will up the resale value of these things are what they’re after.”

Keeping watch over culturally important sites is challenging. Looters often work under cover of darkness, their presence detected only when officers find holes dug in the ground. Cheyenne River reservation has one monitor enforcement officer, Halley Maynard, who knows the locations of particularly valuable sites and is responsible for protecting them. Locals know about most sites, but if word spreads, artifact hunters are tempted to find them.

Maynard patrols the shoreline by boat and the rest of the reservation’s three million acres by truck, ATV and mule for the most remote spots. He’s never caught looters in action during two years on the job, but he has seen the damage they inflict. In the spring of 2007 low river levels exposed a burial site in the northeast corner of the reservation.”They dug 17 holes in the bank,” Maynard says.”Because of what they did, plus the good rainfall and the rise of the river, it eroded half of that site. We couldn’t save it.”

The tribe has signs on all of the reservation’s main highways alerting motorists of its no-dig, no collection policy, in place since 1966. Still, Petersen and other tribal members can’t understand the fascination artifact hunters have with disturbing the graves of their ancestors.

“I have family buried in several cemeteries, but going back five generations, I have a grandmother who is buried on a hill a mile behind my house,” Petersen says.”Those are family cemeteries, but why do people feel that because they are Native Americans it’s OK to rob those graves? If a body washes out on the shore of the Missouri River and there are artifacts that are readily available, people pick those, as well as the skeletal remains. Why do people feel that Native American human remains and funerary items are any different?”

The biggest reason is money. Artifacts sell for hundreds of dollars and some fossils can go for tens of thousands of dollars.”Almost anything that’s really attractive and well-prepared is going to have a market somewhere, legitimate or otherwise,” says Sally Shelton, collections manager at the Museum of Geology at the School of Mines.”For every museum or nonprofit that buys something like that, which is not very common, there are 10 times as many people buying it for private possession. People love these things and they want to have them at home. The problem is, many of these things are dug up so fast they lose all the associated information with them, and they’re no longer valuable scientifically or educationally.”

The Internet auction site eBay.com is a popular marketplace for Native American artifacts. A search for”Indian artifacts” returns over 1,000 results, including arrowheads, grind stones, baskets, pipes and tomahawks. The price for one collection of hand tools was $500.

Family auctions and reputable auction houses also market artifacts. Petersen says she’s seen items from the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee sold at auction.”I think people just look at this like a nostalgia thing, but they don’t connect these things to human blood, or somebody losing a life,” she says.”The eyes of the law are so few and far between, especially when it comes to the river,” Petersen says.

That may have been true in the past, but people like Petersen urge law enforcement to more seriously pursue thefts, and they’re asking for help. Harnois directs people to call the Corps’ hotline at 1-866-NO-SWIPE (1-866-667-9473) if they spot suspicious activity.

“If people are considering doing anything illegal, they better take care because chances are somebody’s going to be looking over their shoulder,” Harnois says.”There are a lot of eyes and ears out there.”

 

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.