Archaeology projects uses volunteers

GLIDE — Barbara Boucock opens what looks like a small pill container. She pulls out a small, iron-red, perfectly-formed arrowhead, small enough to fit inside the white plastic lid.

The arrowhead is one of many American Indian artifacts she’d found Tuesday, explained the Eugene resident, as part of a Bureau of Land Management-sponsored archaeological dig.

Boucock, a volunteer, stood over a waist-high wooden frame, similar to a hitching post, topped with a wire-mesh screen. A pile of dark-brown dirt lay on top of the screen.

Her feet rested on a large dirt pile, the remnants of what volunteers and BLM staff members have sifted through over the last week and a half, to uncover the artifacts.

Nearby, two men stood in a 2-foot deep, 10-foot long flat-bottomed pit. With shovels and trowels they gingerly poured shovelfuls of dirt into metal buckets.

At another end of the pit, a man used a measuring tape to measure a collection of rocks embedded in the floor of the pit. He read the measurements to a woman who drew what the rocks look like onto a map of the 1-meter-square area the two were working on.

Above them all, two white tents shielded them from the sun. Beyond that lay the North Umpqua River and tree-spotted hills.

The dig is part of a public education project run by the Roseburg District of the BLM, explained Isaac Barner, the district’s archaeologist.

Since 1997, this is the sixth year the district office has done archaeological work in the area. The second year they were there, the crews — which have always included volunteers — stumbled upon an American Indian pit house.

Typically, Barner said, the pit would have been covered with split cedar planks and a roof, possibly gabled.

Over the years, crews have uncovered new aspects of the dwelling, including two hearths. Along the way, they’ve found projectile points of chert, basalt and obsidian, deer bones, a few fish bones and other artifacts.

On Tuesday, Heidi Rogers, an Oregon State University student doing a summer internship with BLM, was spending her first day at the site.

“I love it so far,” said Rogers of Roseburg, as she sifted dirt through a screen. She said it’s been interesting to see firsthand aspects of the local American Indian culture she’s studied a bit in college.

This is the third year Boucock and her husband, Jerry, have volunteered on the digs. “We enjoy being outdoors and are interested in archaeology,” she explained.

They also enjoy camping on the site, something that out-of-towners are allowed to do during the digs. Barbara Boucock said she liked camping with two Eugene-based archaeologists hired to work the project, as they “know all this stuff.”

The scenery is stunning to boot. “You hear the wild turkeys and the geese. An osprey last night kept slapping the water. And we saw the deer up on the hillside.

“You could see why it would be good real estate if you were Native American,” she added.

Barner explained the Eugene-based archaeologists will take the artifacts back to their office. They will analyze them. Eventually the artifacts will be archived at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History on the University of Oregon campus.

Barner said the district offers the public a chance to get in on the digs every time it does them. Usually, about 15 volunteers take part.

The district sees the digs as a chance for volunteers to learn about the area’s prehistory, as well as about archaeology. District officials also hope the digs help discourage others from illegally excavating American Indian artifacts.

When someone illegally takes such objects, it eliminates one piece of the archaeological puzzle researchers are trying to put together.

Stealing an arrowhead is “like tearing a page out of the book,” Barner said. If the arrowhead is left in place, researchers can “retrieve a lot of information about it so we can fill in the pages.”



• You can reach reporter Kathy Korengel at 957-4218 or by e-mail at kkorengel@nrtoday.com.