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September is Nebraska Archaeology Month. Nebraska Public Media’s Dale Johnson sat down with State Archaeologist Dave Williams to first find out how far back Nebraska's archaeological history goes.
Dave Williams: We have really well-dated contexts going back about 13,000 years. The earliest cultural periods that we have are called the Clovis period. They're part of a Paleo Indian cultural period. We've got a number of Clovis sites throughout the state, including one that we identified just about a year or two ago out in western Nebraska. We found the base of a Clovis projectile point.
Dale Johnson: You're going to have to explain that.
Williams: Sure. So that's a name of a cultural group. These, these Paleo Indian hunter-gatherer peoples who lived all across North America, from way up in Alaska all the way down through Central America about 13,000 to about 11,000 years ago. They had a really distinctive style of basically a spear point, projectile point. If you think of a typical arrowhead that you might see, a much larger version of those.
Johnson: Where are Nebraska's crown jewel archeological sites?
Williams: I think it depends on who you ask. We've got places like Rock Creek Station down in Jefferson County where there are reconstructed buildings and trail ruts and archeology down there. There's folks who are into the military history, and we've got places like Fort Atkinson and Fort Hartsuff and other places like that. I've always been kind of a stone-tool guy. I like the rocks. I like figuring out where they're coming from. We can run some science on different types of rocks and figure out their geochemical fingerprints, the elements that they're made up of, and tie those to source locations on the landscape. We can track where people are coming from, where they're moving, where they're picking up stone from. So I like the older sites. This Clovis point that we found about a year and a half ago was out at our property at Courthouse and Jail Rocks. That is a multi-component site. It's got the Clovis component. It's got some later pre contact. We call it the dismal river occupation. Those are like ancestral Apachian people who were living in the area. We know that the Pawnee were out at Courthouse and Jail Rocks. It's right near the trail rut, so it's got a lot of history. I think other places like the Hudson Ming site up in Northwest Nebraska has a lot of really great archeology. It was a bison kill site. There's a really dense bone bed of bison and associated artifacts that come from later Paleo-Indian times. And then just the sheer number of village sites that we have associated with ancestral Pawnee people, ancestral Omaha, ancestral Otoe Missouria people, we typically refer to as the Central Plains tradition, those village sites that dot central and eastern Nebraska all along the major drainages, the Platte River, the Republican River. Those sites are really fascinating, and that kind of ties into one of the more important aspects of our work, of being collaborative and working with Native nations, working with other groups. We've done a lot of work with Pawnee Nation and the Otoe Missouria, the Iowa Tribe of Nebraska and Kansas and looking at those sorts of sites and using oral traditions and their histories to help us better understand how these folks were living, what these sites really mean, and that sort of thing.
Johnson: A lot of historical references to Native Americans and Euro-American discoveries. What's been discovered in Nebraska that would refer to the history of African American pioneers?
Williams: So unfortunately, we don't have a lot of archeology related to that yet. Though there are definitely locations. There was the DeWitty homestead and a community in central Nebraska, kind of on the edge of the sandhills, that was an African American community in the late 1800s early 1900s. We have done a little bit of work down in Nemaha County at the Aldrich farmstead. And this was a place where, after emancipation, Mr. Aldrich had a farm down in Nemaha County and he invited African American families to come up and settle and build homes and help out and on his property and do some farming and learn some trade skills and things like that. And we did a little bit of archeology back in 1997 with some volunteer groups, including a group of students from Benson High School in Omaha. The goal was to learn more about these incoming African American pioneers, among the first individuals who were coming into Nebraska after the Homestead Act.
Johnson: September is Nebraska archeology month, a time to explore Nebraska's archeological past. We've been talking about the past with Dave Williams, who is the state's archeologist. Dave, thank you very much for taking time.
Williams: Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity.
Johnson: Dale Johnson, on Nebraska Public Media.