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The Archaeological Conservancy with Linsie Lafayette - Ep 115
640 Plays10 months ago
Linsie Lafayette is the Western Field Representative for the Western Regional Office based out of Reno, Nevada. She has worked in CRM and on many sites. Linsie and Alan talk about Linsie’s journey to the Archaeological Conservancy and what they do to preserve archaeological sites.
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For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/115
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Transcript
Introduction to California Rock Art Foundation and Its Mission
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja, California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also
Collaboration with Native Americans and Funding Efforts
00:00:36
Speaker
work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation. And of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening
Introduction of Guest Lindsay Lafayette
00:01:17
Speaker
to the Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:34
Speaker
Hey, welcome. Welcome to Episode 115. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel. And today we're going to be interviewing Lindsay Lafayette, who's representing the Archaeological Conservancy. And we'll be talking about what it is, how it relates to sites, archaeological sites, and rock art. And it'll be an interesting journey.
00:02:00
Speaker
Welcome, everybody,
Lindsay's Journey in Archaeology
00:02:01
Speaker
to Episode 115, the last one of 2023. And we're honored and blessed to have Lindsay Lafayette from the Archaeological Conservancy on board. He'll be talking to us about what that is and how that relates to cultural resource management or conservation of Native American and historic sites.
00:02:26
Speaker
and how that might even relate to rock art preservation. Lindsay, are you with us? I am, yeah. Hi Alan, thanks for having me. Sounds like you're loud and clear. You told me you were coming in from an exotic location, correct? Yes, I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada.
00:02:44
Speaker
Wow. On the second level of a historic farmhouse. How fabulous is that? Well, welcome to the Rock Art Podcast. We've been doing this for about three years. And you're the first person to come on board to talk to us about the Archaeological Conservancy.
00:03:02
Speaker
But before we sort of probe into that, maybe tell us a little bit about how you got involved with the profession of anthropology, archaeology, perhaps the study of Native Americans and cultural resources. Well, I
Master's Thesis and Experimental Archaeology
00:03:16
Speaker
always liked history and I always liked my grandmother's stories about our old family history.
00:03:23
Speaker
I thought I wanted to be a history teacher because I enjoyed history the best. So then when I went to university, I said I would major in history, but then I saw the archaeology of North American Indians as a class to take. And so I thought, ooh, that sounds so interesting. I'll take that.
00:03:42
Speaker
ended up taking the whole series and then majoring in it and I found myself with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the Oregon State University there in Corvallis and after that I went to France and I dug in a rock shelter in southern France and I came back and looked for work so I just became a shovel bum basically for on the east coast for a little while and that's where I met my husband who is from
00:04:11
Speaker
the East Coast of Canada, which is why I'm here today. And so just random chance brought us to Nevada in Reno. I got a short term work with the BLM state office with Pat Barker. And I worked with him for a little while. And when that was over, he and I worked CRM for about three more years. And we decided that we should go we should get our master's degrees from University of Nevada Reno in their program.
00:04:40
Speaker
In Reno, that's what we did and we graduated and then we did a little while longer and, and then he went on to get his PhD in Wyoming. And I moved to Wyoming with him and worked with the office of the Wyoming state.
00:04:56
Speaker
archaeologist in Laramie for a couple of years and then we ended up back out in Nevada and I did CRM again for about 13 years with one company until I got work with the Conservancy, which I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with them.
00:05:15
Speaker
That's quite
Significance of Ancient Artifacts in Rock Art Preservation
00:05:16
Speaker
a pedigree, don't you think, in terms of the experience that you've had is very broad, both old world and new, extensive work in cultural resource management, historic preservation, different geographies.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yes, yeah, I've been all over the country. You had mentioned that your master's thesis. Oh, my master's thesis, sure. It was you swear analysis on Great Basin stemmed points. So what I did was I had replicas made by James Woods there in Idaho, and he made some replica parmons and wind dust and Haskets.
00:05:54
Speaker
And then I hafted them onto spear points, half of them onto spear points and half of them onto knives. And then I acquired a deer carcass and I hung it with rope in my backyard and threw spears at it. And then I looked at the U-swear on the spears. And then after that was done, after I threw the spears at it, then I had some hafted as knives and I
00:06:22
Speaker
skinned the deer and cut some meat off the deer and then I looked at the U-swear as knives and then I was able to look at some collections from Cougar Mountain Cave and Last Supper Cave and Hanging Rock Shelter under a microscope and I compared the U-swear on those artifacts with the U-swear that I created from replica stem points that I used in my experiment. And what did you learn? What was the upshot?
00:06:49
Speaker
That, uh, I think that stem points were used for both knives and spears throwing fat laddles, uh, some kind of, um, high impact throwing and as well as knives. Yeah.
00:07:02
Speaker
Well, that's pretty exciting. No one had done that before, had they? No one had done that kind of level of replicative experiments that you had. That is an incredible project and one that's certainly very valuable and interesting. Those parmons and wind dust points are paleo-Indian, are they not? And they go way back in time. I think the wind dust goes back to like 11,500 and parmin about the same or earlier.
00:07:33
Speaker
I haven't looked into the current research, so I don't know exactly what they date to anymore, but definitely in that ballpark, yeah, early paleo. And that wind, dust, and parmin are part of that Western STEM tradition that we now are finding goes back as much as 16,000, if not even earlier years ago, and is part of that pre-clovis stratum that has been discovered in Oregon, correct?
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't...
00:08:02
Speaker
Yes, in Connolly Caves by Dr. Dennis Jenkins with the U of O at the Oregon Museum there. Munch, I think they call it.
00:08:12
Speaker
Yeah, I'm very familiar with that because I myself am working on a project in Oregon, but it's been very eye-opening in a lot of ways to go out of California and expand my research into Oregon. Similar, but yes, different. So quite remarkable. So how did you jump from all of that and find your way into the archaeological conservancy?
00:08:38
Speaker
It's because
Involvement with Archaeological Conservancy
00:08:39
Speaker
my husband, Dr. Jeff Smith, he's a professor at UNR and he did an excavation where he was looking into a place to excavate and it was Leonard Rock Shelter. He needed to know who owned it and he found out it wasn't the BLM. It was privately owned and not only privately owned, but owned by the Archaeological Conservancy, which neither of us had heard of before.
00:09:03
Speaker
And so you have to submit an application in order to work on. They're 1 of their preserves, and then they, they have a committee look it over over the application. And then if you're approved field work can go ahead and that is what happened in his case. And so I think he spent a couple of years there.
00:09:21
Speaker
and Leonard Rock shelter and got to know the Western field director, Corey Wilkins. And later, after the pandemic was over, Corey was looking for the Western field representative. And so he called Jeff to see if any students needed any work. And he said that all of his students were, you know, they were employed. And so he couldn't think of any. But then he said the next day, he thought, hmm, I wonder if Lindsay would like to do that.
00:09:50
Speaker
So, Serendipity played a nice part in this opportunity, did it not? Yes, it did. So, yeah, I had a good lead on that job opening. They didn't even advertise it.
00:10:03
Speaker
How did we meet, Lindsay, you and I? Well, we rely on people like you to let us know about properties that come up for sale that have significant archaeological resources. You were one of those people that gave us the heads up and the tip and we let us know that there was an archaeology site with the rock art, you like the rock art. You called us up and so I came and met you at the site and we looked at it together and talked about
00:10:33
Speaker
its significance and hopefully we'll be able to acquire that site with that tip. It's for sale. I hope that it goes through. It'd be a nice acquisition for the Conservancy. Well, let's hold it there and we'll continue this discussion in the next episode. See you
Archaeological Conservancy's Role in Site Preservation
00:10:55
Speaker
on the flip-flop, gang.
00:10:57
Speaker
Welcome back, gang, to segment two of the Rock Art Podcast, episode 115, and we're honored and blessed to have Lindsay Lafayette here representing the Archaeological Conservancy. Lindsay, we were talking about how you got involved with the Conservancy, and we were just beginning to discuss when we met and how you acquire properties, and I think that would be a good place to start. Do you agree?
00:11:23
Speaker
Well, actually, I was wondering if we could do a little bit of a background of what the Archaeological Conservancy is first before we... Please. No, I think that's sensible, and let's backpedal a little bit. Exactly. The Archaeological Conservancy is the only nonprofit that preserves archaeology sites on private land. We preserve historic sites, pre-contact sites, ethnic historic sites. It's been a Conservancy since Mark Michael founded it in 1980, so that's
00:11:53
Speaker
I don't know, is that 43 years now? We have over 585 sites across the country. There are offices like the one in Reno, representing the Northeast, the Southeast, the Midwest, the Southwest, and the West in Reno, of course.
00:12:10
Speaker
And the Western office, we are responsible for Oregon, California, Idaho, Washington, and Nevada, those preserves we have in that region. And there are 44 archaeological preserves in that region that we are responsible for and that we manage. Okay, so I think that's a little bit of a background on what we do. So we acquire these sites before they're developed or before someone else acquires the land who might want to pot hunt it or just
00:12:39
Speaker
you know, plowed into a field, that kind of thing. So that's how we are preserving these sites. And we generally like to just leave them exactly how they are. The purpose of their preservation is to do archaeology. So if you have a plan and you're an archaeologist, you can give us, submit an application and we will review it and see if it meets our guidelines. And if so, then
00:13:02
Speaker
We could do some archaeology on the on the preserve. Okay, so I think that's interesting because people may be unaware, even our listeners, which are all across the globe, that in California, there are actually, it's not as common as it might be in other areas of the country.
00:13:20
Speaker
and maybe it's uncommon there as well, to have private lands that contain archaeological sites, privately held lands. I know that in most of the Great Basin and Western Mojave Desert in the eastern California, most of the landscape is owned or managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service. Do you find that's the case, Lindsay?
00:13:46
Speaker
Right, yeah, along the East Coast, the directors over there, it's a lot different for them because most of the land is privately owned, but that's what is unique about the West. So much of it is owned federally and state owned.
00:14:01
Speaker
So getting something on private land, you know, you need to know people and you need to, that's why I'm doing public outreach because people need to know that if there is something on private land that needs to be protected, then there is a place to contact and have it be reviewed to see if
00:14:19
Speaker
if it can be saved or preserved into the future. In perpetuity,
Rocky Hill Site and Its Cultural Importance
00:14:24
Speaker
as you would say. In perpetuity, yes. But I did connect with the Archaeological Conservancy earlier in time, several years ago, in fact, to discuss a privately held site that's very, very important. It's a rock art site, but it's one of those rare birds that have ethnographic information in that the native people have a robust collection of sacred narratives surrounding the site.
00:14:49
Speaker
And so we know basically from indigenous perspective what the site was used for and what they called the site and how they interpreted it.
00:15:01
Speaker
And then the site falls sort of in the center of a lot of the research that I have done over the years regarding questions relating to rock art function and indigenous symbolism and metaphor, et cetera. So we were not able to acquire that site and we have had difficulties connecting with the owner, but that was how my initial relationship began with the Conservancy.
00:15:31
Speaker
Now, another site that the California Rock Art Foundation has visited often was that one in the Central Valley near Visalia. You know that site for its rock art? Yes, I had a chance to visit it in September for the first time. Maybe tell us a bit about what you might know about that site, and I can add a few things perhaps. Well, I believe... It's called Rocky Hill.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, we mentioned it before, Rocky Hill, but I think technically the Conservancy, it's known as the JT last archaeological preserve in honor. I think he might have been a primary donator to the preservation of that site. I don't know a lot about it. I visited it, but we have a summary written of it, and I did look at it before I went, but I believe it's on the lands of the Southern Yokoot.
00:16:28
Speaker
And it might date back to 2000 years ago to present? Certainly, or if not more than that. It's a pictograph site. It's a polychrome pictograph site, rock paintings. And it exhibits indications of sort of the ceremonial and religious metaphors of the yokits. And there are tremendously interesting panels that exist.
00:16:56
Speaker
And they're situated all over that hillside of Granite. And they're done in vibrant colors of yellow, red, white, black,
00:17:07
Speaker
and some represent sort of spiritual beings, animal human figures, et cetera, et cetera. But it is a remarkable sight and certainly world-class rock art has been preserved thanks to the art. All right. What I thought was unique about it was that it was underneath the rocky overhangs in like little
00:17:27
Speaker
little caves, one of them I had to crouch down and sit down and enable it so that I could see what was going on on the panel is tucked under. So a lot of them, there might still be more that we haven't found because it was very tucked in and hard to find. Yes. And that whole area that is very rich in rock art and to have this particular
00:17:53
Speaker
privately held parcel managed and conserved by the Archaeological Conservancy is an enormous blessing to the general public and even the academic community for that matter. And then we have a Portuguese bench. Right. Yeah, I had I usually try and incorporate site visits when I have other business in the area to make the most of my time when I'm traveling. And so while Alan and I were looking at a perspective
00:18:21
Speaker
site to acquire and preserve. There was a
Portuguese Bench Site and Preservation Collaborations
00:18:25
Speaker
nearby preserve that's already within the archaeological conservancies within our preserves of sites, and it's called Portuguese Bench. It's a village site that was excavated in the 1980s by Dr. David Whitley.
00:18:41
Speaker
But there is one panel on a granite boulder, which is kind of not really where the excavations took place. It's further down the hill, just amongst all the ranching buildings. It's also where a historic ranch functioned. So it's impressive that it has survived and that it's on granite when most of the rock art is on the basalt that's in that area, right?
00:19:06
Speaker
that you're exactly correct. It's very unusual to have a non-basalt rock art canvas for a petroglyph in that area. I guess what is even more remarkable is the kind of shouts koso in terms of its subject matter and highly representational and naturalistic symbolism. So let's pick this up on the next segment and see you on the flip flop.
00:19:37
Speaker
Welcome back, gang. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel, Rock Art Podcast, Episode 115 with Lindsay Lafayette, who's talking about the archaeological conservancy, what they do, how they do it, and some of our interesting interrelationships. Lindsay, so you introduced me to an enormous panel, a rock art panel, that shocked me, I have to say.
00:20:03
Speaker
It was so surprising to see that. It's about five miles, I think, outside of the COSOs itself, and yet it shouts COSO in many ways. And it has really some standard elements, both naturalistic and realistic, on that panel that I've seen regularly occurring in the COSOs themselves.
00:20:28
Speaker
Yeah, well I was glad you were able to see it because we haven't had anybody professionally come and analyze that rock art. There were, like I mentioned, excavations done there in the 80s and I haven't read all of everything that's been published or reported on those excavations, but I hadn't seen anything related to the rock art yet.
00:20:49
Speaker
So I was happy to get an expert's opinion on what was going on there. But I've extensively even cited the work of Mark Allen and other individuals on Portuguese bench in my dissertation.
00:21:07
Speaker
And I knew there was a rock art site there, a panel of, you know, a boulder. It's not mentioned in any of the publications I had run across, Two Masters Theses and any other discussions, no one mentions it. But on that panel, after post-processing it,
00:21:25
Speaker
There's an individual holding a snake. There's snakes at the top. There's a mountain lion. There's a tortoise and bighorn sheep. And then another very large individual with their hands outstretched. What could be an Elko projectile point depiction and several other figures and a smattering throughout the whole
00:21:52
Speaker
panel of bighorn sheep, including a classic koso sheep with full front facing horns and navicular body and flat back, very characteristic. It's a hallmark of the koso cannon of rock art. And such panels are fascinating. And I've had the opportunity to deconstruct and
00:22:17
Speaker
talk about some of those symbols over the course of my career studying COSO rock art. So it was almost like seeing a new friend coming home. So you must have had a chance to really analyze that after we left with your pictures and the D-stretch analysis that you did? Yeah, I did D-stretch. I post-processed it several different ways and it was amazing how much came out.
00:22:42
Speaker
of that image and things that we could see. And you think those are debatable, right? Those images? I would say, with some confidence, that much of the panel would probably date to the Newberry period, meaning from about AD1 to about 2000 BC, so about 2000 to 4000 years ago.
00:23:07
Speaker
No doubt. They're just very characteristic of the material that's been dated within COSO. That classic form of bighorn sheep begins about 2000 BC and continues, proliferates during the later periods, and grows to a larger than life-size image that appears in the COSO range itself. Yeah. Well, that's great.
00:23:33
Speaker
We were able to preserve that and have that information available to you to see.
00:23:40
Speaker
Yes.
Little Lake Site and Archaeological Research
00:23:42
Speaker
And then we had time to look at that bit of a, I don't know if it's enigmatic, but interesting site there at Little Lake. And that has historic materials and even ethnographic materials and prehistoric rock art and historic inscriptions as well, sort of a real mixture.
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah, it seems to be a path that has been used for millennia and into the historic times. It must have been a very important pathway throughout all time going past that water source there in the desert. Absolutely. What was partially shocking to me was
00:24:26
Speaker
You just wandered around and found several new glyph elements that I'd never seen before, and I'd been out there literally dozens of times. You found a series of ottlottles and another depiction of a classic Coso bighorn sheep that you yourself had discovered just wandering around the rocks there. Yeah. And I saw that you recorded it in 1976. I got the site records from... A very primitive recordation that was during my
00:24:54
Speaker
my infancy in archaeology, I was working as an intern for the Bureau of Land Management and doing unbelievable amounts of work living at the Little Lake Hotel and trying to develop a cultural resource management plan to protect the resources. So I have to apologize for sort of the primitive nature of that documentation. That's right.
00:25:21
Speaker
I'm wondering, though, if you're working for the BLM, why you were on private land recording those panels. I guess at the time we didn't know it was private. I guess we thought that it was all BLM, and they even had me doing a lot of work.
00:25:38
Speaker
looking at the Little Lake Ranch itself, even though they knew that was private, because they wanted me to do a nomination for both what they call fossil falls that you didn't see, and Little Lake as a singular nomination, which I did as well. I did a publication, I did my master's thesis on that particular site.
00:26:02
Speaker
And the Bureau of Land Management owns actually the topmost mesa top of that flow, that basalt flow that exists around Little Lake. So it's sort of an intermingled set of private and public landscape. Does that make any sense? Yeah.
00:26:26
Speaker
There's a lot going on in that tiny little spot. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, I'd mentioned this on one of my earlier programs, but a colleague of mine, one of the board members of the California Rock Art Foundation, did his master's thesis on that mesotope there on the BLM land. And what he discovered was hunting blinds and dummy hunters that were being used to hunt the bighorn sheep.
00:26:55
Speaker
And he used state-of-the-art drones and three-dimensional mosaics to recreate the landscape and test models regarding the feasibility, intervisibility in the landscape and whether they could in fact be used to hunt and slay sheep.
00:27:15
Speaker
Right. I'm sure that entire area was being used intensively for a long time. It has a lot of attributes for hunting and gathering. Given that that's a, you know, a freshwater lake in the desert, which is so rare, that would be a, you know, sort of a magnet for a variety of occupation and cultural activities. And it was the same even through historic times where they had
00:27:43
Speaker
a road and a stagecoach stop all there at Little Lake. They called it Lagunita in the past. And that was the historic Spanish name for the site. That was the ethnographic village of Pagunda that Julian Stewart documented. So back in 1938, he documented there were several different ethnic groups there. Anyways, quite an interesting place. Yes, thanks for showing me.
00:28:12
Speaker
Lindsay, do you have some final comments, conclusions that you would perhaps want to share with the audience?
00:28:20
Speaker
Well, I'm
Outreach and Support for Archaeological Conservancy
00:28:21
Speaker
here tonight. Thank you very much, Alan, for inviting me to promote the Archaeological Conservancy. And we're a nonprofit, so we accept tax-deductible donations, of course. And you can have a membership to the Conservancy for, I think it's just $25 a year. And we have a lovely magazine that comes out quarterly, which you can also find back issues on our website, archaeologicalconservancy.org.
00:28:49
Speaker
We raise money through tours. There's a tour coming up in March for the Guatemala Highlands in Copan and in Mexico that is run with an archaeologist with the tour group as a tour guide. And another one of our representatives will go along as well. And in May, we have a rafting trip on the Yampa River in Utah.
00:29:12
Speaker
We'll have a Conservancy representative there as well as an archaeologist who works with the BLM in the region who knows about the archaeology and the Fremont rock art that we'll see on the river in that area. I believe it goes through Dinosaur National Park. It's like a five-day rafting trip, which sounds amazing. Let's see. I guess one thing that we should make the general public aware of
00:29:42
Speaker
is if they know of an archeological site that's privately owned or an historic site that needs protection and that is available for sale or could be for sale, they should probably alert you, right?
00:29:55
Speaker
Yes, those are the best tips. I can go on, you know, things like NEVCRIS and CRIS in California and the Oregon and Washington equivalents like the archaeological databases and I find archaeology sites that look great and they're on private land and I write letters to the landowners and
00:30:15
Speaker
But more often than not, I do not hear back. So if I don't have that tip of someone who is interested in selling their land anyway and wants to preserve the archaeology on their land, that's the best kind of tip to have. Otherwise, I'm just
00:30:30
Speaker
kind of sending a letter out into space it feels like trying to trying to see if people are interested in preserving their land and we're not pressuring anybody to sell their land we're very patient we can answer questions you know people don't have to sell it right away they can they can put it in their will they can
00:30:50
Speaker
can live on their land, live on the land while we own it. I think it's called a life estate so you can still sell the land and live on it and you can be on the committee that makes decisions about that property after we acquire it. So there's lots of options to be had and go ahead and ask us questions and see how we can work together to preserve archaeological resources. Well Lindsay, it's a pleasure connecting with you and I'm honored that you had a chance to share
00:31:21
Speaker
the joy of doing the work for the archaeological conservancy. And all you people out there in podcast land, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. OK, happy holidays. Talk to you in 2024. God bless. See you on the flip-flop, gang.
00:31:44
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:32:16
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.