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Hell Gap: A Window into Paleoindian Life on the Great Plains - Ep 05
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In this episode of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast, host Carlton Shield Chief Gover takes listeners to one of the most significant Paleoindian sites in North America: the Hell Gap National Historic Landmark. Located in eastern Wyoming, Hell Gap has provided a treasure trove of archaeological insights into the earliest inhabitants of the Great Plains. Carlton explores the history of this iconic site, from its discovery in the 1950s to its designation as a National Historic Landmark, highlighting its importance in understanding Paleoindian culture. We’ll delve into the various Paleoindian components uncovered at Hell Gap, including artifacts from Clovis, Folsom, and other key traditions, and discuss how these finds have helped archaeologists reconstruct lifeways, tool technologies, and hunting strategies. The episode also features a history of the site’s excavations, from the groundbreaking early digs to more recent research efforts. Whether you're fascinated by ancient history or want to learn more about how sites like Hell Gap shape our understanding of the Paleoindian past, this episode offers a captivating look at one of the Great Plains' most remarkable archaeological landmarks.
Youtube: https://youtu.be/EvzAaRURSSg
Links:
- Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist Hell Gap Site Webpage
- Hell Gap: A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies Edited by Mary Lou Larson, Marcel Kornfeld, George Frison
- Hell Gap National Historic Landmark YouTube video by Wyoming SHPO
- Archaeology Spotlight: Excavating Hell Gap YouTube video by University of Wyoming
- The Archaeology of the North American Great Plains by Douglas B. Bamforth (2021)
- Archaeology on the Great Plains Edited by W. Raymond Wood (1998)
- Carlton's KU Anthropology Faculty Bio
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode, go to: https://www.archpodnet.com/great-plains-archaeology/05
Contact:
- Instagram: @pawnee_archaeologist
- Email: [email protected]
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Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. Join me as we uncover the rich histories of North America's Great Plains, exploring the latest archaeological discoveries and past cultures that shaped this storied region. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 5 of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. I am your host, at Dr. Carlton Shields, Chief Gover, and I am thrilled to have you join me on this exciting journey to the rich and fascinating histories of North America's Great Plains. So
Hell Gap Site Overview
00:00:36
Speaker
today, we are going to be talking about the Hell Gap site. It is a national historic landmark. And for those of you watching YouTube and the podcast on the YouTube, I'm still i'm still recording from home. I've still been traveling a lot. I'm actually in an in-between two trips at the moment. I head to Japan next week to present at the National Academy of Science, Frontiers of Science. So when this comes out Thursday, I'll be just getting ready to come out.
00:01:06
Speaker
and get ready for my trip to Japan. Also, like I said, it's not my apartment. I haven't moved my recording stuff over. I am recording this Monday evening, a couple of days before this is due, and it is seven o'clock.
Recap of Paleo-Indian Period and Hell Gap Focus
00:01:21
Speaker
It is Laramie's dinner time. She has her food, but this is the ah the witching hour of my very, very adorable black cat. So she's going to be around and probably a little noisy. So last episode,
00:01:37
Speaker
We talked about the Paleo-Indian period. We talked about peopling of the Americas. And I wanted to begin focusing on specific sites in the Great Plains.
00:01:51
Speaker
And
Significance and Preservation of Hell Gap
00:01:52
Speaker
that's why I wanted to bring up Hell Gap National Historic Landmark. Hell Gap with the site designation, I think it's like 48GO305. Yeah, so 48GO305, that is the Smithsonian trinomial for Hell Gap. And it is a deeply stratified Paleoindian site. I believe that there's
Archaeological Significance and Discoveries at Hell Gap
00:02:20
Speaker
some also like transitionary Paleoindian to archaic, but it sits on a archeological preserve, which the Wyoming archeological foundation purchased. And so the hell gap site itself is made up currently of five localities.
00:02:47
Speaker
But there is more archaeology on the site itself. And so what I mean by localities is that there's five different areas of of excavation. And the most famous one is locality one. And locality one, that's where we find the most, that's the area that's most well known in terms of excavation for having multiple Paleo-Indian complexes or different times of occupation or human culture. But I'm starting to get ahead of myself. Where where
Hell Gap's Location and Environmental Context
00:03:25
Speaker
is Hell Gap? Well, Hell Gap is in the state of Wyoming. It's in kind of the southeastern corner. It's
00:03:34
Speaker
like an hour and a half north of Cheyenne, about 30 minutes northeast by dirt road of Guernsey, Wyoming. So it's it's right on the cusp of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. So the site itself sits in the Hartville uplift, which is a zone of positive topography.
00:04:03
Speaker
We're going to dip in back to some of the earlier episodes where we talked about the Great Plains geologic landscape. It has incredible raw material for lithic stone tools,
Hell Gap as a Bison Hunting Site
00:04:19
Speaker
right? So the heartfelt uplift, for those that are familiar, it is a it it is a gorgeous type of chert that can be mined out of the heartfelt uplift. It's like a orange with sometimes is it moving a little bit into that red zone.
00:04:35
Speaker
with these gorgeous like black dendrites. It is a very pretty stone, and it opens up. The site itself is is in a valley you know area, and you look due east, and it's just the Great Plains. so you can If you imagine yourself in time going back to Hell Gap and the surrounding area, if you hike or climb,
00:05:01
Speaker
up on the ridges around the site and around that Front Range area. I mean, you can just peer into the Great Plains, which is a really great lookout spot for Bison and Hell Gap itself.
00:05:17
Speaker
there there's a lot of bison remains, butchered bison that have been excavated out of out of the sites here. So, I mean, that's what, it was it was a hunting camp, a but a bison processing area, right? When we're talking about Paleo-Indian archeology, looking about 15,000 to 13,000 years ago, there are not you know settlements or towns that we think people are not living and in place for very long. It is very much temporary encampments. People are hunting there. And the site was, as the story goes,
00:05:57
Speaker
discovered in the 1950s by two students. I've heard a couple different versions of how the site was found. There was like a snow storm, prom was involved. Sometimes it was just students like, I'm not entirely sure, but it's found by two individuals.
1960s Excavations and the Witness Wall
00:06:12
Speaker
who for some reason or other, they were just kind of like digging out, out there. And, and they came across some archeology and, and they reported it to the University of Wyoming and archeologists predominantly from in the 1960s from Harvard. specifically between 1962 to 1966, you know, really excavated by two folks. It was a team and they were doing field seasons every summer. Henry and Cynthia Irwin, as well as C. Vance Haynes. Like there were some really cool characters that were present at Hell Gap. Some really famous photographs that came out of there and and they're the ones that recognized how important this site was. And
00:07:03
Speaker
There's this famous photo called The Witness Wall. right they They excavated this huge block out and left a wall on the excavation that had all the stratigraphy and they mapped. They put little nails, like railroad nails, like that the tops look like these really big circles.
00:07:24
Speaker
into the wall where they found a cultural complex. So there's this really famous photo, two of them, one of um this big archaeological meeting of Henry Irwin presenting the witness wall to his colleagues, and they're all along the edge of the site.
00:07:40
Speaker
And then there's one of just the witness wall itself, where you have Clovis, Folsom, Midland, Agate Base, and Hell Gap, Alberta, Eden, Scotts Bluff, Lower Frederick, Upper Frederick.
Projectile Point Typologies and Archaeological Contributions
00:07:51
Speaker
And then towards the top, once you get a little bit closer in time, you have Patton Creek and and Sudbury. And it has such a ah mythos to it that site you know Cynthia and Henry Irwin their siblings. Henry did not live into adulthood. Cynthia became a very well-known Southwestern archaeologist. Henry Irwin did his dissertation on on Hell Gap, among other things. and kind of you know There are some interesting parts of that dissertation. One, promoting this Accama culture, which is this like ancestral Pan-Indigenous group that, you know not really,
00:08:29
Speaker
about But he actually talks about what we know as the frizzen effect, named after George C. Frizzen from the University of Wyoming, who um you know in a paper ah ah described why you can have two objects, two projectile points, that have the same form but of different size, and it was George who described, well of course they get smaller over time because you have to re-sharpen the points, and as such they get smaller, and it's called the frizzen effect.
00:08:59
Speaker
But actually, if if you read Henry Irwin's dissertation, he he describes the same thing like a couple years before George. I just found that out this summer. But the site itself, like those paleo-Indian components, date from 13,000 to 8,500 years ago.
00:09:16
Speaker
And so the fact that it has Clovis, and I think later there was read rereescribe it was It was redescribed. My apologies. It was originally called Clovis in the 60s. It was that Clovis point was redesignated as a Goshen point. So it's called the Goshen. So the oldest component there is Goshen. you know i I didn't talk about it in a Palestinian episode. Goshen points look incredibly similar to Clovis points.
00:09:41
Speaker
I'm not a paleo-Indian archaeologist. I am not a lithicist or an archaeologist that studies stone tools by any stretch of the imagination. A Goshen point to me, as a trained archaeologist with a PhD who can you know put two and two together, a Goshen point looks eerily similar to a Clovis point that has undergone the frizzen effect.
00:10:05
Speaker
There are people that will disagree with me, and that is fine. This is my podcast. I can do whatever the heck I want, and I am looking at a picture right now of ah of a Goshen point, and it looks pretty darn similar to Clovis. Tell me otherwise. But there's also Folsom, so it has like the some of the oldest paleo-mendent components that we know of that are confirmed, right? as As we talked about in the last episode, I'm very much a believer that people were here earlier than you know the accepted date for Clovis, whether that's pre-Clovis or just older Clovis technology wielding people. Who's to say? But they have Agate Basin. What's also incredible about the site, it's not like, oh, it has all these payloading components that we already know about. Hellgap is the type site for five.
00:10:57
Speaker
I want to say five. I might be an idiot. And I should probably have like actually put notes up, but it's the tight site for, for roughly for about five projectile point typologies. What do I mean by type site? A type site is as described when we talked about Blackwater draw versus dent or 12 mile Creek versus Folsom.
00:11:25
Speaker
It is the first site with a recorded typological or diagnostic artifact. So, Hell Gap being the type site for five different complexes is incredible. So, not only does it have a deep archaeological history, but it contributed to groundbreaking excavations in the field of archaeology back in the 60s, and there are more excavations going on today.
1990s Excavations and Modern Techniques
00:11:58
Speaker
So what are the what are the complexes? Okay, so I double checked my data.
00:12:05
Speaker
three archaeological complexes. And I know the folks from Wyoming are probably giving me a lot of crap for this. It's late. I just finished dinner. It's it's ah it's indigenous people's day. Then I'm speaking really from just experience and my overall knowledge of the site. So, you know, everyone forgive me for not being as usually prepared. I realized, you know, to be honest,
00:12:29
Speaker
I need an episode done in a couple of days, and it's it's just been a busy, busy time. so What are those complexes? well Of course, you have the Hell Gap Point. Hell Gap Point is named after the site. You have a Goshen Point.
00:12:47
Speaker
Right, that's named after the county in which Hell Gap is in. So you have the Hell Gap point named after the Hell Bad site. You can't have multiple points named, you can't have multiple different types of points named after the same site, right? Cause that'd get confusing.
00:13:03
Speaker
So, the Goshen Point, or the Mini Clovis, is named after Goshen County, where the site is located. And I believe, what's the last one? Always trips me up. Frederick, Frederick points. The Goshen points are also called Plainview, by the way. Anyways, and then what's kind of, you know, what what does...
00:13:24
Speaker
might explain why the Goshen point or plainview point looks a little different or is smaller. It might be right. We, as we talked about, it's not like a snap of the fingers and everyone's like, okay, we're done making Clovis points. We're making Folsom points, but plainview or those Goshen points might represent as that intermediary period between the traditional Clovis and the traditional Folsom point. But with that, we're going to go ahead and take a break here. We'll be right back. I'm going to talk about excavations at Hell Gap after Harvard in the sixties during the four seasons. So we'll be right back.
00:13:55
Speaker
So continuing on, these 30-minute episodes go by so quick, just FYI. after recording A Life in Ruins with David and Connor and doing like three 17 like minute segments, transitioning to like two 14 minutes. Like I'm never able to speak about everything I want to and it just rambled. Hell Gap after the Harvard crew in the sixties was reopened in the nineties, primarily by two archeologists. Well, three, George Frisin, but Dr. Marcel Kornfeld, Dr. George C. Frisin and Dr. Marcel Kornfeld and Dr. Mary Lou Larson.
00:14:29
Speaker
And I worked at Hell Gap. I think I mentioned that in the last episode during graduate school at my master's at Wyoming. I was first a, I wasn't a camp manager. I was like,
00:14:42
Speaker
camp repair. I did a lot of fixing screens and like water pumps and like site management. And then the second year I was a crew chief under mar Marcel. And me and Dr. Mackenzie Corey from Washington State University, we we have our own field school at Hell Gap. We're not focused on locality one.
00:15:01
Speaker
we're doing a survey of the whole property. And I'll talk more about that fuel school fundamentally as time goes on in this podcast, because we are accepting students in the spring. So that will be a constant mention if you want to work with me and Mac. But Marcel and Mary Lou and George, their big idea is like, so that Harvard did their thing in the 60s.
00:15:22
Speaker
Mary Lou and Marcel and George wanted to re they wanted to replicate the 1960s excavation with turn of the century archaeological methods and excavation. So they took a piece of the witness wall and which was left by Harvard, right? They capped the site, all that good stuff.
00:15:44
Speaker
and started excavating down again, taking a piece of that witness wall down. So in this space, it would be the same spot, but like an extra two and a half meters over. I'll have the reports and stuff in, and some videos that in the show notes and to see the differences. And of course, you know, Marcel and Maria Lu were using different screens to capture more objects that might not, that might be more difficult to find with the naked eye. And
Modern Excavation Findings and Precision Techniques
00:16:11
Speaker
so the amount of objects that were, that were identified and recorded by the 1990s and 2000s excavations were, you know, they found a lot more, a lot smaller material. than the Harvard folks did. And then also capturing the screen matrix. So not only they didn't just throw the dirt out, it was screened, it was then water screened. And then the remaining debitage that wasn't washed away in water screening was then bagged. And they were doing excavations like taking a one by one meter unit and subdividing it by quad. So you had 50 by 50 centimeter quadrants.
00:16:50
Speaker
in which those screen matrices and quadrant bags so were dedicated to. So they were really doing precision archaeology and excavating by five centimeter levels over you know three rough roughly three meters deep. It took years for them to finish up. It wasn't until last year, 2023, 2022, over 20 years for Marcel and Mary Lou to finish their excavations. you know What took Harvard four field seasons, Marcel and Mary Lou did at at a smaller scale. They didn't have as many people or they didn't open as much space. It took 20 years. like That's the level of precision they went to doing hyper precise
00:17:35
Speaker
because they Because at a stratified site like that, like Hell Gap, where you have multiple complexes that aren't necessarily dictated by stratigraphy, right where it's where you have multiple complexes separated in time but might be in the same geologic layer, you have to have control over over depth in order to really understand the relationship between in time and space between these cultures. So that's why it took so long.
00:18:03
Speaker
And some more bison, you know, there's bison and tickles at the lower levels, bison, bison, and and some of the top levels at locality one. Now, localities two through five, they have not been as investigated as critically as as locality one. Locality three might be lost. And I think locality four was just brought back into the site. What I mean by that is like the property that locality four was located on or locality five, and Northwest of locality one.
00:18:33
Speaker
was owned by a different property owner. And the Marcellan Railroad did not have access to that part of the site. But recently, I mean like really recently, like within the past year and a half, two years, that landowner passed away and actually donated that portion of their property to the Wyoming Archaeological Foundation. So me and Mackenzie Corey got to see the you know site this summer. not It wasn't open, but I'm in touch with Marcella, but what happens next? And
Ongoing Surveys and Future Research at Hell Gap
00:19:01
Speaker
much of the hell gap property hasn't been systematically surveyed. I am pretty sure me and Dr. Corey are the first ones to systematically survey a part of that of that property. because The focus has been on locality one. like If you're a paleo-union archaeologist, you work at locality one, and that's what Marcel and Mary Lou were doing.
00:19:22
Speaker
Marcell and Mary Lou have been, I cannot stress enough, delayed. Dr. Mary Lou Larson, she passed away three years ago. Mary Lou went to school with my PhD advisor. i've known so They've known each other forever. Marcell was married to Mary Lou for like over five decades. you know Just an incredible amount of time.
00:19:44
Speaker
But the site itself, back in 2017, 2018, 2018, was designated a National Historic Landmark, making it one of only like 14 archaeological sites, I believe, in the United States to be given that that designation. Like, it is it is incredibly important, the fact that the site was given that designation as a National Historic Landmark. Like, that's how much it contributed to our understanding of not only paleo-Indian archaeology, but like what's going on in the Great Plains. And so it has an and ah just an incredible contributions to the field itself. I mean, they're, they're processing bison. I mean, that's at at the end of the day, it has people were returning to that site over thousands of years. Cause it was that great of a location. Like you'd have to really, in order to appreciate it, you have to go there. Like it it's,
00:20:34
Speaker
It's in kind of a valley. It is shielded from the west, you know, the mountains are to the west, shielding, it what shields you from winter winds. It opens up to the Great Plains. You have topography that you can climb up and just look over the Great Plains, especially the high Plains, the short grass prairie to look for bison and an incredible raw material source of the Hartville uplift for your projectile points and knives. Like it is an incredible place if you're a hunter gatherer to hunt bison and process. And not only that, there's definitely over a hundred stone circles there, AKA TP rings. That site is is known for its Paleo-Indian component, but all over the property are TP rings, which would suggest, it's you can't date TP rings, but people even up until the 19th century were living there, indigenous people. Like the amount
Human Activity and Landscape Investment at Hell Gap
00:21:33
Speaker
of TP rings that are present, it is clear that was a multinational
00:21:39
Speaker
hunting ground or campground for hunting. it it and and so What me and Dr. Corey are looking at is as part of my excavations there are documenting the teepee rings and looking at the the landscape, the archaeological landscape across the entirety of the property, not just locality one. so you know That will be determined. so If you are actually at the Plains Anthropological Society annual meeting, which is this week, the week of October 14th in Lethbridge, Canada. Dr. Corey is present sometime. This episode comes out Thursday. Conference kicks off Thursday. Go find Dr. Corey. We have a poster. I'm not there because I go to Japan next week.
00:22:22
Speaker
But Dr. Corey is presenting a poster um with our team, myself, Dr. Corey, Simon, and Justin Garnett on some preliminary findings from from Hell Gap at this past year. So if you're there, check it out. And I think we'll be talking more about it at the Society for American Archaeology Conference in Denver in April. But overall, just kind of closing this up.
00:22:47
Speaker
Here's a site that has some of the oldest components, known components. It's multi-component Paleo-Indian. People are repeatedly using that site over time because of ah for multitude of factors, but it also suggests and illustrates investment in landscape. like People routinely are coming coming back. like People are starting to have place, associated place, repeated human behavior rate. and you know A lot of people probably Think of archeology as there's, oh, there's just this one-site people here once. As we move through time, especially North America and the Great Plains, there's investment in a landscape, in a place for repeated use to make. They're expending energy to improve the area, so that way they can expend less energy later. right That is a time investment.
00:23:37
Speaker
that is an investment in labor to a place. So no mammoths, sorry, no elephants associated with the site, but bison, right? Lots and lots of bison. And today, if you're at the site, I guess to close up, you know like it's it's it's a dry environment. Back then in the Paleo-Indian period, when the climate was different, there's a lot of mollusks or snails present, like back in the day in Paleo-Indian times.
00:24:07
Speaker
over 11,000 years ago, 8,500 years ago, it was a wetter environment. And so some of those invertebrates that are being recovered under these new modern you know more modern techniques than the 60s, being able to find those delicate snail shells right helps us reconstruct a paleo environment. That's another critical aspect of Hell Gap is that those excavations looking at the stratigraphy, looking at the geoarchaeology, collecting data beyond the points, the bones, and and the lithic debitage, and taking pollen samples and recovering invertebrates in the soil, you can then reconstruct the environment in which those people lived in when that site or that component was occupied.
00:25:01
Speaker
And so
Reconstructing Past Environments at Hell Gap
00:25:03
Speaker
it's not just finding the things, right? Archaeology is not about what you find, it's what you find out. So having those, having soil samples, which is what Marcel and Mary Lou were picking up, the the matrix from screening buckets of dirt from a quadrant, help us understand more fully, not the fullest, but more fully,
00:25:26
Speaker
the the archaeological record and human behavior, right? We're not paleontologists. We're anthropologists. We're studying human culture. And part of human culture, human material culture, is understanding the human behavior that went into creating the archaeological record. So with that,
00:25:46
Speaker
um That's going to go ahead and end episode five of the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. I'm going
Episode Conclusion and Future Topics
00:25:52
Speaker
to think pretty hard about what i'm going ah what we're going to talk about for episode six. I haven't decided yet. for're go so I think we're going to stick with the Paleo Indian period. I think we might pull out a different different site, we'll see, to be determined. But until then, thank you all so much for listening. I'm Dr. Carlton Shilcheap-Gover, and this has been the Great Plains Archaeology Podcast. See you next time. Bye-bye.
00:26:18
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Great Plains archaeology podcast. You can follow me on Instagram at Pawnee underscore archaeologist, and you can also email me at Great Plains Ark Podcast at gmail dot.com. And remember, anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie. American author Willa Cather.
00:26:44
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.