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I excavated a mammoth! Ep 3
251 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of Ethnocynology with David Ian Howe. David takes his listeners through a POV descriptions of what it’s like to scientifically excavate a large animal at an archaeological site.
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https://www.archpodnet.com/ethnocynology/3
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Transcript
Introduction to the Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Episode 3 Introduction: Ethnocynology and Host Background
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 3 of Ethnocynology. I know Ethnocynology is the study of dogs in past and present human societies, but also what I established in the first two episodes, if you want to go back and listen to those, is I'm an anthropologist and an archaeologist.
Dogs and Hunter-Gatherers: Common Archaeological Questions
00:00:26
Speaker
And I specifically study hunter-gatherers in the past. And dogs, of course, came to existence by interacting with human hunter-gatherers, so this is kind of my my focus. But a question I get constantly is, how do archaeologists know where to dig? Like, where do you know where to find stuff? How do you find stuff? And like, what's an excavation like? And can I join? I can answer all those questions
The Warren Mammoth Site Discovery
00:00:47
Speaker
with this. Now I know what I'm about to talk about is not a dog, but it is a giant Ice Age animal known as a mammoth.
00:00:54
Speaker
And Stefan has been on my ass for months, actually years now, being like, dude, you've been sitting on mammoth footage for two years. Why don't you just make a video? And I've sat here being like, well, I want to make a, you know, award winning documentary. I could submit to something. And he was like, mate, just just do it. Just make a video. So here's me podcasting about this site. And I'm just going to do it the easy way for you. I'm not going to make a high production but documentary like I plan to. I'm just going to walk you through from when I arrived to when I left what I experienced and how this works. because that's honestly probably the best way to explain it to you. So without further ado, here's the Warren Mamma site. The Warren Mamma site is a Mamma site or excavation located outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. I can't give the specific locations, but it was found on a rancher's property who was a sheep rancher and he breed sheep there. The guy's name is Doug. I don't know if he wants his full name in here, but he's a very wealthy kid. And he had a worker who was operating a track hoe
00:01:51
Speaker
and And in operating this track, oh, trying to build or dig a well for the sheep out in the field, he found what he thought was a dinosaur
Mammoth Bone Discovery and Carbon Dating
00:02:00
Speaker
bone. He pulled it out like a big round bone, kind of like it look like a poland here from Lord of the Rings, you're just a big bowling ball. And ah he was like, yeah this is a dinosaur bone. The worker I asked if he wanted to be interviewed or talked about in the documentary and he said no, so I won't name his name. But props to this guy because he dug this out, thought it was a dinosaur bone, talked to the landowner. And the landowner was like, yo, this is a dinosaur or something. So being as generous and smart as this guy is, he called the University of Wyoming
00:02:32
Speaker
They took that to the paleontology department. The paleontology department said, oh, this is a mammoth. And then you should probably contact the archaeology department because they are actively working on a mammoth excavation in Douglas, Wyoming, which is the Loprela mammoth site, which I'll do a future video on. I also worked there.
00:02:48
Speaker
And so the state archaeologist and a couple of professors and students went out to the site to check it out and they found a small biface, which is a stone tool on the surface near it, and then took a couple of carbon dates with samples and found out that this mammoth was 13,500 years old, calibrated carbon dating.
First Experiences at the Excavation Site
00:03:05
Speaker
With calibrated carbon dating, they found out that the mammoths was 13,500 years old, which puts it in well within a couple hundred years, if not like 200, 300 years of Clovis being in Wyoming. So the archaeologists were like, we're going to dig this because it could be cultural and another mammoth kill.
00:03:22
Speaker
So in the summer of 2022, I'm working at the other mammoth site at La Pral and my professor pulls me aside and he was like, Hey, do you want to get some sick footage of a mammoth being excavated? And I was like, absolutely. So he took me out to the site and I drove myself and a couple of students and volunteers were there. And this was probably one of the coolest experiences of my life because I used to go to the museum in New York all the time.
00:03:46
Speaker
They ended up interning at later on in my life to see the dinosaurs, to see the giant bones. Like every kid loves that. And, you know, the opening scene of Jurassic Park where they're pulling out the velociraptor from the ground and they're using GPR, which is ground penetrating radar. So see the velociraptor on screen, which you can't see it that well. That's kind of science fiction in the movie. But anyway, it's that like, I've always wanted to see that I wanted to be the little fat kid that like gets scared of the Raptor Club. And Dr. Grant's like, I hate kids and scares them. That was me at the site, except as an adult. And I wasn't scared.
00:04:17
Speaker
But what I saw was I can't describe it like Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanza just like a gift coming out of the just eroding out of the ground every day as you further excavated this thing. So let me talk to you about what happened when I got there.
Excavation Methods and Mapping Techniques
00:04:33
Speaker
This might be boring, but I want to just explain this a little bit. When you look around the environment where this is, it's the high plains. So basically where Nebraska moves into Wyoming before you hit the Rockies. So high plains, the prairie, whatever you want to call it with mountains and hills around. And you can see all around you, it's Jurassic era geology. I'd say that was the dominant like geological formations that were around there. Beautiful property, just absolutely stunning. The sunsets there were crazy, but the site was located a little further away from the sheep ranch, of course, out in the fields.
00:05:04
Speaker
And just out in the middle of a field in what used to be an ancient riverbed. And that's where the mammoth was excavated. So I got there a day or two late or like the second day of excavations. So they had already started taking the mammoth out of the ground. And when I got there, I walked in and just said like,
00:05:21
Speaker
whoa when i looked down at the ground i was like whoa because mammoth bones were just coming out of the ground and you could see what was immediate to me was that there was a giant just straight angular trench in the ground where the tracco was digging the you know the well So in in that giant trench where the well was, was then further pushed like the walls were broken down and and excavated further to make a big kind of opening. And then in that opening was us sitting in the trench digging towards further into the opening where the mammoth was. We found the femoral head of that mammoth. So we know from the femoral head, the rest of the bone has to be going, you know, that way, the opposite direction of where the head was.
00:06:01
Speaker
So they started digging that way and lo and behold, more bones kept coming out of the ground. And this is a careful archaeological excavation. And what's different here is a paleontologist, what they do is just dig out the bones and like either can pedestal them, which means to dig around them.
00:06:18
Speaker
and the bones then sit on pedestals of sand, and then you take a picture of it, or you can just dig slightly around the bones, put a cast over it, and then just expose the whole dinosaur or the you know piece of extinct fauna that's there and do it that way. But what an archaeologist does is carefully excavates all the way down to the, we do it in levels, which I'll explain later, and you're putting the bones on top of the on top of the soil so that in each unit and then quad, the unit gets divided into one meter by one meter,
00:06:48
Speaker
and then in there you divide that into four quads. You can carefully activate each quad of the unit, each section of that unit and write down notes and you have a more down to a It's just data heavy, like we're just nerds and need all the extra data. And then when you put all this data into the computer later and it all makes a big picture, you can see, wow, this is carefully excavated. So the reason we do that is because rather than just leave the bones there on the surface and take the bones out, you want to go down those five centimeter levels to see what else is in that quad, whether it be stone tools, more bones, pieces of bone, because we need to know that. And other things that could come up are
00:07:25
Speaker
stains in the ground from charcoal, from fires, from your campfires, hearths or even postholes from people building houses around this mammoth. So we need to check that out. I'm getting into the weeds here, but I want to just explain we're digging towards where the bones are and have a general idea of like, here's the extent of what we're going to dig. That's all we can really do this summer. Next summer, we can do this half because it's just a lot to excavate. And if the mammoth happens to not show up this direction, you know, oh, well, or we can start digging that way a little bit.
00:07:54
Speaker
So the day I got there, I immediately started taking pictures, taking videos, asking the archeologists, you know, what are you digging? Can you tell me about this? And I took some video on that. And what I want to talk about majorly, just before we get into more excavation of like, you know, how this stuff went, what is most important here is we use an electronic distance machine, which if you haven't seen that at EDM.
00:08:17
Speaker
or a total station is what it's called. And a total station is what you see construction workers using on the side of the road. That thing that's on a big tripod that you put your eye into and they're shooting a laser towards someone holding a pole. What that does is we take a, with a Trimble, like a very fancy GPS machine, you take a coordinate for, you know, just establish a center of the site.
00:08:41
Speaker
or doesn't have to be the center you can establish on the outside of a site on the azimuth or on the corner a geolocation like on the entire planet, like a global positioning system point of where this excavation is. From there, you then set the total station on top of that so that you know exactly, you know, this is where the coordinates and the points taken in the site are referenced from this point on the planet Earth. And then from there, when you find artifacts, or you find bones, or you want to map the extent of the site, map the boundaries, map anything in the site,
00:09:13
Speaker
you then step into the total station and then you shoot the laser beam at the pole and it will tell you the exact location like x coordinate y coordinate and the z coordinate which is elevation so we're in space this artifact is and why that's important is like yeah you can just kind of through the X and Y yourself by basing with ah like the old school way of taking a ruler and ah you know a line level and finding it. But this way, and you can do el elevation that way as well.
Daily Excavation Routine and Preservation Efforts
00:09:40
Speaker
But in this way, just it's quick and easy and it logs it into the total station so you can plug that into the computer later and you can see a big blow up of like where X, Y, and Z these artifacts are in space and you can kind of manipulate it around and see how things deposits with them
00:09:55
Speaker
alluvial and whatever Aeolian movements, which would be like flooding or like wind or sand or something like that blowing over it. So into the weeds here. So ah when I wasn't taking pictures or I wasn't you know interviewing people about the site, I was in there digging and everyone gets assigned a unit. And sometimes when it's really tight, two people work in a unit and you you know divide the quads up between you.
00:10:17
Speaker
And again, you start, we go in five centimeter levels and you'll start digging a new quad. You map that out using the EDM and you find like where in space this quads going to start and they use the Northwest corner or the Southwest corner, depending on which one you want to use.
00:10:32
Speaker
Can't recall what we used in this one. Either way, you use one of the corners. And then from there you map out, you know, like, Oh, I'm 50 centimeters this way. I'm 50 centimeters that way. And you start digging the bone and you just carefully excavate down. If you find nothing, you just keep digging and you put that dirt into a bucket and usually scoop it up with the trowel. And then you scoop it into a dust pan.
00:10:54
Speaker
Then you take that dustpan, I'm getting into the minutiae here, but this is how it works. You're scraping dirt into a dustpan, then dumping that into a bucket. Okay. And then you take that bucket and you usually have to put some kind of tag in it to say like this is unit, whatever level five, 50 centimeters to 55 centimeters deep. And you're taking that and then you give it to.
00:11:14
Speaker
what we call the bucket line where then the screeners pick it up and we'll start taking that and you have that tag that's on the unit or on the bucket of dirt that you have so that they know what unit and level this belongs to and your initials are on it so if something goes around they can come talk to you and usually volunteers are screening but when there's a lot of work to do people you know always hop on and help and What screening is, and I'm just going to get into that really quick, is especially at this site, we had to do water screening, which means you take a hose and just blast the sand rather than take your hands and push the dirt through that really fine, kind of looks like netting. It's wire on a, you know, what a screen looks like, right?
00:11:52
Speaker
And you can take the pole, like sides on it and sift it yourself. Or in this case, we use the water because it's faster and you just blast through it. Sometimes it's really tough dirt, like really tough dirt. This luckily was pretty nice and sandy if I recall. So yeah, it was very sandy because it collapsed easy.
00:12:08
Speaker
Then people in the screens are pushing through that and they're looking for any evidence of stone or bone or seeds or charcoal or anything like that. Specifically at this site, we were desperately looking for stone because we wanted to know if this mammoth was butchered. So everyone on the screens looks through that. When they pick through the screen and there's nothing else on it, they just you know put the tag into a bag and then put that into a made bag and then log it onto a thing saying this screen.
00:12:35
Speaker
was screened and there was nothing in it. And if they find something in it, they write down what was in it. That's the minutia of it. Every site's going to be different when you work for someone else to like, well, here's how I do it. Make sure you burp the bag. Make sure the bags aren't in the sun. I don't care. Just like every site you get to, someone else is going to have a new way of doing it. This is why I hate CRM because every time I work for a new company, they're like, well, that's not how I tie the string around the nail. I don't give a shit. I want the nail to be tied.
00:13:00
Speaker
The string around the nail, you know, and if it doesn't look as great in the pictures as yours, fine, but I'm getting the same data. So chill out. That's a rant. Sorry. But at this site, this is how I learned. I learned to excavate with these people. I was very comfortable. I knew the system. Let's do it. So that's water screening. Sorry, I should add one more thing. You leave the screens out in the sun for them to dry.
00:13:19
Speaker
And then if there's anything else, when it's wet, it's hard to see everything in there. When it dries, you can sift it one last time, see what's in there. And if there's nothing, you know, you dump it and the tag, you know, that's over. So back to me digging in a hole, I'm now probably doing three to four buckets, a quad, I think, maybe less, but just taking the dirt out. Depends on how big the bone is in your section, you know, cause you might only have.
00:13:42
Speaker
a couple, you know, pounds of dirt as opposed to like some units where you're having like tons, not tons, but you're having like probably 10, 20 pounds of dirt coming out of there. So we're digging and digging and you will know, with each quad, you go deeper and deeper and you're getting down to more bones. And some of the bones lay flat on the surface. So when you're digging,
00:14:01
Speaker
I just use the example of 50 centimeters to 55 centimeters below the surface, right? Sometimes the bone will stop at like 52 centimeters and it's laying flat. So therefore I put it on that pedestal and the further I dig down around it, the more that pedestal like raises and it kind of gets precarious, but the bones are pretty wide. So there's a base to stay on and you dig further down around it, you know, staying in the quads and the, and the lines of that.
00:14:28
Speaker
coloring in the lines. And then sometimes, you know, once you got to the ribs, like it was really intricate. There was like rib bones popping out, the skull bones and stuff, because a lot of that kind of got smashed and, you know, over time with weathering and erosion. And you got to leave those in there. A lot of times when it's a really tiny bone, you're taking that out, putting it into a bag. And you're saying this belongs to this quad, this level with this person taking it because you don't want that in there. It's too liable to be crushed.
00:14:53
Speaker
But at the end of the day, when you put all these points in the computer and you mapped where that bone was in time, or not time and space, well, I guess time too. You're mapping in, you know, longitude, latitude, and elevation where that piece of bone was. You can know later on when you put it all in a big map in the computer in the lab where it was relevant to the rest of the bones. So we're digging and digging and dude more.
00:15:16
Speaker
more bones come up and like you're seeing femurs and hemeri and I guess only two hemeri femurs there's ribs there's a tusk coming out of the ground and it's like Every day, and I have time lapses I can throw here on the video, but just every day you're digging there, like more and more bones came out and it was so fucking cool. Like just bones coming out. Now, would I have loved to have seen on the mammoth tusk a human that was gored by it and a human skeleton there? Absolutely, I would have loved to see that. However, the tribes would have come shut that down real quick because it's a human body. And we are we have to adhere to NAGPRA, which is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
00:15:56
Speaker
So if a human body were to be found here, excavations have to stop. You have to call the tribes in the coroner. They have to come check it out and they can decide who gets to keep it. Cause you know, there's many tribes that used to live here and then that's into the, you know, we can talk about that another time as well. But if you find human remains, you got to stop. And then from there, that's a whole several episode podcast.
00:16:16
Speaker
So just to give you into the mindset of what happens at the end of the day, cause you can't dig this all in a day at the end of the day, you're all tired and you just want to get back. And it's three o'clock in the Wyoming sun, which is technically the high desert, high Plains. So it's baking. And then we cover the site with tarps and put wood down because you don't want coyotes coming in at night, chomping on it. You don't want raccoons. So I think coyotes with a bigger concern there, vultures.
00:16:41
Speaker
There's like stray dogs that wander around sometimes.
Exploration and Mapping of Surrounding Areas
00:16:44
Speaker
And there's so many dogs excavating around. Well, they kind of are excavating too when they're digging holes. but A lot of pet dogs just hang out at site finding shade wherever they can. And they love it because there's so much human action going around. And here I am talking about dogs. There's dogs all over the place and I took tons of pictures of dogs. I'll put a montage of that up here too. But it's really cute because they try to find any shade they can and they usually all huddle together in the shade and it's kind of adorable. But a risk of that and why I didn't bring my dog here is because he's I don't want to use that word, but he's special and he'll just plow through all the bones and like lay down on them and stuff or take one. And I just didn't want to risk it. So didn't bring him. But anyway, at the end of the day, you cover the site up, you put the tarps down and then we all drive back to the campsite, which in this case happened to be at the sheep breeding farm.
00:17:32
Speaker
And there was like a barn there with a kitchen and all sorts of stuff. And we could cook food there. And at the end of the day, you just hang out, sit in the circle. There's no fire. We're just sitting in a garage because it's hot out. And you just sit around and drink beer. Some people volunteer to cook dinner that day, usually have KP, which if you've been in the military is like, you know, kitchen duty and yeah whoever has to do chores. Some people are assigned sweeping. Some people are assigned, you know, cooking food, serving food, all that stuff. And it's kind of just nice, easy camaraderie. Someone's like, I got it today.
00:18:01
Speaker
And then you hang out and at night we would drive around to the rest of the site or on the property and see these like beautiful sunsets. And of course we're archaeologists. We would walk to the top of these hilltops and look for stone circles, which there were tons of. And stone circles are rocks that used to line hide structures. So probably teepees or other hide like structures that were up there. And you you can see the remains of that through that. And usually you can dig in those and find more tools and things like that or, you know, household.
00:18:29
Speaker
Occasionally you might find beads, but probably more likely some stone flakes and things like that. And a lot of them are sacred. If it's a really big thing, like you don't want to touch it, or when you look at it from the sky, it looks really cool. And those sometimes are called medicine wheels or medicine circles. You don't want to do that.
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah, so then every morning you go back to the site, at like eight, you could eat breakfast, you make your lunch for the day, bring it out to site, get back to the site, you take the tarps off and you just keep digging and digging. And dude, every day more and more came out and it got to a point where the concentration of bones in the middle became so intense that like several people had to lean over from other units and take like toothpicks and toothbrushes and like dental picks to like kind of get all the dirt out. Cause our goal,
00:19:12
Speaker
was to not excavate each bone and take it out as we went we wanted to leave all the bones pedestaled so that you you could take a drone picture at the end of the excavation to see what the whole thing looked like and you wanted to take pictures of it as many as you could but again some bones were too fragile or too precarious and we had to take those out But the majority of it, you could see, you know, the tusks, the humerae, the femura, the ribs, the spinal column, like all sorts of stuff. And the tusks were easily the coolest. And me and the state archaeologist, Spencer Pelton, I remember being like back to back, like Mace Windu and Obi-Wan in that scene in the Attack of the co Clones. like
00:19:47
Speaker
just huddled together, kind of squatting, trying our best not to touch each other or bump into each other, I should say, and knock each other over onto the bones while we're carefully excavating. And it just got so precarious at times, but so fun. And in the middle, the bones were so tightly concentrated in the middle that we had to take this big grid that we made out of rope and string. And you set it over the bones and you could look at it and take kind of like a, not color by number, but a a grid system, really.
00:20:17
Speaker
where in each grid, you could be like, and we had an artist, Tyson Arnold, help us with this, draw the bones on where they are in this grid. And then we can put that to the rest of it. Cause it was really intricate. The rest of the bones, you can kind of draw, you know, sketch them. If it's just one big bone in the unit, kind of have a big cylinder in the unit, like especially if you're in the middle of a femur. But we had him do that. And I got several pictures of like them all doing that. And I called it like a Wyoming puzzle. Cause it just looked so cool. Like it was.
00:20:46
Speaker
I can't describe to you how cool this is. And I'll put some time lapses up in the video and stuff. But anyway, we're all digging and it gets to like the end of the session where we accidentally found all the bones that we could in what we plan to dig. And I took several videos like of people holding the camera and while I talked of like, here's how you find excavations. And this is why they wanted me on the site. Cause I could talk about this stuff and like a non cause Nat Geo can come in or highlights magazine or, you know, Theo Von could come in and be like, what you all digging?
00:21:15
Speaker
and like not really know, especially in that geo or things like that, they don't exactly know how the minutia of a site works and how to excavate.
Community and Collaboration at the Site
00:21:22
Speaker
And they ask like generic questions and stuff like that. But I was able to answer the questions that like I know people would want to know from an archaeological perspective and also be like, they probably want to know this or people don't understand this.
00:21:34
Speaker
And one of them, I took a ah solid video on like at the end, how we take points of the mammoth. So before we finished the excavation and pulled all the mammoth bones out, which is a whole thing in itself, you take these points and you put them all around the mammoth and you can take what the the distance machine, where in space those points are. And then it's called photogrammetry, I should say. And Todd took the camera and took pictures all around the bones as much as he could.
00:22:00
Speaker
with those nails in the frame. And then from there, when you put all those together with the drone image of the mammoth, you can stick it and into a computer and, you know, the software of the computer can stitch all that together. And you have a giant 3D model that you can move around kind of like Tony Stark and Iron Man of the mammoth in space. So that way, rather than just like in the 80s or 90s, you just drew a picture of it. Now we have like a 3D image of it. That's pretty cool. Now, I think you can do that with an iPad. There's some software. You just put this little thing on the back of an iPad.
00:22:30
Speaker
and scan it around the bones and it can map all that for you. like The future's crazy, dude. But let's see. Yeah, we screened every day. We went back to site, had fun, cooked dinner, went and excavated more stuff. Some days we just got lit. Other days we just hung out. Sometimes we went to stuff in town. yeah any Any site, there's
Potential Cloning of Mammoths and Ethical Implications
00:22:51
Speaker
like stuff like that. And then I think we all just hung out on my bus roof and and talked about stuff like that. But you go back to site, new people came in and like people all want to come see the site. So like other volunteers came in and people that professors knew from school and you get new perspectives and you see how people dig. But the main thing of this was I saw everybody that came into this site just looked at it and like,
00:23:14
Speaker
Took a deep breath and was like, whoa, because it's really cool. You don't always see a mammoth dug out a complete mammoth. So I guess I need to start wrapping here of this and just to keep it, keep it simple. But through all the screening, through all the excavations, the careful excavations of pulling it down. I remember paleontologists want to just dig the bones out and take the bones. They don't care for anything else around it, which is fine.
00:23:38
Speaker
if you're digging up a dinosaur because there's no stone tools around it. But this was to be carefully excavated in a processual manner to find, collect all the data you could on anything around the mammoth. And at the end of the day, through all the screens, through all the excavation, even if it was very close to humans arriving in Wyoming, there was no evidence of stone tools or any human culture associated with this mammoth. It just happened to be a bull elephant that died ass up in a stream. And apparently elephants like to die in streams if they kind of go off and do their thing. So.
00:24:07
Speaker
I guess they get thirsty and want to drink and then they just roll into it and die. I don't know how that all works, but you can look that up too. Another thing that if they breed mammoths and clone mammoths, I would like to know that data. A lot of people are just like, I want to see one. Yeah. I want to know what it's like when they suffer and die from an atlatl going through its chest. I really don't. I wouldn't want them to die, but I swear when they clone mammoths, you're going to have to stop archeologists from just absolutely destroying and butchering them to see what it's like. I'd also like to know how they interact around dogs. See how that works. I'd also like to know.
00:24:37
Speaker
you know, their social behavior, how they interacted. Was it very similar to elephants or very different? Cause it's different climates and stuff. Why did they go dive by stream? It's just like elephants. That's stuff that I would, I would like to know through mammoth cloning, but I'm against it in certain ways. Some ways I'm very for it.
Final Thoughts and Importance of Documentation
00:24:53
Speaker
Uh, let me know in the chat or in the comments what you, you know, your thoughts on that too. Cause I guess what I want to say is I don't want to see a mammoth like born and it's like leg is like shrunk and it's like, kill me. Like that's our fault. Like I don't want, I don't want that to happen. Then you got to breed it from an Asian elephant back to a mammoth.
00:25:10
Speaker
any amount of things. It could catch COVID. It can give us some kind of ancient COVID and we all die. Who knows? Uh, let me know in the comments. That's probably an exaggeration. Don't quote me on that, but I know I'm a little against it in some ways. And like, what if it's got, you know, no eyeball, but just like, you know, I don't know. And we're doing it because we, we never stopped to think if we should, we were just concerned if we could, you know, I don't, I don't know about that. So anyway, no stuff was found at the site. I can do another video on this later, like how more in-depth the excavation was and like how this worked and stuff. And um if you have other questions, I have so much footage. So like shoot me an email, davidatdavidinehow.com. Leave stuff in the chat here on YouTube. Leave comments in the in the chat below.
00:25:50
Speaker
shoot me an email, message me on Instagram. What are other things you'd like to know? Cause I have so much footage of this. And yeah, at the end of the day though, this was a Pleistocene excavation. So it was just to sum up, this was a mammoth that died close to the time that humans arrived in Wyoming.
00:26:07
Speaker
And what we did was carefully excavate it using units and quads and taking the systematic data of where this mammoth was in space. And I guess time through carbon dating and understanding how it died. And then there's a whole aspect of archaeology called geoarchaeology, which studies the geology of an archaeological site. And my professor Todd Servilla took a video of him explaining that here. We can we can add that here in the in the video. I can't really explain it myself here on the podcast.
00:26:34
Speaker
But essentially, like he can show you through ah like looking at that trench that was dug with the the well trench with the trackhoe. You can see like different layers of soil that were deposited from different flooding events from either the Ice Age ending or like another flood later on. And you can see how this thing was deposited. And it's very cool. Goes way over my head, but that's geoarchaeology.
00:26:55
Speaker
Once we were done excavating for the year what happens is the state curator was there like the person where all these bones are going to go into the state repository under the anthropology department in Wyoming and we had to basically take the bones extremely carefully and like lift them up and be like one, two, three as like safely as possible or if you could stick a board under them that was the best way to do it because these are brittle. They'll crumble and take those and put
Acknowledgments and Collaboration Emphasis
00:27:22
Speaker
them onto a board and then you you wrap them in bubble wrap and then you took tape and tape them around there to make them just as tight and secure as possible and then they were taken from the site, put very carefully into a car with more bubble wrap or a truck
00:27:36
Speaker
driven very slowly to the University of Wyoming, which is ah probably like an hour and a half away, and then brought to the repository where they are now are stored in a climate controlled facility and often taken upstairs to Todd's lab to be excavated. They take more of the dirt out from around them if they were casted. Oh, right. Casting is when you essentially like when you break your arm and make a cast, you do that to a bone. So you put paper towels over the bone and then put plaster casts over top of it, which you probably see with dinosaurs and stuff in the museum.
00:28:06
Speaker
And then you cut from under that, flip the bone and put it onto the board, strap it down with bubble wrap and tape and bring it back. And then that's brought to the lab and carefully excavated out of there with like fine picks and stuff like that to get to the bone, just in case there's stone tools or something around the bone in general, or just to you know get the dirt off the bone.
00:28:26
Speaker
So that's the extent of the site now. I think there's tons of research going on with it, just in terms of like why you find a lot of elephants or dead mammoths or long rivers here in Wyoming. Now the Platte River, I'm pretty sure is like littered with mammoths. Don't go digging there for them. Or if you do find some called the anthropology department, because then you can take part in a big excavation like this. That's really fun. I forget what we called the mammoth. We named it something. It might've been after Doug, or is the Warren mammoth. I think we named something.
00:28:55
Speaker
Anyway, but at the end of the day, I just want to give a shout out to Doug for calling the school and allowing us all to come out. And he even donated the, because he could keep these if he wanted, he could take both the tusks and like put the tusks over the front doorway, like a, you know, Viking warlord, if he wanted to, because they're his, they belong to him on his land. But he was chill enough to be like, no, take him like,
00:29:16
Speaker
do all the studying you can because once you're a millionaire and have that much money, like what else are you going to do? Like just let the school come out and it's more press because then people can come to his property and check it out. The governor was supposed to come one day. Like it was crazy.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:29:27
Speaker
I think the guy from a theory on that in front of the theory, I'm was going to come out one day because he lives in, he lives in Wyoming.
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah, that was the Warren Mamma site. I'll probably make more videos or a more in-depth video on this later on, and we can talk about it more on the podcast. But in terms of excavating and in terms of ethnocynology and dogs and stuff, I did mention dogs with you know them being around site. But if you were to find a direwolf or you were to find dogs at a site, that is exactly what you would do. The same thing. Carefully excavate down around the bones, pedestal them, and look for any evidence of stone tools or anything like that. Carefully take them out of the ground after photographing them and mapping where they are.
00:30:01
Speaker
bring them back to the curation facility or the lab and look at them to see if there's any gnaw marks or cut marks to see if they were eaten, anything like that. There were some gnaw marks on this mammoth, I think they were rodent and some carnivore, probably a coyote gnawing on it and definitely some rats when it died. so That's the war and mama site. Next time I will talk about the parallel mama site, but maybe next week we'll just talk about some dogs first and take some, take some topics from the chat so we can keep it relevant to dogs. But anyway, thank you very much. You can get my merchandise on davityandhow.com slash store. I got stickers, shirts, and you can buy the art prints that I had in the lecture. And you know, my Instagram, you can buy those there too. Please rate and review the podcast on Apple podcasts. Please leave a comment here below on YouTube or on Spotify. I think you need comments now, something like that.
00:30:44
Speaker
Just let me know how you like the podcast and please support the APN. Subscribe to the APN, follow that podcast on Apple there as well and Spotify. so ah Thank you very much. to See you next week.
00:31:00
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.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.