Dig may remake Spokane history
The hand-carved stone tool hasn’t seen the light of a late-summer sun for 5,000 years. Nobody knows the name of the person who dropped it next to an old hearth.
But it must have been a popular spot in Spokane’s early history. The tool is just one of tens of thousands of artifacts dug from six feet of silt near People’s Park, one of the oldest, largest and most valuable sites archaeologists have seen in the Inland Northwest.
“It’s pretty darned exciting,” said Stan Gough, director of archaeology and historical services at Eastern Washington University. “The history of Spokane itself is going to be pushed back many thousands of years.”
Before the city builds a 95,000-gallon wastewater collection tank on the site, Gough and a team of archaeologists from EWU have been digging and sifting through a 25-by-60-foot section of earth near the confluence of the Spokane River and Latah Creek.
Closest to the surface, archaeologists found advanced arrowheads and spear points. At the bottom of the dig, where Gough expects tests to show that the artifacts are at least 5,000 years old, simple stone tools have been recovered. Better age estimates won’t be known until carbon dating results are returned in a few months.
Diggers also found a rare spear weight, of a type Gough has never seen in this region. The weight was common on the East Coast, but its discovery is a first for the Inland Northwest.
The area was a natural spot for activity, Gough said. The Spokane River waterfalls served as a natural barrier for salmon, so the fish would head up Latah Creek or pool in the area now known as Peaceful Valley. Native people from the region would come to the falls to fish, hunt and prepare food for storage.
After carefully digging out ancient tools and detailing how and where the artifacts were retrieved, Gough and his team will spend the winter trying to determine how the people lived in this area through time.
The number of artifacts and the size of the dig are rare, Gough said.
“In terms of a prehistoric site, this is certainly the largest in the region that has been conducted,” he said. “This will now become a very important set of information for comparing and contrasting anything that comes afterwards.”
Students and anthropologists at the University of Idaho will make use of the information found at the site, said Lee Sappington, associate professor of anthropology at UI. He works with tribes in North Idaho to put on paper what Native people have been saying to one another through oral history for years.
“The only way we learn about a lot of those things is through archaeology,” he said. “With those kind of artifacts in Spokane, it will help us in North Idaho to learn about the past here.”
At the site of the Spokane dig, workers have been clearing away dirt about 4 inches at a time from several nearly 6-foot sections since June 7. In the shade of a tall locust tree, about 15 people with trowels cleared away some of the last of the dirt last week. Buckets of silt were taken to large metal screens, where EWU anthropology student Kim Mumaw shook out the dust, then carefully eyed hundreds of tiny rocks, looking for rock flakes or other ancient remnants.
“The hard part is finding the bones,” she said. “They look like rocks.”
While screening dirt on the surface is a job for students because, as Mumaw said, “it’s pretty hard to mess this up,” others worked in a 6-foot hole, kneeling on cardboard pads and carefully removing rocks from a pile and categorizing them into buckets: one for regular rocks, one for fire-cracked rocks and another for hand-modified rocks. A black line in the cross-section of dirt was evidence of a fire that once tore across the land.
Standing at the edge of the hole in the ground was Andy Andrews of the Spokane Tribe, who, along with tribal elders, has been watching the dig since the beginning of the project.
The area has history for the tribe. Chief Spokane Garry, a prominent leader during the shift from Native to white control of the land, camped across the river from the excavation site, Andrews said, and when white settlers came to Spokane, they rolled rocks at his camp to try to force him to leave. Garry relocated to the area now called High Bridge Park, but settlers kept rolling rocks at him.
Watching the process of removing artifacts helps connect the tribe with its history, Andrews said.
“I’ve seen things in a museum, but I’ve never seen something pulled out of the ground,” he said. “It’s exciting for me and exciting for the elders who come down and look.”
Sara Walker, an archaeologist with EWU, has been working on the project since it began and said it’s been an extraordinary dig for many reasons.
“One of the big surprises was so much was left preserved,” she said. The area has been used so much, even in relatively recent history, that she expected a greater disturbance to the site, which sits narrowly between two large sewer lines that were installed in the 1940s.
“Along the Spokane River there’s not been an excavation of this scale at all,” she said.
Commercial archaeologists were surveying sites on Lake Coeur d’Alene and the Spokane River last year, but the results of those studies will likely remain confidential. The work was done as part of Avista Corp’s relicensing efforts for its five Spokane River dams, said company spokesman Hugh Imhof.
Representatives with the Coeur d’Alene Tribe were unavailable for comment.
For now, artifacts are being stored at EWU, but they may find a permanent home at a facility at Washington State University. The results of the excavation, which the team was trying to wrap up last week, will be published, and some pieces may find their way into an exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, just a half-mile from the dig.
But finding parts of the past is not a treasure hunt for museum pieces.
The value of archaeology isn’t in the artifacts themselves, but where they’re found in relation to others, Gough said.
“People bring in a shoebox full of things – well, that’s pretty and nice, but there’s no context,” Gough said. “We can’t learn anything from that.”