By SHANNON O. WELLS
In the summer of 2023, about seven Frederick Honors College students found themselves trekking across a vast southern Wyoming prairie, ostensibly staging a search for artifacts remaining from a 19th century transcontinental railroad. Their discoveries, however, took them much farther back in time than the Western frontier in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
“The first day they were there, the excitement was just extraordinary, because we really didn’t know the scope of the American Indian artifacts that were on the site,” recalled Nicola Foote, Frederick Honors College dean and professor at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
She accompanied the students on their first day at the site. “We knew from previous programs that there were probably some, and we also knew that in the 19th century the railroad had gone through the site.”
The first-day plan was to train on site survey methodology, which involves walking in formation. “It’s quite funny to watch,” she said. “They’re all in a line and their eyes are on the ground. And then you plant a flag anytime you see something.”
While learning how to effectively walk and search, the students remarkably planted around 300 marker flags, denoting various artifacts, including a roughly 10,000-year-old arrowhead, as determined by Jim Johnson, anthropological archaeologist and faculty lead in Pitt’s Global Experiences Office.
“So they immediately realized, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re on possibly one of the largest Native American settlements in the West,’ and they think they will also find these rings that signify this was where hunting took place,” Foote said. “And they found nine of them.”
Inspired by the discovery, Johnson did some surveying using Google Maps and other data “and he thinks there might be several hundreds of these,” Foote said.
As intriguing as these discoveries sound, one may also wonder why, exactly, seven Pitt honors students were wandering around a Wyoming prairie in the middle of summer. Well, another group of first-year honors students is at it again this summer at the Alan L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve. The fossil-rich 6,000-acre site located north of Laramie in southeastern Wyoming, was donated to the University Honors College around 2005.
Philanthropist Allen Cook’s gift, valued at approximately $7 million, preserved the land for research by Pitt students and faculty, as well as by research partners including Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientists and faculty and students from the University of Wyoming.
In early July, six Pitt students caught a plane from Pittsburgh to the site, where they will work with two University of Wyoming students. Designed for first-year Frederick Honors College students, the three-week, three-credit course focuses on building an understanding of basic survey techniques.
As Pitt’s assistant director for Domestic Study Away programming, Tim Crawford coordinates the excursions.
“With having 6,000 acres, they’re trying to systemically understand what is out there and survey pieces of the property,” he said. “They’re learning about archaeological mapping techniques ... because this piece of property has very significant artifacts on it that they’ve been able to identify over time, but really more need to understand what is out there.”
“So this really gives students the opportunity to introduce them to survey work and mapping,” he added.
Yellowstone connection
Inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years, the space includes the site of an original 1860s Transcontinental Railroad station. The cultural landscape the students explore includes ranges from some of the earliest sites in the Mountain West to significant historic sites within the past 200 years or so.
In 2006, former Pitt Honors College Dean G. Alec Stewart told the University Times there was some “luck involved” in piquing Allen Cook’s interest in the University’s programs. Bill Mundy, a childhood friend of Stewart’s who was hired to appraise Cook’s ranch, persuaded Cook to consider Pitt’s expertise in educational field work.
Upon donating the property for exploration, Cook said he was “thrilled” to be handing over stewardship to the Honors College, “because its leaders have an exciting vision for discovering all the land promises for education and research. Their understanding of its delicate ecosystem and their interest in collaborating with other institutions in the nation assured me that the ranch land I love would be used for the highest purposes.”
Cook’s comments reflected the ongoing connection Pitt’s Honors College has had to Wyoming. Each summer since 1989, it has offered the Yellowstone field course, a one-of-a-kind program in and around Yellowstone National Park, where students explore the geological, ecological and cultural dimensions of Yellowstone and its environs.
Stewart said he saw the Cook site “as an expansion of our established Yellowstone field course, located at the northwestern corner of Wyoming,” rather than a new program. “Allen Cook’s gift will generate a cascade of opportunities over the years for our students and faculty with this additional setting and new institutional collaborations.”
Ancient past, wide-open future
Reflecting on her Wyoming adventure last summer, Foote said the “magnitude of the archaeological site out there is stunning. … It was electric.”
The students, she added, seemed to feel the same way. “These students (wanted) to go to Wyoming. They were excited, but they didn’t know the scale of what they were going to be participating in.”
Although there are mining operations in the general vicinity, the site is mostly protected from industrial and development activity.
“In addition to the archaeological resources, there’s this amazing repository of dinosaur artifacts as well,” Foote explained of the land. “And that was the initial motivation for the gift, when (Allen Cook) found those dinosaur fossils.
“He wanted to make sure that they could be conserved,” she added of the still-active partnership with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to work on “classifying those bones and so on.”
While the “non-human element” remains critical to the program, Foote said it’s currently shifting more toward the “human histories” at the site along with a continuation of Pitt’s varied environmental studies programs.
“We’re hoping to develop an animal-behavior program because there was some really unique and endangered species on this site,” she said. “So we want to have students be able to systematically survey and track those species. And even the non-endangered prairie dogs are absolutely fascinating out there.”
Longer-term plans include working with Native American tribal authorities in Wyoming. “It is a little bit complicated because these are 10,000-year-old-plus artifacts. So it’s not like the tribal authorities today are the direct descendants, right?
“It’s a little bit more complicated, but we still want to make sure that we have those partnerships as we continue to explore the sights,” she said. “So that’s one of the goals moving into the next stage of the project.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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