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Protecting the Past

Interview with Renee Barlow, Ph.D. Research Curator of Anthropology, Utah Museum of Natural History

Nancy Green: When did you first hear of Range Creek?

Renee Barlow: I first heard about Range Creek in 2002, apparently just after the sale to the federal government. The BLM was interested in doing a survey and Jerry Spangler was being contracted to come and do the archeological work because he had done his Masters thesis in Nine Mile Canyon, which is the next canyon over and he had been publishing about it as well. So he was probably the archeologist with the most experience in this region that was currently working. And he asked Dr. Metcalfe and I to come down and help out with the project. So, for the first field year we all came down and volunteered and fell in love with the canyon.

Green: Why did you fall in love with it?

Barlow: Well, part of it is just the beauty and the remoteness, and part of it is the archeology is just so well preserved and so spectacular, it's rare to find one or two sites like this, let alone a couple of hundred.

Green: Is this a once in a lifetime opportunity for you?

Barlow: It is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I have never had the chance to work in a place with so many sites that haven't been disturbed and that aren't going to be disturbed. Usually, when I'm, when I'm doing archaeology, I'm either working for, an agency that's looking at the impact. So, for example, doing an inventory for the Bureau of Reclamation when they were putting in the Central Utah Project. So we're looking at the places where a pipe is going to go, or a canal is going go, or a drill pad. A lot of the projects that I've worked on have been primarily because some construction activity was going to happen. So whatever site we found was in imminent danger of being destroyed and we were just trying to collect all the information we could before the project happened.

In this case, this is a research project, which started out just as an inventory. The BLM had heard there were some sites here and wanted to check it out and to find out what kind of a project they were going to need in order to launch a full inventory and so we're not running ahead of the bulldozers or the drill pads, and so we have the luxury of thinking about our research questions and really putting together a project for the long term. I am just starting it, probably a couple of generations of archaeologists after me will be continuing to work on this. They'll have new research questions. To be a part of that is so rare. I feel very excited and very, very lucky just to be here.

Green: Let's talk about the Fremont Indians. Describe their lifestyle.

Barlow: The Fremont are a bit of a conundrum in archaeology because they don't clearly fit in most of the archaeological categories of southwestern Native Americans during what's called the Formative Period. It's a time when corn, beans and squash have moved up from Mexico into the southwest -- either with people, or they've been adopted by the indigenous peoples of this area that have been here for thousands of years. Life ways are changing and they're changing pretty dramatically. We see a transition from people who are moving around most of the year to people who may be sedentary, living in a house for at least a season, sometimes longer. In most of the southwest, they're building really permanent surface structures by A.D. 1000 at least. In the Fremont area, they continue to use pit houses well into the 1100's and 1200's and even to 1300's. Throughout the whole Fremont period there's only about a handful of surface structures that indicate that kind of settlement. The rest continue to be pit houses. So they appear to be maintaining their mobility. We also don't have the huge villages like we see in Chaco Canyon. We don't have what looks like the social and political complexity that's often attributed to the classic southwestern civilizations.

Instead in the Fremont, they appear to retain a lot of the earlier traits and yet, research is suggesting that corn and probably beans and squash were a big part of their diet. So, while they adopt some of the traits, other ones they reject to some degree. So, the Fremont have been notably variable. You'll go to one community and they'll be a dozen structures and another community they'll be one or two-- and one community you'll have lots of painted wares, in another community it'll just be gray pottery and a few artifacts that indicate it was Fremont and the rest suggest they're doing mostly hunting and gathering. So, from one valley to another, from one site to another, there's not the same kind of consistency that you see among the Anasazi or the Hohokam, even though they're contemporaries.

Green: Many people feel the big mystery of the Fremont was, "where did they go, what happened to them?" But it sounds like there are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the Fremont.

Barlow: Yes, one question is where did they come from? Most archaeologists working in the region -- this is still a controversial issue-- believe that the Fremont have a set of technologies and material traits that evolves out of an earlier archaic people. But there's still some question about how much of an influence migration, and possibly of peoples from the south, had on the Fremont. There have been other hypotheses, like perhaps these are people from the plains that moved over that now don't appear to be really tenable any more. But there is a question about how much migration effects what we see in terms of the Fremont, that's a big one. In terms of their life ways, we're still wondering, for example, how complex socially and politically the Fremont are. Are they still living in small bands that are fairly mobile most of the time or do we have at least some settlements, some communities where we have larger extended families, perhaps some people more important than others or, or some people being more equal than others. Do we have greater social-political complexity?

In Range Creek, some of the, just the density of sites, the shear number of villages, I think were up, up to about 70 pit house villages now, some of them fairly substantial and the shear number of grain storage sites suggest we might have communities up to 600 people. That's larger and more complex than we thought for at least this part of the Fremont region. There's only a half dozen places really like that, so, we're still trying to decide what all these artifacts and sites mean in terms of their life ways on a lot of different levels and then of course, what did happen to the Fremont. Is it possible that they migrated out of the area? Is it possible that they were absorbed to some degree in later hunting and gathering peoples that moved in? Did they simply abandon some of the more sedentary and agricultural technologies in favor of more hunt, a movement back to more hunting and gathering and just become archeologically invisible rather than actually people leaving the area. So, we're not really sure about all those questions.

Green: What have you found surprising about the pit houses?

Barlow: The pit houses are a little bit different than what we usually see and some of the things we're calling pit houses, we're not really sure they're pit houses. We have standing stone walls and structures that look like they were more like stone towers, so we don't really know how they were constructed. We haven't excavated any yet. We don't know what the roof was like and we don't know whether we have the typical ladder coming in from the roof or a side entry. We don't really know what these structures look like yet, but they look different from anything we've seen before.

Green: How about the granaries?

Barlow: Some of the, some of the granaries are unusually large. They'll hold up to one thousand liters of grain, which means dozens and dozens of trips of baskets to fill them. And the largest of the granaries are on cliff faces. They're situated 25, 60 feet up in the air on a cliff face that's a quarter of a mile above the canyon where they're growing the maze. So, they're hauling it way up and out of the way and then up a cliff face in order to secure it. So, it really looks quite defensive, like they're trying to defend their food.

Green: It sounds like the Fremont are the most incredible climbers, and just to access these sites safely you need professional help. How have the Search and Rescue Teams helped you?

Barlow: Prior to the search and rescue teams coming in, we were recording most of the cliff granaries from the ground using spotting scopes and binoculars and trying to estimate size and so, we couldn't actually access them, see what was inside or even get a really good view of them. The search and rescue teams came down and they would set up all their equipment and harness up the archeologists and their concern both about our safety--which I really like -- and also the safety of the archeological site. So, they'll spend hours, if that's what it takes, putting in protection, making sure that we never actually touch the structures. Sometimes they'll have three different people on ropes and harnesses pulling us around a corner and into a site and bringing us in just above it so we can lift the lid on a granary, see what's inside and make a collection of corn or wood or charcoal and material for dating. We've collected data on the size of granaries and on the contents of them that we never would have had.

Green: Looking at the sites as places to collect data is one set of views. I've talked to others, notably Native Americans, who have differing viewpoints on how the sites should be treated. Is there room for different perspectives here?

Barlow: I think that often the scientific view of both the archaeological record and the place where we find archaeological sites is one from most archeologists that seems to be intrinsically European in background. Archaeologists tend to view artifacts and archeological sites as pieces of information, as data that's waiting to be collected and it's because we're interested in it. We see these as objects that are profane. Many Native Americans see much of what we consider the inanimate world, to be part of the realm of sacred, to have a spirit. Artifacts, archaeological sites to some degree, may be viewed as something more sacred, not necessarily as a book to just be opened and read. And I think that's especially true about Native American remains.

We have a fascination with human remains. Think about the popularity of a lot of the television shows on right now, CSI, we want to know what information we can get out of them. Native Americans don't necessarily have that split between the sacred and profane. Maize, for example, may be seen by Native Americans as not just a food that you eat, but also a symbol of fertility, and it may be used in a lot of other contexts beyond just the profane --this is food for the table. And so, I think it's a mindset that needs to be explored. But also, we need other voices in archeology. We need the Native American voice in archeology as well. We need Native American interests to be represented in archeology much more than they currently are, so that we can start to mend some of the rifts between how sites and artifacts and the landscape in which they exist are viewed.

Green: You mentioned remains. I know that's a very controversial topic. How do you handle human remains when you come across them?

Barlow: If we come across human remains our policy is to leave them undisturbed, to record the location and report them immediately or as immediately as we can. When we're in here it's very difficult sometimes to get communication out of the canyon. But we actually try to do this within 24 hours to the land holding agency. So we have to determine first of all, which land they're on, which can be difficult. We've got state lands and a couple of different state agency land holders, and federal agencies involved, and so we have to determine which is the appropriate agency to notify. Then we need to notify them. But our policy is not to disturb them, we'd prefer to just leave them where they are.

Green: For the average person, what's the importance of Range Creek and the studies that happen here?

Barlow: For most people, I think the interest in past life ways is intrinsic. So, the people that I talk to both at the Community College and at the University levels, they have an interest in what's happened here before. They have an interest in what happened to these people. When we talk about them as farmers, they say, "wow, how did, how did they make a living?" and when, when I talk about the granaries they're really just interested in it. Well, "why are they putting the corn up there?" And everybody has their own ideas about what they may be, and at this point I think one is just as valid as the next.

It's funny, I think it's human nature to be interested in the past, and most people when they come in here, if they see a rock art panel or a thousand year old shard of pottery on the ground, they feel a connection to those people. I think that's a big part of it. And I also think that because it's here in Utah, I think a lot of the people of Utah are kind of excited because they feel like it's their Range Creek and I hope they feel an ownership and that they want to help preserve it and help gather that information as well. We get a lot of volunteers in here helping out, non-professionals.

Green: If you could wave your magic wand and have the future you wanted for Range Creek, what would it look like in twenty years?

Barlow: I would like to see this canyon preserved as it is with a real flavor of wilderness--with still the rugged and remote qualities that it has, so that future generations could come into the canyon, walk in through the gate and find archeological sites the same way that we're seeing them in 10 years, in 20 years and 50 years and 100 years. I'd rather see smaller groups of people come in and the amount of traffic limited in the canyon, and especially the amount of vehicle traffic -- even the amount of traffic that we're creating as scientists in the canyon. Just coming in smaller groups, so that we don't destroy this amazing opportunity, this amazing resource, while we're trying to figure it out.

Green: What would be the worst-case scenario for Range Creek?

Barlow: The worst case scenario would be a paved road and you stop by the side and there's a tram going up the side of the mountains, so you can see Deluxe Apartment in the Sky or the Beehive Granary without getting your feet dirty and without crossing a creek, without climbing over any boulders, so that you make the experience antiseptic and you might just as well watch a movie as actually come into this canyon.