Explore the Issues:

Native Americans

Wildlife and Sportsmen

Oil and Gas Exploration

Protecting the Past

Interview with Duncan Metcalfe Archaeologist The University of Utah

Ken Verdoia: Duncan, let's begin with Fremont Indian basics. Help the person who has no background whatsoever just become a little bit more familiar with who these people were, where they lived and their range of existence.

Duncan Metcalfe: Sure. The Fremont archeological culture or tradition begins about 200 A.D. So it reaches its maximum flourish around 1100-1150 A.D. and pretty much disappears by 1350 A.D. It extends from the southern edge from the Anasazi, so, say southern part of Utah, north up past the Great Salt Lake from the West Desert, about the Utah/Nevada border all the way into Colorado. It's part of a fluorescence of farming throughout the southwest at this period of time where corn, beans and squash, which were domesticated down in Mexico, moved up into this area and people began to adopt, at least part time, a farming life-way. Prior to then, all people were hunters and gatherers and after then, most people became hunters and gatherers.

Ken Verdoia: How does Range Creek provide an opportunity for us to better understand this lost people?

Duncan Metcalfe: Oh, in a number of different dimensions. Because of the pristine character of the archeological sites, where we're not having to deal with years of people walking over these sites and picking up the artifacts on the surface or actually vandalizing the archeological sites. It's a deep and broad research base. In another dimension, this is a marginal environment for farming. We're relatively high up. Although we have a permanent creek, it's not a big one. And even minor perturbations in past climates would likely have a pretty significant effect on the success the Fremont enjoyed with farming. So it's a good place to look at why people switch between farming and hunting and gathering.

Ken Verdoia: Will it teach us anything about how people were forced to cope with climatic change as well?

Duncan Metcalfe: Absolutely, and again, because it's fairly sensitive as a farming area, even those minor changes are likely to influence people's decisions about which resources to actually go after. So a slight southward movement of the south jet stream, capping off the monsoonal flow of moisture that comes up in the summer would make farming probably untenable in this particular part of the country. A slight shift in the worldwide climatic patterns, causing a little cooling down and a shortening of the frost/freeze season, less solar energy striking the surface may well have also made farming a dicier proposition.

Ken Verdoia: The Range Creek land that was transferred to the State of Utah was just a very, very small percentage of Range Creek. I think that some people misunderstand and think that the whole canyon was part of the transfer. How can such a small percentage of this canyon be so important?

Duncan Metcalfe: Because it controls access to such a big part of the canyon. If you look at the area that is controlled by the two gates, one at either end of the ranch, it's actually almost 50,000 acres. The ranch itself is 1500 acres, so, a fraction of the total land that it provides access to. The majority of land is Bureau of Land Management, something in the order of 85%, Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands make up about another 13% and the remainder is the ranch lands that are owned by the Division of Wildlife Resources.

Ken Verdoia: For the 50 years prior to the transfer, the gatekeepers were the Wilcox family. Tell me how you view them as stewards of this piece of land and all that is embodied on that land.

Duncan Metcalfe: Well, Waldo Wilcox, who owned the land just prior to it being transferred to originally the Bureau of Land Management and then eventually to the Division of Wildlife Resources, claims it was his father, Budge, who actually instilled the preservation consciousness into his two sons Don and Waldo. And they have a clear admiration and respect for the archeological sites over which they held stewardship. Again I've been an archeologist for close to 30 years and in that period of time there's probably six, eight sites that I've found that I was pretty sure had never been walked over by another Anglo and stuff picked up, six to eight. We're at about 295 sites at the moment in this portion of Range Creek Canyon and those within the confines of the gates are almost 100% pristine.

Let me put this into perspective, if we were to go up one canyon up, Nine Mile Canyon and walk onto an archeological site what you would see is primarily debitage, the small flakes of stone that are produced when stone tools are made. You wouldn't find any arrowheads. You wouldn't find any formal tools. There'd be few if any pieces of pottery. Here in the evening when the survey crews come back, I will get a site form and it says between 25 and 50 pieces of debitage; 6 projectile points, 4 drills, 10 beads--just a wealth and this is just on the surface. We haven't excavated anything and yet when you're dealing with a domain as broad as this lower part of Range Creek, having those surface clues, as to where to start to work next is absolutely essential.

Ken Verdoia: About 100 years ago the, the success of archaeology was defined almost exclusively by its sense of drama, by how big the ruins are that you have uncovered, by how perfect the golden structures you exhumed from a tomb. You are talking about a very different type of archaeology now aren't you?

Duncan Metcalfe: Absolutely. Fremont archaeology is about as subtle an archaeology for farmers as you're likely to ever find. Here we can walk onto a site and I say here's a residential structure, a pit structure. Where talking about a ring of stones that most people would walk right across and never think about. The granaries, they're fairly dramatic when you can actually begin to pick them out, but they're so cryptic that it's difficult for the lay public to actually recognize what they're looking at. It's not Mesa Verde, it's not Chaco Canyon, it's not the big archaeology that you see further south, and yet from a research prospective, we can learn far more from Range Creek than we're going to learn from looking at Batatican again or, or so forth cause it was excavated so early on.

Ken Verdoia: The perceived roll of archaeology at one time 100 years ago was to grab the item and take it back to a museum on the east coast. But there seems to be a different ethic for how you are collecting data on-site in Range Creek.

Duncan Metcalfe: Right. I mean archaeology's evolved into a scientific discipline and the primary goal of archaeology is to understand how people lived in the past. How they dealt with changing opportunities and constraints of their local environments, both in technology, social organization and hopefully in the long run, ideology. The professors who taught me, their basic question was the relative age of things. Is this site the same age as this site or is it older or is it younger? With the advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1950's, that disappeared. That was no longer a problem. All you had to find was some organic material in direct association and get a date.

The archaeologists are taking on increasingly difficult questions and it's one of the reasons we have a fairly strong preservation dimension to our work. And it is very clear that my students will have more techniques, more methods at their disposal than I have, and their students and their students and so forth. And so, I think one of the opportunities that Range Creek presents is to set up a long term coherent research design for understanding the Fremont and beginning it, and recognizing I'll never see the end of it or hopefully I'll never see the end of it. Hopefully, my students will never see the end of it. When you excavate a site you destroy a site. It cannot be re-excavated and there are X number of Fremont sites. The wonderful thing about Range Creek is there's the potential for us to set up a long term research design that takes advantage both of an evolving character of archaeology as a science and a coherence, a continuity, that probably has never occurred before in this particular region of the world.

Ken Verdoia: For an outsider to come in and see the number of interests and agencies at play on a federal level and a state level, it just seems daunting. There's got to be a substantial challenge in having so many hands on the management plan.

Duncan Metcalfe: Yes, the interesting thing is, with few exceptions, anyone who comes into Range Creek, at whatever bureaucratic level or lay level, that we can actually walk around and show them the archeological sites, talk about what the potential is here. I think everyone comes away with an appreciation for the uniqueness of Range Creek. And the one exception was a Californian, who I made fight a range fire with a 5-gallon bucket for 5 hours. Everybody when they leave says, "How can I help you?" and that's I think part of the wonderful aspect of Range Creek politically, with respect to federal agencies and state agencies, it's complicated but it goes best when there's clear communication and that's what we're certainly striving for now.

Ken Verdoia: It would seem that with so many interests it almost demands a go slow policy, no single interest can rush to judgment or force a direction.

Duncan Metcalfe: Yes. It's tough because I'm an archaeologist and so I think always the archaeologist should rule, and when the archaeology is as amazing as it is at Range Creek, I feel like I have some justification in that push. But the fact is, the natural history of Range Creek, the geology, the paleontology, the wildlife, the flora, all of them at some level contribute to this place as being a unique place. The archaeology is the crown jewels. There's no two ways about it. But I think, you know, in 10 years I'd love to see classes in landscape architecture come through here. I'd like to see classes on wildlife painting. I think the opportunity for setting up an educational experience in extremely broad context is, is great here at Range Creek.

Ken Verdoia: That's almost a best case scenario. What though might deny you sleep on some nights when you worry, say if we don't do it right. These dangers could put the future of Range Creek at risk?

Duncan Metcalfe: Oh, there's a number of them…time, people stopping, beginning, my not paying as much attention to what's happening as perhaps I am at the moment. But because it's in this part of the country, probably oil and gas. The fact is, I think for the first time in my lifetime and I thought it was going to happen 20 years ago, worldwide production of oil is less than demand. I don't think these oil prices that we see today are ever going to disappear and as oil prices increase the economic viability of alternatives increase and so, that would be my worst fear.

Ken Verdoia: Let me ask you, we've talked a lot about the science and acknowledging the respect and the scientist's perspective. We've also talked with those that say where we sit right now is not just a great scientific opportunity, it's actually a spiritual center. There are Native American voices who say, "Tread lightly, for these are our ancestors." Have we been remiss in taking into account the Native American perspective--the Native American cultural traditions in defining a place?

Duncan Metcalfe: I don't know remiss, but I do believe that there are many different voices that can tell a story about a particular area or a particular time. I'm a scientist. If I can't measure it describe it, analyze it. It's not of much interest to me. It's as simple as that. But that doesn't mean that the Native Americans shouldn't have the opportunity to use Range Creek to tell their own story. Their own view of the past, the present and, and their future. I think archaeologists in the past had not done a particularly good job in presenting sort of the two different messages. The science, you know if you spend 10 years in graduate school learning to be a scientist, it tends to dominate how you think about the world. And I'm fortunate because at the Utah Museum of Natural History we have an Indian advisory committee and in thinking about our new museum and how we might put together the displays, one of the strong directions that people are moving is to actually have the Native Americans tell their own stories for that part of our mission.

Ken Verdoia: Give me a kind of a run down or recap of how this all came to be. I heard that perhaps for as long as 10 years, Waldo Wilcox had been considering, thinking and talking about eventually selling the land. Without going into exact dates or necessarily all the complex relationships, can you give me kind of a general blueprint of how this all came to be?

Duncan Metcalfe: Yeah. I think the primary impetus behind the transfer of the lands came out of Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, which is a non-profit group in Utah and I think a lot of that harkens back to the days when Waldo was farming corn and wheat in large areas and there really was a fairly large population of deer and elk in this area. That disappeared really in the 1970's, but because of their influence, they put together a package along with Ex-Representative Hansen and then Senator Bennett that provided some congressional monies. About 4/5th of the purchase price came from the federal budget and 1/5th from the state budget and through a conservation easement they purchased this property in about 2001 and set into the congressional language was a caveat that it would move to the state when a certain percentage of the purchase price was paid by the state.

Ken Verdoia: That was a long time to keep secret because the transfer took place in 2001 and the way this burst on the scene in December of 2004 is relatively extraordinary--international coverage, live television coverage, morning news shows trying to get their satellite trucks into the area to tell the story. Why was there that quiet period between 2001 and 2004?

Duncan Metcalfe: Oh, if we'd had our druthers it would have been a quiet period for 10 years. The worst thing that happened to us, in my opinion, from an archaeological perspective was the amount of national and international attention paid to this place last summer. The only way to protect archaeological sites is to know where they are and to have a good baseline descriptive data set for each of them, and if you know that there are 15 projectile points on the site when you go onto it and there's only 2, you know 13 have disappeared. If you don't have that baseline data you walk onto the site and there's only 2 and you record it as only having had 2. So, we really tried to keep it quiet. Not secretive, but quiet. We'd given papers at professional meetings and so forth about our early work, but we're just trying to keep it out of the public eye. It went to the public eye.

Ken Verdoia: Were you surprised at the level of interest that was generated?

Duncan Metcalfe: Absolutely, and to this date, I'm not sure why it had the level of interest. I think it was a bunch of pieces coming together: The idea of a rancher protecting the archeological sites on his land for 50-60 years; the ruggedness of the terrain; the natural beauty of this particular place; and then archeologist's drooling. I think that combination is probably what generated it. But to this date, I have no idea about why it ended up in a Johannesburg paper.

Ken Verdoia: A number of years ago, almost 20 years ago, as a very young reporter, I was told by an archaeologist, "well, the simple thing about my profession is they aren't creating any more sites." And yet, it seems at a pivotal point in your career, you've been gifted this remarkable opportunity to be in this place, at this time, shepherding truly groundbreaking research with extraordinary support. This must be very, very special for Duncan Metcalfe.

Duncan Metcalfe: Absolutely. It's the coolest thing I've ever done and I suspect the most important thing I will ever do in my life. The potential for understanding the past at Range Creek. The potential for providing interpretive exhibits based upon the materials that we generate from Range Creek. The ability to begin to set up what I can imagine as the 30, 50 year research project, which I'll never see completed and likely the next person who takes it over might move it in a very different direction than I had. I never, I never expected that kind of opportunity. Typically what I do is I, when I run field schools is I'm right in front of the bulldozer. So I either excavate it or it's going to disappear and, then, next year I'm in another part of the state and the next year I'm in yet another part of the state. Here we can actually begin to think about, should this site be excavated this year or should we wait 50 years to excavate it? Clearly the majority should wait 50 years to be excavated. We can develop a very slow, deliberate research agenda here, and as you say, we've got tremendous support from our partners, from state history to Salt Lake Community College. The University has been very supportive of my activities as has the Utah Museum of Natural History, and again, as long as I can get people down into the canyon, much of the certain natural opposition to focusing so much archaeological attention to it disappears.

Ken Verdoia: Another very important aspect is the young people you're bringing into this landscape.
It's an extraordinary dynamic, at times it's almost more impressive to me to watch the human dynamic and the spirit that evolves even in this grand landscape.
Tell me your perspective on that and the importance of charging these young minds, these future archeologists.

Duncan Metcalfe: Well, it's, that's the greatest part of my job. And it's important to remember in 1977, I went to the University of Utah field school. In 1987, I was running the University field school as a professor. It changed my life, so, I expect it to change a lot of student's lives. The interesting part about it is that when we go through the applications and we pick out the pool that we're actually going to bring down here. We realize that the application is a very imperfect scale about how well they'll do or how much they'll enjoy it. Generally in a field school of 10 students, I expect 2 will go on, 2 had the worst, most miserable experience of their entire life, and the other 6 decide to actually continue in whatever majors they had started out in, so, they'll get their degree in Accounting or Physics or what have you. But to watch them interact, I mean we come into this very remote area of the state. We spend 2 months effectively living on our own here. It's, we should actually bring in cultural anthropologists to study the phenomenon of students actually, and staff working out a successful rhythm.

Ken Verdoia: When it's all said and done, and you're in front of a group making another one of your presentations, and there is someone in the back that asks, "What does this all mean to me?" What do you tell them, Duncan?

Duncan Metcalfe: Well, the Fremont were highly successful in a very hard place of the world. We're living in that same place. The Fremont began, adopted a corn agriculture, they flourished and they disappeared. And I look around the Great Salt Lake Valley today and see houses going up on the point of the mountain. I see no distinction between Sandy, Kearns and Salt Lake. You're just traveling through an area whose population is burgeoning and we live in the desert. We've built Jordanelle, we've built dams to try to capture this precious winter water that we get in the state and at some point demand for that water is going to exceed its supply. The Fremont probably faced those very same dilemmas, and understanding how they dealt with them, not technologically, but socially, I think is critical for actually how we're going to have to deal with this world, not in 10 years, 20 years or 30 years. By understanding how people make decisions, why they make the decisions that they do, then perhaps we can be much better informed in making our own decisions in the future.