by Cristina Rojas August 10, 2022 Share

Growing up, Portland State anthropology major Cory Martinez remembers taking family trips to the Eugene-Springfield area to visit his grandma. On the drives down, he often wondered about the people who had come long before him. In a full-circle moment, Martinez got to put shovel to dirt this summer on a prairie just 20 miles south of Springfield, looking for traces of the past as part of archaeological fieldwork.

"It's really satisfying to be able to sit here, dig shovel test probes and maybe find something cool," he said after a day out in the field.

Martinez is an undergraduate intern on the Willamette Valley Historical Ecology Project, a project that brings together students, staff and faculty from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland State, University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde.

The project's focus is two-fold: train students in archaeology and cultural resource management through field, lab and classwork; and gather new information on archaeology, human-water dynamics and cultural resource management issues in the Willamette Valley that could help inform future environmental restoration and heritage preservation efforts in the region.

"We would like to build something long-term to create a pipeline for training and educating archaeologists while getting them to do useful work for us," said Molly Casperson, an archaeologist with the Army Corps' Portland District, the project's funder.

The need for more students trained to work in cultural resource management is pressing, said Shelby Anderson, an associate professor of anthropology at PSU and a co-lead of the project. A project like this helps increase and diversify the pipeline of students interested in pursuing these types of careers by providing them with paid hands-on training in fieldwork, post-field analysis and curation, report preparation, as well as outreach and educational experience.

"This is what helps them be better professionals and move up the career ladder from student to professional, from field tech to crew lead, and so on," she said.

Beginning in January, the group of PSU students — six undergraduate and four graduate — got a crash course in Willamette Valley ecology, archaeology and Indigenous landscape relationships. They then created outreach materials and exhibits to share out at the Archaeology Roadshow, an event now in its 10th year designed to excite the public about archaeology and heritage activities. Student projects included a card game with native plants of the Willamette Valley, a pamphlet on the various laws and practices surrounding amateur collecting in Oregon, a zine exploring the diverse uses of the native plant wapato, and a story map showing landscape changes at the Fern Ridge Reservoir near Eugene. This summer, the group shifted their focus to fieldwork.

The team spent the better part of two weeks at an Army Corps-managed site near Dorena Dam, one of 13 dams in the Willamette Valley. It's believed to have been the winter encampment of Chief Halotish of the Yoncalla Kalapuya tribe in the 1850s before tribes were forcibly removed to the reservations. The stream would have run right alongside it, but it was diverted decades ago for the construction of the dam.

The fieldwork, combined with radiocarbon and spatial analysis of settlements, will help the team answer a few of their research questions about how people organized themselves in relationship to water across the landscape. But it also has a practical purpose.

"The Army Corps manages this habitat as a wet prairie," Casperson said. "When they're mowing or if they want to expand it and cut down trees and do a bunch of ground disturbance, if Chief Halotish's camp was actually there, we would want to be very careful about doing anything that would disturb it."

Over several days, the group dug dozens of test holes measuring about 30 by 30 by 50 centimeters to try to delineate the site's boundaries. Working in pairs or groups of three, one person dug through the layers of soil and shoveled dirt onto a wire mesh screen, while the other shook the screen and sifted through the dirt searching for artifacts.

"We're taking note of everything like the soil composition, but we're also looking for any materials that may have been used by Indigenous people to make tools," said Chloe Clark, a senior environmental studies major.

Among their finds were stone flakes from tools, aqua glass and square nails. Once they refilled the hole, they moved on to the next. Any artifacts they found were then brought back to the Museum of Natural and Cultural History's lab to be cleaned, cataloged and preserved for the public.

Jaime Kennedy, director of the museum's archaeological research division, said the team will conduct research on the items as well as the environmental and cultural background of the areas; use GIS to map the sites where they dug and the soil types; prepare items for curation; and write technical reports.

"They'll get a chance to go behind-the-scenes of what happens after you go out into the field," she said. "Regardless of whether we can answer all the research questions we set out to answer, there's still utility in everything that we're doing. I never had an opportunity like this as an undergrad and I would've welcomed it."

Clark, who recently has taken an interest in hydrology, said she jumped at the chance to participate in the internship because it let her stay in Portland and get time outside. She said her days out in the field have given her a lot to think about what career path she might want to take — and making connections with people from the Army Corps and museum has been a big plus.

"The thing I've enjoyed the most is working with so many people from different backgrounds," she said. "I didn't know there was so much to archaeology and that you can be involved in so many ways at the local, state and federal levels."

For Nate Jereb, a graduate student in anthropology, the project was an opportunity for him to engage in an interesting research project and help him hone in on a thesis topic. 

"This is a cool project and I think we can do something interesting with it," he said. "It's one of the fun parts about this job — getting to go to interesting places, meeting interesting people and getting their perspectives on things."