BYU archaeologists excavate 1,000 year old Fremont Village at the south end of Utah Lake in Utah County.
Named the Wolf Site, after the property owner, this Fremont village site dates to AD 1100. The site is relatively large and contains a mixture of adobe wall square house structures and round pithouse structures as well as adobe lined fire pits, fish and mammal bones, ancient corn, arrow points, arrow shaft straightener, shell beads groundstone, and pottery fragments.
The ancient village is situated on a series of low hills surrounding streams and valleys, currently (and probably anciently) used for farming. Other than a few artifacts scattered on the ground surface and an occasional differentiation in vegetation, very few clues suggest the extensive amount of subsurface remnants of an ancient village.
Archaeologists believe that the Fremont culture occurred much of northern Utah and are contemporary with the Anasazi of the four comers areas. The Fremont were farmers of corn, beans, and squash, but also supplemented their diet with number of wild plants and animals; at the Wolf Site, this included fish from Utah Lake.
The field school students spend ten hours a day, five days a week learning how to conduct archaeological excavation, mapping, note taking, photography, and other skills. They have also called on the expertise of soil scientist to try and find the location of ancient corn fields. The soil scientist took samples around the site and will run carbon isotope analysis to determine the presence or absence of ancient corn.
The BYU archaeology fieldschool will be excavating at the Wolf Village site until June 15, 2010.
Additional Information:
The Utah Statewide Archaeological Society will meet in their annual convention this weekend, June 11-13 in Salt Lake City.
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