Time Team America: Range Creek

This week's Time Team America takes us to Range Creek, Utah, a remote canyon southeast of Salt Lake City, in the pinyon and sagebrush region known as the Great Basin. Range Creek is famous for its virtually untouched Fremont culture sites—pithouse villages, granaries, middens, and rock art sites dated ~AD 600-1400.

Fremont Culture Rock Art at Range Creek. Photo by Dr. Julie Schablitsky

Range Creek, which you may have seen featured in Smithsonian magazine or National Geographic or Archaeology magazine, is a 4,000-acre ranch in the Great Basin of Utah. Landowner Waldo Wilcox sold the ranch to the Trust for Public Lands in 2002 for a cool $2.5 million. Range Creek is right in the heart of the basin and range region settled by the Fremont culture, and Wilcox had kept its archaeological treasures protected. When archaeologists led by Duncan Metcalfe of the University of Utah finally got a whack at Range Creek, they found a virtually pristine labspace for studying the Fremont culture.

The Fremont culture is a fascinating story of adaptation. They first moved into the Great Basin probably from New Mexico about 500 AD and successfully followed a combined maize-bean-squash agriculture with hunting and gathering subsistence. For some 800 years they succeeded, with the help of irrigation ditches, to successfully farm the Great Basin despite arid and stormy climatic conditions. The reasons for their end are still debated, but definitely the climate change called the "Medieval Little Ice Age" was part of the equation.

Time Team America and the Fremont

The PBS program airing July 29, 2009, illustrates the fabulous scenery in Range Creek, while giving us a bird's eye view of the archaeological ruins. An introduction to Fremont is woven throughout the program, including a detailed discussion of the Pilling collection of Fremont figurines, by Renee Barlow of the College of Eastern Utah Museum.

Fremont Figurines from Pilling Collection. Photo by Markarian421

Other topics addressed in the program include types of storage by Metcalfe, pollen analysis from Linda Scott Cummings, and experimental recreation of an adobe-walled granary by Time Team members.

The geofizz technology used in this episode of Time Team America is demonstrably useful—unlike, it must be said, some of the earlier programs. This time, magnetometry successfully identifies subsurface features, including a trash pit (what archaeologists call a "midden" and what geophysicist Meg Watters spots as a "humic layer" in the program) and a earthen-walled pit house. Used for the first time by TTA here is laser scanning imagery, providing a detailed image of the Fremont rock art, and a three-dimensional plan of the Big Village site in Range Creek. That's pretty cool: I'd love to spend more time with those images.

TIME TEAM AMERICA digging team member Jeff Brown descends into a cliff-side granary left intact by the Fremont Indians 1,000 years ago.
Photo Credit: Doug Brazil

Also useful is a latter-day Walden Pond confession by Time Team member Joe Watkins, who describes how he built and lived nine months in a pit house in Taos Valley in 1975, and what it taught him. Ah, to be young and adventurous!

Experts in on the program this week include Metcalfe, Barlow and Cummings, rock art specialist Polly Schaasfma and Utah state archaeologist Kevin Jones. The program airs Wednesday, July 29th, 2009. Check local listings.

• Time Team America: Range Creek, at PBS where you'll be able to watch the program on July 30, 2009
• Resources for Range Creek, related websites and additional information
• Fremont Culture, summary of current research with a brief bibliography
• Time Team at About.com, everything on the Time Team program on About.com to date