USU Archaeology Field School Unearths Farming/Living Patterns

Moving people to the production, not moving production to the people, appears to be the model for ancient farming practices in southern Utah, and undergraduate students at Utah State University have completed field work that supports that claim.

"More than 10 weeks of excavation in 2001 and 2002 at three prehistoric Anasazi sites east of Kanab have revealed a variety of remains illustrating different aspects of the ancient farming culture that held sway in Utah from A.D. 500 to A.D. 1300," said Steven Simms, anthropology professor at Utah State University and head of Utah State’s archaeology field school. "The Anasazi in the area, who worked below the Vermillion Cliffs east of Kanab, are an example of farmers who have not simply settled down. They move in stops and starts. They have a number of homes and associated farm plots scattered around the landscape."

The concept is not new. It was offered several years ago by archaeologist Doug McFadden, who works for the federal Bureau of Land Management. Simms believes that work by the students in the field and the ensuing followup in the lab will confirm the practice.

"The Anasazi people of this area, a stretch of terrain from Kanab east almost to Lake Powell, had a basic ecological relationship very different from other Anasazi and from us," Simms said. "They had to move people across the landscape to the production, and they had to do it frequently because plots of farmable land were small and rainfall was very uneven across this space. This is very different from our relationship with the environment because we move the production to the people."

Simms and multiple groups of Utah State students have completed summer digs on state school lands for the past two summers. The program is part of the curriculum in the department of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology at Utah State. The excavation and a related reconnaissance of more than 2,000 acres are being done under contract with the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration.

"The Utah State group found the most exciting, well- preserved and graphic remains at the 'Vermillion Vista' site," Simms said. "The site includes 25-meter-long walls, five sunken and slab-lined corn bins and paved fire hearths. While impressive in the collective, it was really a modular kind of housing — only a single corn bin and its associated pole-, adobe- and log-covered structure were used at one time."

The site, after a brief abandonment of perhaps one to five years, was used again by the same people or their descendants, adding another module. The new units were built on the same axis as the previous — the old were often kept largely intact or simply allowed to become buried in the deserts sands.

"Perhaps a little like keeping grandpa’s room just as it was when he was alive," Simms said.

Program officials believe the Vermillion Vista site holds great educational potential for Utah. It has already provided the important, hands-on training for Utah State students, but the site can also be preserved as an outdoor museum for future generations.

"Sites like Vermillion Vista offer a tangible way to touch and feel some of the more abstract concepts that archaeology can teach, like the different relationship between the land held by ancient and modern people," Simms said. "We often marvel at prehistoric cultures, either for their fortitude and tenacity, or their ability to do things under what seem like 'primitive' conditions. But these perspectives are really more about us than about the ancient ones. They do not really tell us about them, or what the ancients have to teach us. In many ways they faced the same problems we face: finding enough water for the farms, ensuring that production remains high enough that the bad times can be weathered, managing the differences between the 'haves' and the 'have nots' and so on."

These factors are ecological issues, and exposing school children even to simple ecological relationships, such as the premise of moving people to the production versus moving the production to the people, can open a world of learning about nature, Simms concluded.

For information on the archeology field school or the anthropology program at Utah State, contact Simms at (435) 797-1277.

Contact: Steve Simms (435) 797-1277
Writer: Patrick Williams (435) 797-1354