Karl Puckett

kpuckett@greatfallstribune.com

Site is located in vicinity of Malta on BLM land.

Two burns were conducted to expose cultural features hidden in native grasses.

More than 2,300 newly cultural features have been documented so far,

MALTA, Mont. – Situated on a ridge with views of the Little Rocky Mountains and the Milk River, rocks are curiously positioned in a straight line leading to a circle of rocks 1.5 to 2 meters in diameter.

A thousand years ago or thereabouts, said Josh Chase, Hi-Line archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management, somebody moved those rocks to create a place to fast and seek visions.

In its own right, the vision quest structure is historically significant.

But it is just one of thousands of newly recorded cultural features the agency has discovered on 600 to 800 acres of rolling prairie in the vicinity of this northeastern Montana community that are illuminating how people hunted, worshiped and lived 800 to 1,000 years ago.

Even artwork remains in the form of rocks positioned to look like people and animals.

“There’s really no site like this anywhere on the Northern Plains,” Chase said.

It’s the extreme diversity and density of the cultural features, all in one large connected landscape, that makes the location stand out from other prehistoric archaeology sites, Chase said.

Rocks, many of them brown quartzite, are abundant in the glacial till deposited by glacial ice, and Native Americans moved them into lines, circles, piles and shapes for practical and spiritual purposes.

The site is entirely on public land but inaccessible because it’s surrounded by private land used for ranching. The owners of that land are a big factor in the preservation of the site because they share an appreciation for the area’s history, Chase said.

The agency wants to one day make the site accessible to the public after the culture features are properly interpreted.

“It’s the history of the United States, right?” said Chase, standing on the edge of the vision quest site and explaining the importance of the cultural features here, adding, “Without places like this, a country loses its identity.”

In the past, the BLM completed limited study of some of the area’s most prominent individual features. It’s designated as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern because of the cultural resources.

But the agency did not have an inkling of its scope until it employed an unusual combination of fire and 21st Century unmanned aircraft technology to expose and document evidence of prehistoric life hidden in the area’s native grasses.

“It’s not just a site or a collection of sites,” Chase said. “It’s a landscape.”

First, a 650-acre prescribed fire was set last year.

It was the first time a prescribed burn was deliberately set over a known cultural site, Chase said.

With the mixed-grass prairie laid bare by fire, the largest number of cultural features Chase had ever seen in one location in his archaeological career were revealed including lines of rocks called drive lines used by Native Americans to steer bison over ridges where they could be injured and killed.

Circles of rocks indicating teepee rings were exposed. Human and animal effigies and vision quest sites situated at high vantage points with views of the expansive landscape turned up.

The work also documented several additional bison jumps.

“All this was obscured by vegetation,” Chase said.

Then a drone was launched — flying above the black ground — and the newly exposed rocks taking photos of thousands of cultural features and triangulating the locations.

It also was the first time the BLM used an unmanned aircraft to document cultural resources on the northern plains, Chase said.

That allowed the BLM to piece the individual features together and create 3D models of what turned out to be a much larger archaelogical landscape than previously believed.

All told, 2,400 unknown features were recorded on 300 acres, or one feature per 3 to 5 feet of ground.

“Which is exceedingly rare,” Chase said of the density.

On Easter Sunday this year, another 300 to 350 acres were burned, revealing additional features that are now being recorded. A fixed-wing aircraft flew over the area to photograph those additional discoveries earlier this week.

“There’s a leg. Another leg. Body,” said Chase as he walked around the rock-shaped outline of a person, or human effigy, which also has three small wings on the head that look like a head dress.

Since the work began, what appears to be four additional human effigies have been discovered.

Two effigies were documented previously.

Effigies are rocks positioned in a way to represent people or animals, and they’re spiritual in nature, Chase said. One effigy at the site resembles a turtle.

“A thousand years ago, you’re not going to do that unless it’s for a reason,” Chase said.

The BLM became aware of the site in the 1970s after it was looted for projectiles used to kill bison. A cursory analysis was conducted of prominent effigies.

It’s called the Henry Smith site after an area homesteader.

Chase proposed additional analysis in 2010 and consulted with tribes in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas and the Montana State Historic Preservation Office.

Two bison jumps previously were documented, with one of them studied in the late 1980s.

Drive lines discovered from the recent work alludes to the possibility of an additional six bison jumps.

“There’s a rib fragment right there,” said Chase at an exposed area of a hillside that revealed layers of bison bone like a cake.

White bone stuck out of 20 feet of brown deposition preserving hundreds of years of history, with each layer representing a different bison kill event.

“You would have events stacked on events,” Chase said.

Previous carbon dating conducted on the bison bones dates the site to 800 to 1,000 years old, and it was in use for several hundred years for different purposes including habitation, bison hunting and spiritual reasons.

Bison kill sites are often envisioned as cliffs over which animals plunge to their death, Chase said.

However, at the majority of bison kill sites, including Henry Smith, Native Americans drove bison along drive lines to ridges or coulees, not cliffs. With hundreds of animals running at full speed, a few would break their legs causing a pileup that allowed people stationed on the ridges to finish the job.

“Imagine running a full herd of buffalo through that full tilt,” Chase said pointing to a ridge leading into a coulee.

Today, those draws probably are not as severe as they once were because of erosion. And they also are filled with hundreds of years of bison carcasses and bones.

Nearby sites where bison were processed after they were killed are indicated by fire-cracked rock that remains at the site. It is called fire-cracked rock because the rocks were used around fires and cracked.

Rocks in other areas are positioned in circles in places with inspiring views, indicating they were constructed for vision quests.

Archeologists sometimes need to use their imagination in studying cultural features, but this is not one of those sites, Chase said.

The easily visible rock features also represent a unique connection to the past that doesn’t require an excavation to appreciate.

“You’re standing in a tepee ring and know somebody was there a thousand years ago,” Chase said.

He picked up a rock and ran his finger across a “bulb of percussion.” That’s a distinctive bulb that occurs on a flake of a rock that was detached from a larger rock after being struck. The lithics, or culturally modified rocks, are sure signs that people were making tools here.

“That’s a tool,” Chase said as he walked across the black landscape, picking up a flat stone with worn edges that appeared to have been used for scraping, probably bison hides.

It is not surprising people used the site a thousand years ago, Chase said.

Besides the bison, Chase said, “You have water. You have good cover. You have good grass.”

Those are the same attributes that make the area attractive for cattle ranching today.

Between 2010, when the project first was proposed, and 2015, when it began, drone technology advanced. That prompted the BLM to use one to record prehistoric rock formations. Recording thousands of specific locations from the ground would have taken forever, Chase said, and the birds-eye view revealed the bigger picture.

Use of the prescribed fire and drones represents a shift in archaeology away from invasive techniques, such as excavation, at sensitive sites, Chase said.

“This is just a different project for us because we’re burning for a different reason,” said Scott Meneely, a BLM fire operations specialist.

Usually, prescribed fires are set for the benefit of wildlife or the landscape, Meneely said. In this case, fire was used to discover what was hidden under the grass.

“Can you imagine being back in those days?” Meneely said as he drove to the site, passing a buck pronghorn standing on a ridge burned black. “Some of these rocks are very impressive.”

Fire can harm cultural resources, Chase said. But this project has shown that, used in the right way in the right place, it can be a positive tool. As the fires burned, temperatures of 1,300 degrees were recorded on the surface for 15 to 30 seconds. That caused a rise in temperature of 2 degrees under the surface, but the fire wasn’t hot or long enough to harm the features.

It is likely that human remains are located at the site, but none have been identified and wouldn’t be disturbed if they were found, Chase said.

One high bench area seems to be associated with bison kills and spiritual features such as effigies and vision quest sites.

Teepee rings found at another bench across a coulee from the other indicates activities associated with everyday life.

Studying the area on a landscape level, with the aid of prescribed fire and a drone, helped Chase develop that hypothesis.

“You have to open the door and see what’s outside, and that’s really what we’ve done here I think,” he said.

Follow Karl Puckett on Twitter @GFTrib_KPuckett.

What’s next

The Montana Archaeological Society will hold its 59th annual meeting at the Hampton Inn in Great Falls April 15 to April 17, and Josh Chase, an archeologist with the BLM, will present a paper on new findings at the Henry Smith site near Malta Saturday, April 16. Presentations occur throughout the day. Go to http://www.mtarchaeologicalsociety.org/ for more information.