What stone points uncovered in Idaho and tribal knowledge can tell us about early people of the Americas

Archaeologists at Oregon State University have found projectile points in Idaho that date back nearly 16,000 years — making them the oldest such artifacts found in the Americas. The points were uncovered at the Cooper’s Ferry site along the Salmon River in western Idaho. Though the land is currently held by the federal Bureau of Land Management, it’s the traditional territory of the Nez Perce Tribe and its ancestors.

OSU anthropology professor Loren Davis joins us to talk about the discovery and about what it means to fill in the region’s historical record with physical artifacts. We’ll also hear about the artifacts’ cultural significance from Nakia Williamson-Cloud, director of the Nez Perce Tribe Cultural Resources Program.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Archaeologists at Oregon State University have found sharp hunting tools in Idaho that date back nearly 16,000 years, making them the oldest such artifacts found anywhere in the Americas. The finding is one more piece of evidence to challenge the notion that the earliest humans in North America walked here over the Bering Strait land bridge. The points were uncovered at the Cooper’s Ferry Site along the Salmon River in western Idaho. The land is currently held by the Federal Bureau of Land Management, but it is the traditional territory of the Nez Perce Tribe. For more on this discovery I’m joined by OSU Anthropology professor Loren Davis, and Nakia Williamson-Cloud, the director of the Nez Perce Tribe’s Cultural Resources Program. It’s good to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Loren Davis: Yeah, thank you.

Nakia Williamson-Cloud: Thank you very much.

Miller: Loren Davis first, can you describe these projectile points?

Davis: Yeah. So when we say projectile points, what we’re really referring to are the pointy bits at the end of hunting weapons systems that are intended to be able to hunt and kill animals at a distance. And so this might be something like an arrowhead, or it could be a larger knife-like thing that’s attached to a larger shaft, and we might think of that as a spear. Or you can think of these also as things that are sort of in between, middle range sized objects that might be attached to something like a very long arrow, we call this a dart, and they can be thrown, we think, with a stick that sort of has a hook on the end.

Now we say projectile point because usually we’re trying to be a little bit neutral because we haven’t often found the wooden or bone or ivory elements that go with the rest of the technology. And we used to usually find the tips themselves. So there’s a lot of inference that happens.

These are made from stone through a process of striking it in sort of a percussive way, like a drummer percusses a drum. Or you can press off small flakes with something like a tip of an antler. You can sculpt these objects out of different kinds of rock.

Miller: And I should note that they’re actually just beautiful objects. There’s a link to your paper on our website. They’re different colors, sort of a mossy green and a reddish brown and a cream colored one. From a lay person’s perspective, they look clearly like human made tools. But you’re a scientist who can’t just rely on thinking this looks like humans made it. How do you determine that a piece of stone was human-made as opposed to just the beautiful chance of looking like a tool?

Davis: Well, in a lot of ways we want to base our understanding in the things that we know the best. And this can come from historic accounts where Europeans were in contact with native peoples, and there’s direct observations of things like the process of making stone tools and their being used. And from that information from the experts themselves, that is Indigenous peoples of the Americas, you can begin to make arguments backwards.

And then also you can look at an object and say, well yes, it’s broken. But was it broken in a way that sort of patterned that makes sense as someone was trying to achieve some outcome in terms of a technological solution to, let’s say hunting or processing plants? Because nature can also break rocks, but nature doesn’t break rocks in ways that look like the objects that we’re focusing on in this study.

Miller: Nakia Williamson-Cloud is with us as well, as I mentioned, the director of the Nez Perce Tribe’s Cultural Resources Program. We were just hearing from Loren Davis about one of the ways to learn more about the objects that are found by archaeologists or anthropologists is to talk to some of the experts, including people who have been here since time immemorial. Nakia, how would you describe the relationship that’s developed now for over more than a decade between the Nez Perce Tribe and researchers like Loren Davis?

Williamson-Cloud: I think this whole process, it was a difficult relationship in the beginning in terms of just the foundation of many of these institutions, the discipline of anthropology and archaeology, obviously put sometimes at odds with our responsibilities and how we’re accountable to the land and the resources that are part of who we are, part of our lives. And so, I think over the past year, there’s been kind of a sea change in the community, in the discipline, where the value of our oral testimony that ties us to this land, to the resources, to the archaeology that’s being studied by people such as Loren, has been verified. I think, just like with anything else in the world, when we work together and we have that collaboration and we have that mutual respect, it can bring a lot more understanding and learning about a lot of things in this world.

So basically I think for us, we’ve had a willing partner with Loren. And so it’s been a pretty good relationship in terms of the official government consultation that happens to the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, and the technical level consultation that I provided my office and the archaeologists that I also have.

The tribe also has our own archaeology crews that we field. It’s a proactive approach to engage in the discipline that historically it didn’t serve native communities such as myself

Miller: Loren Davis, what can objects like these hunting tools tell us about the people who used them?

Davis: That’s always a challenge at some level, because we’re talking about static objects. It isn’t like you can pick up a stone tool and put it to your ear and have it tell you its life history. But the things we can typically say through the archaeology process are pretty basic fundamental things, like when did someone make this? How did they make it? What material did they make it out of? And the questions about the when and the what and the how are easier for us to answer.

The deeper cultural aspects of why, or how someone might have felt about this, they’re pretty much unknowable to archaeologists when you start to talk about deep time. So that’s why we have to be careful about not expecting too much out of archaeology. We have things that we’re pretty good at, understanding things where they occur in time and space and so on, and maybe even how certain things might be made and used. But the cultural aspects and how they relate to the people themselves, I usually want to defer to the Tribe in understanding things like that.

And I have a lot to learn. I’ve been working at this a long time, but I will eternally be a student of trying to understand what people are doing in the past with these things.

Miller: So let me go back to you then, Nakia Williamson-Cloud. What does it mean to you personally that these tools have been found, and using radiocarbon dating of the animal parts that were found in the same dirt layer, that they were found to be almost 16,000 years old? What does that time mean to you?

Williamson-Cloud: Well, I guess for me, obviously there’s something to be said for objective truth. So for someone like me that has the knowledge has been passed down through our community, through the oral testimony, it’s maybe not as much of a surprise to our people, simply because we have the oral traditions that tie us to that specific place and the lineages that are currently in our reservation, we can tie to that place that that was used well up into the historic period. I think for us, it’s more illuminating for those outside of communities such as my own.

And I think it is important, because it’s part of the education process for outsiders, even people that live in the immediate area, they have no idea about the longstanding history that the Nez Perce people, the Nimíipuu, who have maintained this ongoing relationship with the land that defines our existence, and continues to define our existence in the face of much of the utter transformation of this landscape and the waterways. It’s something that we still struggle to hold on. But I think it’s an important part of the story that didn’t end when these artifacts were placed in the ground, it didn’t end during the treaty making time, it didn’t end during the 1877 war. It’s a continuum. And so I think it’s really important to be put in that broader perspective and how people understand the story of Nez Perce people such as ours, and other Native communities as well.

Miller: Loren Davis, I want to dig deeper into this issue of the time itself. What does it mean that what you found is nearly 16,000 years old, in terms of our understanding of when and how it was that humans got to the Americas?

Davis: Well of course, that’s a pretty contentious topic. You ask 10 people, you might get 10 different perspectives on it.

Miller: When you ask 10 anthropologists, you could get 10 different answers? 10 people who really know what they’re talking about, ideally?

Davis: I don’t know, it seems like people are kind of savvy about this topic sometimes, and they have their own opinions on it. But I think even within the professional community, sure, you can get a lot of different ideas.

There is of course a scientific perspective. And I just want to say it represents one way of knowing. It’s not necessarily, I would say, the only way of knowing because tribal folks have their own perspectives too. But from an archaeological point of view, all we can really say is that at Cooper’s Ferry, which is the English name for the site, we have found evidence that people were living there doing activities related very likely to hunting, around 16,000 years ago. Now, if we dig deeper in the site, we did find some other artifacts, but we weren’t able to get direct radiocarbon ages on the associated items. And so we have an expectation that there’s likely even slightly earlier evidence of people living at the site.

Now, we dig a little bit below that and we run out of sediment. There’s no more archaeological record for us to measure. So you could interpret that as what we have found the very earliest there is. But I think that that would be incorrect. It’s better to say that we can say that the record goes at least to 16,000. And it could go earlier of course. And to be able to evaluate the deeper answer of when did we first start to see people in a landscape, you have to be able to look very intensively in all kinds of different kinds of deposits, even ones that are older.

Now, the discovery that evidence at Cooper’s Ferry is important from a technical point of view. Because if your expectation is that an archaeological record is only going to go back, let’s say 13,000 or 12,000 years, professional archaeologists might get to that layer where they say “here’s the artifacts that go with 13,000,” and they may stop looking. And as a result, if you didn’t realize there’s something older to be found, you don’t keep looking, you don’t discover it. And that part of, in this case Nez Perce heritage gets lost. So we’re trying to raise awareness among professionals too that there’s a record that goes back that much farther.

Miller: Why is it that a record that goes back that much further complicates the idea that the way humans got to North America was by walking?

Davis: Well, I don’t know that we know exactly how it happened. All archaeologists can really do is make an argument based on some data points in a landscape. So if you have an archaeological site in what’s now western Idaho that’s 16,000 years ago, well then you start to look around and say what was the world like at 16,000 years? And at that time, there’s a mass of ice that’s sitting on North America the size of Canada. And these glacial ice sheets were just tremendously large, and they would have obstructed north-south movement in North America for animals and plants and people, except for perhaps on the Pacific coast. Now, what archaeologists then will generally do, and I’m in that group too of course, is that you would say, “well if we think that people might have come into the Americas at a certain time, what might be the likely corridor?”

The thing we have to be careful about again is that the view about the whole “people in the Americas issue” keeps changing. That is, it keeps getting older and older as more evidence starts coming up. So as I started out as a grad student, I was taught certain perspectives that through my own work I’ve been able to show that’s not true. It’s actually older. It might be a little different than what we thought. So as I get older and work on these projects, I realize we have to be very humble and recognize that there’s a lot we don’t know. Even though I can come up with an explanation that aligns very well with the scientific perspective, I have always have to admit that it’s not based on a tremendous amount of evidence, and we are making arguments in the end.

Miller: It is fascinating that the more you learn, the more humble you’re getting it seems like in terms of this field of study.

Davis: Well that’s the plan at least.

Miller: Nakia Williamson-Cloud, before we go I’m just curious what you hope that newer residents of this land will take away from discoveries like what Loren has been talking about?

Williamson-Cloud: So I think at this site that we call Nipéhe is a really important site that ties us to this landscape. And this landscape that has changed over tens of thousands of years has continually defined the existence of desperate people. We didn’t come to this land and implement a strategy of our own thinking. We, our elders, our ancestors interpreted what this land had to offer, and we adjusted our lives accordingly. And to this day, this is what we still try to do. And out of that relationship, the land and resources to the people, come what we know as Nez Perce culture, our language, our ways of life, ways of knowing, our laws. And this is what’s a part of our long term viability as Nez Perce people on the land. But fundamentally, these same elements of life is what all life depends on, all people that are here. And so it behooves the broader society to listen to people that have been here 16,000+ years of how we’re going to be here another 16,000 years into the future.

Miller: Nakia Williamson-Cloud and Loren Davis, thanks very much.

Williamson-Cloud: Qe’ci’yew’yew’. Thank you.

Davis: Thank you.

Miller: Nakia Williamson-Cloud is the director of the Nez Perce Tribe Cultural Resources Program. Loren Davis is a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University.

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