ENHS Nature Trails May 2000 Article 1

This month's speaker: Tom Connolly

PARENTAL INFLUENCES? Both my parents were children of North Dakota homesteaders. My dad was an amateur historian who contributed regularly to ND History (the equivalent of the Oregon Historical Quarterly), and always had stories about the places we traveled around the state: this place was the site of a battle between cavalry and Dakota Indians, that butte is where the Indians say a spirit lives, there is where Lewis and Clark camped. I grew up knowing that the land was filled with human stories that were far more ancient than those reported in U.S. history books.

WHO INFLUENCED YOU TO PURSUE STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY? I stumbled into Anthropology. I was a Sociology major in college, and had a couple of professors who encouraged me to go to graduate school. But by the time I had earned my degree, I had my fill of Sociology. At the end of my Junior year I joined an archaeological field school, and spent more of my senior year in Anthropology classes than in Sociology classes. When I went to grad school, it was in Anthropology.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO YOUR AREA OF SPECIALIZATION? I went to an archaeological field school in Minnesota in 1976, and returned as a paid assistant the following year. In 1978 worked on the field crew at the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, an archaeological project sponsored by the National Park Service and run by the University of North Dakota. This is where the five Mandan and Hidatsa villages were located, where Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-05. In the fall of '78 I began grad school, in the UO Anthropology Dept.

WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR TRAINING? My masters and Ph.D. are both from the U of Oregon.

WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO OUR TOWN? The U of Oregon.

WHAT ARE YOUR CURRENT DUTIES? I am head of the Research Division for the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology, an administrative unit of the UO Natural History Museum. Most American archaeology today is done in connection with construction and development projects, and is driven by historic preservation laws. Our research unit does archaeology for public agencies (primarily the Oregon Department of Transportation) and utilities, to help them with their compliance needs. Our unit is self-supporting, and employs five research faculty in addition to me. We work closely with the Department of Anthropology, providing employment and research opportunities for students. As with the other MNH faculty, we all occasionally teach courses through the Anthro dept.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO TALK ABOUT? Our archaeological work at the Paulina Lake site in central Oregon. From 1990 to 1993 we did archaeological work in Newberry caldera, in connection with a proposed upgrade the Paulina-East Lake Road in preparation for the caldera's recently designated National Monument status. As a result of our first two years of site testing, significant changes were made to the road design and alignment to protect archaeological sites. In 1993 we did more extensive archaeological work at sites that could not be avoided by the construction, including the Paulina Lake site. We undertook what is probably the most extensive excavation to date of any pre-Mazama-age (> ca. 7600 years) site in the Pacific Northwest. We exposed the remains of a small residential site that included the 9500 year-old remains of a tepee-like house, the oldest such feature now known in North America. We recovered an extensive tool assemblage that gives us good detail about what people were doing at the site. We recovered pollen and other botanical remains that not only provide us with information about what people were eating, but about the nature of the Early Holocene environment and subsequent changes.

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