"Archaeologists for a day" dig up shards of history

By Jim Downing
Seattle Times staff reporter

JAMES BRANAMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Neil Abson, 5, left, and brother Trevor, 7, work together to sift through dirt, looking for artifacts related to subsistence activities — hunting, gathering, trading — of the Northwest's native cultures.

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Trevor and Neil Abson, ages 7 and 5, clearly like to play in the dirt. At the Burke Museum's Archaeology Day yesterday, the Seattle brothers shook the two-person sieve so hard they almost fell over.

But that roughhousing had a purpose.

"Tailbones!" Trevor shouted, picking from the sieve a thimble's worth of what looked like mouse vertebrae.

He had found some of the hundreds of plant, animal and handicraft artifacts buried in a big bin of dirt on the museum's front steps.

Robin Goldberg, the museum's archaeology outreach coordinator, along with volunteers from the University of Washington community, had set the stage for the discovery.

They had buried actual artifacts from the museum's education collection in 30 wheelbarrows of soil. The bin was divided into sections, each containing artifacts related to a subsistence activity common to native cultures in Western Washington: fishing, shellfish gathering, plant gathering, hunting and trading.

	JAMES BRANAMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Trevor Abson, 7, digs for "artifacts" placed in dirt outside the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington.

"Everyone gets to be an archaeologist for a day," said Goldberg.

Every October, the Burke hosts a hands-on day of archaeology as part of Washington Archaeology Month. Last year's theme was "Mummy Madness," featuring the first appearance in 12 years of the museum's mummy, Nellie.

This year the focus shifted from the afterlife to staying alive, with artifacts and exhibits on native survival skills.

All day long, the aspiring archaeologists took to a section of the bin with trowel and bucket. Their task was to figure out what activity was represented in their section of the dirt bin. They dug up mussel shells, dog femurs and the shoulder blades of harbor seals.

Children then took their finds into the museum, where graduate students and curators were ready with samples of bones, rocks, seeds and beads to help make positive identifications.

Trevor Abson shopped around the tables, comparing his "tailbones" with the samples.

"Those do look like tailbones," said Stephanie Jolivette, a graduate student in archaeology sitting in front of a dozen shoeboxes of animal bones. "But why don't you take a look at some of those seeds down there."

Yes, seeds — evidence, perhaps, of plant-gathering activity. Trevor had his match.

Other special displays around the museum were designed to bring home the idea that in archaeology, it's not so much what you find as where you find it and what's lying all around.

"The message we're trying to get across is that context is much more important than the artifact itself — the context is what really tells the story," Goldberg said.

"So we encourage kids to not pick up artifacts they might find in the forest," but instead to leave discoveries in the field and report the findings to an archaeologist.

The artifacts hidden in the dirt in front of the museum were largely, in fact, casualties of insufficient context, Goldberg said. When eager relic-hunters pick something up in the woods and bring it into the Burke, it almost always ends up as an educational tool rather than contributing to archaeological science.

Without data painstakingly collected from where an artifact was found, it's difficult for archaeologists to learn much from the find.

In the stone-tools area, Mick White, 5, from Edmonds, seemed to have already internalized the importance of context.

"What volcano did those come out of?" he asked, as graduate student Jacob Fisher worked a disk of obsidian with an antler, popping off fine scallops of stone to make a serrated edge.

The obsidian was from the Glass Buttes in Oregon, it turns out.

At closing time, as the last of the day's 400-plus visitors wandered out of the museum, Goldberg and a half-dozen student volunteers pondered how to deal with their big bin of soil. It was, after all, still full of artifacts that had escaped the junior archaeologists' fingers and trowels.

After a moment's hesitation, they set themselves to archaeology's ubiquitous chore: screening stuff out of dirt.

Jim Downing: 206-515-5627 or jdowning@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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