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About The Columbia press. (Astoria, Or.) 1949-current | View Entire Issue (April 24, 2020)
April 24, 2020 T he C olumbia P ress 5 New artifacts suggest first people arrived in Northwest earlier than thought B y m iChelle K lAmpe Oregon State University Stone tools and other arti- facts unearthed from an ar- cheological dig at the Cooper’s Ferry site in western Idaho suggest that people lived in the area 16,000 years ago, more than a thousand years earlier than scientists previ- ously thought. The artifacts would be con- sidered among the earliest evidence of people in North America. The findings, published late last year in Science magazine, add weight to the hypothesis that initial human migration to the Americas followed a Pa- cific coastal route rather than through the opening of an inland ice-free corridor, said Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University and the study’s lead author. “The Cooper’s Ferry site is located along the Salmon Riv- er, which is a tributary of the larger Columbia River basin,” Davis said. “Early peoples moving south along the Pacif- ic coast would have encoun- tered the Columbia River as the first place below the gla- ciers where they could easily walk and paddle in to North America.” Essentially, the Columbia was the first offramp on the Pacific coast migration route, he added. The timing and position of the Cooper’s Ferry site is con- sistent with and most easily explained as the result of an early Pacific coastal migra- tion. Cooper’s Ferry, located at the confluence of Rock Creek and the lower Salmon River, is known by the Nez Perce Tribe as an ancient village site named Nipéhe. Today, the site is managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. An aerial photo of Cooper’s Fer- ry on the Salmon River, above, and lead researcher Loren Da- vis, left. At right is the dig site. Davis first began studying Cooper’s Ferry as an archae- ologist for the BLM in the 1990s. After joining the Oregon State faculty, he partnered with BLM to establish a summer archaeological field school there, bringing under- graduate and graduate stu- dents from Oregon State and elsewhere for eight weeks each summer from 2009 to 2018 to help with the research. The dig site includes two ar- eas. The published findings are about artifacts from area A. In the lower part of the area, researchers uncovered sev- eral hundred artifacts, in- cluding stone tools, charcoal, fire-cracked rock, and bone fragments likely from medi- um- to large-bodied animals, Davis said. They also found evidence of a fire hearth, a food-processing station and other pits created as part of domestic activities. Over the last two summers, the team of students and re- searchers reached the lower layers of the site, which con- tained the oldest artifacts, Davis said. He worked with a team of researchers at Oxford University, who were able to successfully radiocarbon date a number of the animal bone fragments. The results showed many ar- tifacts from the lowest layers are associated with dates in the range of 15,000 to 16,000 years old. Davis’s team also found tooth fragments from an ex- tinct form of horse known to have lived in North America at the end of the last glacial peri- od. The tooth fragments, along with the radiocarbon dating, show that Cooper’s Ferry is the oldest radiocarbon-dat- ed site in North America that includes artifacts associated with the bones of extinct ani- mals, Davis said. The oldest artifacts uncov- ered at Cooper’s Ferry are sim- ilar in form to older artifacts found in northeastern Asia, and particularly, Japan, Davis said. He is now collaborating with Japanese researchers to do further comparisons of artifacts from Japan, Russia and Cooper’s Ferry. He is also awaiting carbon-dating infor- mation from artifacts from a second dig location at the Cooper’s Ferry site. “We have 10 years’ worth of excavated artifacts and sam- ples to analyze,” Davis said. “We anticipate we’ll make other exciting discoveries.” Slowing the spread of COVID-19 In these extraordinary times, Columbia Memorial Hos- pital and its caregivers are proactively working to slow down the spread of COVID-19 in our communities. Some of these changes may affect you. R Everyone entering a CMH facility must be screened for COVID-19. R No visitors are allowed for most hospitalized patients*. R Patients may not bring a companion to appointments, except for minor or dependent patients. R Check your symptoms with a nurse. Call the CMH COVID-19 Community Hotline at 503-338-4699. * For the most recent information about the visitor policy, see columbiamemorial.org/visiting-a-patient. 2111 Exchange St., Astoria, Oregon • www.columbiamemorial.org