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Under the Rock Shelf

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The handprints have become a living symbol of the work anthropology professor Greg White's summer field school has done at the Paynes Creek area near Red Bluff, to extend the record of human habitation in the region back 5,000 years or more.

Previous archaeological studies in the region had failed to date any cultural activity older than 3,500 years. Were there no people here prior to that time, or were the archaeologists simply not looking in the right places?

White had been spearheading a three-year search for answers. It was a puzzle with a large missing piece, until Paynes Creek. Part of the problem had been the rocky terrain, so unforgiving and exposed that most artifacts had been swept away.

For centuries the soil beneath the rock shelf protected a living area that has now yielded evidence of both rich indoor and outdoor use dating back 7000 years or more. Students made this discovery by first peeling careful layers of soil from an 8-foot by 10-foot trench.

Surprisingly, at the base of this trench they found the top of yet another living chamber, making this the deepest rock shelter discovery yet in Northern California.

This was an exciting moment for the school, which thrives under the auspices of the Archaeological Research Program directed by White and the Department of Anthropology at CSU, Chico. Comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, the school is funded through university and government agency grants totalling upwards of $70,000.

White's goal for the yearly field school is to join research, student potential, and government cooperation-a practical consideration that comes naturally to a man who found archeology not through books, but through field work.

White, whose lean, open face looks used to the outdoors, grew up following his engineer father around on road surveys in the Mendocino National Forest, where he helped him identify sensitive archeological sites. Hooked at a tender age, he hit the road right out of high school, tooling around in an Econoline van and offering himself as a "young whippersnapper with a good back and a lot of energy" at archeological digs.

"This was during a time when there weren't very many of us around," White laughed. Returning to school in his mid-twenties, he met mentor David Fredrickson at Sonoma State, where Fredrickson ran a program that the CSU, Chico Archaeological Research Program is modeled after. By the time White had earned his Ph.D. from UC, Davis, he was already demonstrating a propensity to make things happen, running several large projects of his own.

The archaeological field school philosophy is melded from these academic and field experiences.

"Nine out of ten students are going to get jobs with federal or state agencies, or private consulting companies that provide services for those agencies," White explained. "We give graduate and undergraduates real on-site experience that enables them to step into that job market." It's experience that is much more than just sifting for artifacts, and includes managing the entire spectrum of details for a dig, from camp chores to dealing with bureaucracies. White underscores the importance of student learning by adding that his graduate students are "paid as if they were working archaeologists."

Field school student success rate is high. Five of last year's twenty participants are now working for federal agencies full time, and five have gone into private consulting.

Research is another important aspect of the field school for White. While he admits his early love of artifacts has given way to a yen for management, he still holds great respect for archaeology itself. "It's really just a branch of anthropology," he said. And anthropology is people. People who "lived and loved, laughed and cried, just like we all do."

The record of these people is now coming to light through that eight-by-ten trench in a kind of "window of chronology," as White put it. That's because this unique spot offers evidence of such a long span of occupation, one buried beneath the next.

"We're reversing the order of deposition, essentially," White said, "pulling out the dirt in layers the same way it was laid down."

A sense of respect is inherent in such an act, where one hour of field work becomes twenty in the lab. And in keeping with this respect, discovery of human remains would, White said, close the dig.

For now, this window has revealed three phases of occupation. The earliest inhabitants who lived in large scale settlements, surviving on wholesale gathering and processing of foods such as acorns and natural bulbs, lasted, according to White, "500 years ago up to 1,500 years ago."Beginning around 500 years ago, smaller-scale extended family units emerged. "Groups were more widely distributed across the landscape, and had a broader spectrum diet, including small game."

The final stage was brief and existed, as White put it, "in the contact period," the time of fur trappers and trading posts. A time that came to an end very quickly after the Gold Rush. White lamented, "Within twenty to forty years, of course, there was massive ethnic cleansing."

To underscore the site's sensitivity, White said, "Discovery of these ancient deposits is all controlled by geomorphology and landscape level formation processes. And our understanding of the past is directly related to the preservation and storage of that past on the landscape."

That's where the experts come in-experts such as geoarchaeology specialist Frank Meyers, who helped identify the site, and policy makers at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) who will help preserve it.

White's field school received a $50,000 grant from the BLM to work at Paynes Creek, and the school in turn is assisting the BLM in nominating portions of this land for the National Register of Historic Places. A cooperative agreement, White said, that indicates how much agency priorities have shifted."

They are responding to recreation and historical values," he said, "and management of public land. Ecology is driving policy now." In fact, agencies such as the BLM are more than pleased by the school's performance and are almost "competing with each other," White added. "We're already booked for the year 2001 in our summer field school undertakings, with very, very solid funding."

Money has also come from CSU, Chico, in part from the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and also from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. "So we're really top notch in terms of our equipment," said White. This includes a dating lab in the field, two 450-watt generators, and twenty- by forty-foot barracks tents. A full kitchen services forty people, and at night students immerse themselves in archaeology via satellite lectures or slide shows.

No matter how state-of-the-art his equipment is, White never forgets his long-held connection to humanity, past and present.

"We're seeking out long-term partnerships with Native American peoples," he noted. "We talk with people who have a lot of traditional knowledge we'll never have-without going right to the source."

In addition, next session will have two fully funded positions for Native Americans interested in becoming Tribal Preservation Officers for their communities.

This connection pleases White, who said that other students in July's group included a geology professor and a Vietnam veteran, as well as several young aspiring archaeologists. "You get a group like that together and experience just happens," he said of the mix.

Each of the students in the group, he added, was touched by that rare discovery of the handprints on the rock wall below the shelf, an individual monument that speaks eloquently of the thousands of lives lived in this spot over thousands of years.

"You're seeing the direct handprint of someone who occupied this shelter, used the tools and materials we've discovered-and that puts a human face on things," said White, who understands these remains as "truly the residues of human activity and life. That to me has been in everything I do."