How Long Were Indians in the Ola Valley?
Jim Fennell 2011
The Indians and the topsoil appear to show up in the Ola Valley at the same time. That’s interesting because topsoil can be dated. The near simultaneous arrival gives the impression that the Indians were lurking nearby waiting for the topsoil to get here. I’ll have to leave it to people smarter than me to determine if there is any truth to this idea. I wrote the bottom line first. The rest of the story of a hole in the ground is a presentation of the evidence from that hole and my interpretation that leads me to believe the Indians and the topsoil arrived together.
The Test Hole
The decision to dig in my yard was easy. When Pat and I began building our house here in 1978 we had no idea that we were locating it in the middle of an ancient Indian camp. But over the last thirty-three years we have picked up 2,000 or more chips, flakes and artifacts within a hundred feet of our house. I choose a place that looked like it would be out of the way, staked out a three by twelve foot area for a test hole, and started digging and screening.
I am not an amateur archaeologist and I am not an artifact collector. Nevertheless, I do value the prehistory of Idaho, and I don’t want to see it lost. I wish there was an abundance of well funded scientists who could research places like the Ola Valley. Reality seems to be that there are few archeologists, little money for research and a lot of powerful competition for that money, and everything is strangled by a morass of regulations. I’m not crazy about shoveling, but the situation was that of the three billion people on the planet either I started shoveling or it wouldn’t get done. I should emphasize that I used the word shovel. If you have the picture of a scientist with a trowel and a brush excavating artifacts that are located with a GPS before being recorded with precision, let me assure you that my methods fell far short of real science. My hope was that with my crude shovel methods I might learn enough to interest the real scientists.
1,000 Pieces of Camp Debris by Four Feet
I’ll attempt a rough description of the material that came out of the test hole. (See the sandwich bags in the photo to the left.) Before I do that I need to point out that this was not a pristine site. We had 
never plowed or dug on this spot. But I had hardly started digging before I found a bone buried by one of my dogs years ago. My hole cut across a mole burrow that was about eight inches below the surface. I came out one morning and found that the mole had dumped two five gallon buckets from the burrow into my test hole. A few weeks later the mole dumped three wheelbarrow’s of debris into the test home. At eighteen inches below the surface, I found a tiny fragment of yellow plastic In the quarter inch screen.
The picture on the left would have been more impressive if I had emptied all of the sandwich bags on the floor. The problem with that is that I would have had to pick them all up.
The 1,000 pieces are approximately:75% chips and flakes, 25% fragments and artifacts. There are also a number of river rocks that were carried into the site. Most of these have been broken.
The artifacts found are in order of occurrence: Knives, Gravers, Spoke shaves, and other things in tiny numbers.
The stones used to make the artifacts were: Basalt, Obsidian, Jasper, and Opal
Photos of Some Special Pieces
The arrowhead below is thin, delicate, and chipped with such precision that it looks more like a piece of jewelry than a tool.
The next photo is of an opal knife found near the arrowhead above.
The next photo is of a tiny fragment of pottery dug up 42 inches below the surface, near the arrowhead and opal knife. It is thin and delicate and made with such skill that it is hard to believe. It was made by hand, and smoothed with a smooth stone. Using a 30x magnifier I can see striations from the smoothing stone. It was then pit fired. This piece seems so unlikely that it stimulates contaminated site theories. It is less than an inch long. Details are lost in the 
photograph. But after studying it under magnification, I am impressed. This was a thing of beauty, the work of a master craftsman.
Hunting and gathering societies were people who had to carry their belonging from place to place. Pottery was too heavy for the hunting and gathering people to carry. This piece was left here long before Indians had horses. It may be thousands of years old. It seems possible that it came here from far away.
Four Organic Items Fond in the Test Hole
1. Grass roots—where the organic matter in the soil ends the artifacts end also. Organic matter in soil will eventually break down leaving only carbon, but the fact that the artifacts end at the bottom of the topsoil suggests the topsoil dates back to the end of the ice age. As I pointed out earlier, topsoil can be dated. I would love to have an accurate date for the bottom layer of topsoil here. Below the soil that contains organic material, what I call topsoil, there is only clay. When dry the clay is like a brick. Screening is impossible. When moist the clay is so clingy it is also impossible. Days of trying to continue the test hole on down in the clay have led only to frustration, no chips, artifacts or imported river rocks.
2. A small clump of something that may be dung that has white hairs in it. Found at about 50 inches down, the clay zone. The main suspect for contamination is the mole. 
You can see plant fibers in the picture but you can’t see the hairs. I used a 30x magnifier to see the hair. I was watching for hair because hair is something that can last a long time. I was attempting to screen clay when I found this. But because the line between the topsoil and clay is more of a transition zone than a precise line it was a bit unclear. I encountered the same confusion with the next item pictured below. Finding two soft items that may have come from clay leaves me thinking that clay may preserve soft items that the topsoil wont preserve. Topsoil is more acidic and contains more oxygen.
3. A small fossilized bone from 50 inches below the surface. This piece probably came from the clay environment. 
It looks like the breast bone of a bird. There are many features visible with magnification that are lost in the picture. Magnified it looks like stone. I don’t have a scale for measuring the specific gravity, but it feels light. My impression is that this is a semi-fossil, that is it is partly fossilized and partly still bone.
4. Bits of charcoal. I wondered while digging this hole why I didn’t seen any charcoal, and I suspected my vision. Then a nephew named Lars Wells came for a weekend visit. He wanted to try screening with me. I was cleaning out the bottom of the four foot level. Lars is a young guy in his mid forties with good color vision. I had mentioned charcoal to him. He had hardly started screening when he held up a tiny piece of something and said that it looked like charcoal. He crushed it between his fingers and sure enough it was charcoal. In the next couple hours he found a few more tiny pieces of charcoal. I have them in a small plastic box. The value of this charcoal is limited. It has been contaminated by human touch and by being stored in a plastic box. There is only a tiny bit of it. It likely has no value other than proving that there is charcoal in tiny bits 48 inches down if the searcher has keen vision.
Why are there tiny bits of charcoal in the soil? This is wildfire country. Wildfires leave tiny bits of charcoal in their wake. If the fires started soon after the end of the ice age, the sites that were collecting layers of soil may include periodic layers of tiny pieces of charcoal. The charcoal I have came from the bottom of the top soil, it suggests fire returned as soon as the grass returned. The stratified sites may contain a history of fire in the Ola Valley. The occasional microscopic layers of charcoal may be useful for studying fire, dating artifacts or correlating events between camp sites. There is charcoal in the ground but you need something more precise than a shovel, a quarter inch screen and a color blind screener to find it. The charcoal record in the soil may extend back to the ice age. It is serendipitous that the history of fire and the history on ancient people in Idaho can be studied simultaneously.
Why are there tiny bits of charcoal in the soil? This is wildfire country. Wildfires leave tiny bits of charcoal in their wake. If the fires started soon after the end of the ice age, the sites that were collecting layers of soil may include periodic layers of tiny pieces of charcoal. The charcoal I have came from the bottom of the top soil, it suggests fire returned as soon as the grass returned. The stratified sites may contain a history of fire in the Ola Valley. The occasional microscopic layers of charcoal may be useful for studying fire, dating artifacts or correlating events between camp sites. There is charcoal in the ground but you need something more precise than a shovel, a quarter inch screen and a color blind screener to find it. The charcoal record in the soil may extend back to the ice age. It is serendipitous that the history of fire and the history on ancient people in Idaho can be studied simultaneously.
Everything Happened at Four feet Down
· I became aware that my theory of old soil had collapsed.
· The topsoil ended at four feet down below that there is only clay. There is a confusing transition zone of a few inches between topsoil and clay.
· The artifacts—chips, flakes, fragments, tools and river rocks left by people—ended. Days of trying to screen the clay below the topsoil have produced no chips, artifacts or imported river rocks.
The old soil theory collapsed at four feet. I had found artifacts to a depth of four feet. I knew that it was unrealistic to think the people who left the artifacts could have been here longer than ten thousand years. So if four feet of topsoil had developed in ten thousand years, then in 100,000 years there should have been at least forty feet of topsoil. There certainly isn’t forty feet of soil at this location. Something was missing.
I had to ask why the topsoil grows to see what had happened. The surface of the place where the test hole is isn’t flat. It is inclined at least fifteen degrees. Soil could wash in at the top but what was there to keep it from washing out the bottom end of the site? The answer is grass roots. That is an enlightening realization. During the ice age it was too cold for grass to grow here. There was frost heaving in the winter and more rain in the summer. Erosion ruled. Any topsoil that was here before the ice age quickly eroded away and there was no grass in the summer for more topsoil to grow.
The clay is resistant to erosion. There were mountain glaciers on the West Mountains twenty miles to the north. There were possibly, perhaps even likely, ice damns and glacial floods as the ice age ended. But nothing as puny as a flood could wash that sticky clay away.
As the ice age ended, the grass returned to the Ola Valley. The valley was hospitable to human life and people showed up as soon as the grass roots did. That is why there are artifacts end at the bottom of the topsoil. The age of the topsoil is probably a record of how long people have lived in the Ola Valley.
About the depth of the topsoil: If the surface of the ground at this site had been steeper there would have been less topsoil on this spot. If the slop of the surface had been flatter the depth of the topsoil would have been greater. The dept of the topsoil isn’t what is interesting. The fascinating part is the age of the topsoil at the bottom of the topsoil layer.
That’s my theoretical explanation for what I saw. Fortunately it is a testable theory.
How Long were the Indians in The Ola Valley?
Pat and I have a spear point that a backhoe dug up when we built our house. Three archeologists have each said that it is at least five thousand years old. Spear points chipped in this style were used between 5,000 and 6,500 years ago. We have one piece of evidence that Indians were in the valley by at least 5,000 year ago. Clovis points that were used between 9,500 and 10,500 years ago have been found within fifty miles of the valley. Were Clovis people in the valley? The answer to that question probably depends on how long ago the grass began to grow in the valley after the ice age.
