The Archaeology of the Wild West

From the Bonner County Daily Bee:

A hundred years away and then some, a man knelt on the east side of Sand Creek and carefully peeled back layers of time. He was part of an archaeological team that would explore Sandpoint’s original town site for the last time before it was buried and sealed forever beneath the Idaho Transportation Department’s Sand Creek Byway project. He used ever-smaller tools and brushes to unearth a tiny, heart-shaped object. An object that, once cleared of the mud and clay surrounding it, shone like gold in the sunlight.

“That’s a pretty little thing, isn’t it?” asked Bob Weaver, a historical archaeologist visiting the SWCA Archaeological Research Laboratory in the Spokane Valley. Weaver held the pendant between his thumb and forefinger and turned it in the light. After a moment, he placed it back on a table and lifted a small packet of folded paper.

“This is fragile,” he explained, unwrapping the folds. Inside was a dark metal object about the size of a thumbnail, with another, smaller piece nestled beside it. On closer inspection, both pieces were shaped like miniature turtles. Weaver turned the larger of the two over, and gently placed the smaller version into a hollowed-out cavity in its back.

“Nesting turtles,” the archaeologist said. “The Chinese made these. There were usually several of them that fit one inside the other.”

Sandpoint’s Chinatown — which Weaver described as “really just a couple of shacks” — delivered a surprisingly rich storehouse of artifacts during the dig. Broken opium lamps and ceramic pieces, toys, charms and unbroken rice bowls were recovered from what was only about a 15-year chapter of the town’s history. . . .

The scholarly value of late nineteenth-century archaeology is rather small, because you can learn so much from written records for so much less money. But sometimes objects from the ground connect us to the past in a way that words on a page cannot.