Since its inception in 1975, the Kansas Archeology Training Program has been bringing people together from different parts of the state and the country to dig in the dirt and make new discoveries about our area's past.

The Kansas Archeology Training Program, or KATP is a joint effort of the Kansas Anthropological Association and the Kansas Historical Society.

In 2023, the training program made a return trip to Scout Lake, a popular archeological site in western Kansas.

Welcome to Scott County State Lake.

This is a little oasis out here in the high plains.

It has been used by various people for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Here, the resources were great.

There is a lake here now that's manmade.

It's rugged territory.

But the people probably lived here because of the resources were here.

This is also the site in this area of El Cuartelejo which is the most northern and easetern Pueblo in the United States.

And that was occupied probably in the late 1600s and the first quarter of the 1700s.

So there's been a lot of digs down here.

In fact, the first Kansas Archeology Training Program of any duration was in 1975 here at Lake Scott.

This is probably the most investigated sites we now have in Kansas.

There are other universities that have dug here and also the Smithsonian.

Waldo Wedel who was the senior archeologist for many years for the Smithsonian, was a native Kansan, and he did a lot of work out here in the 1930s.

And knew stuff is always been found and the story just was chapter after chapter.

Some sites have been loaded like around the Pueblo itself.

So every time an excavation occurs out here and it's scientifically done and analyzed, there's new information.

And in some cases it's...

I always use the analogy of drilling for oil.

Sometimes you hit a well and many times you don't.

And so you don't know what's underneath the ground until you really get in and examine it.

And it's been a very good turnout out here.

Photographer Margaret Lowery enrolled in the KATP program at Scott Lake to capture the process and hear the voices of those participating.

My name is Liam Bevitt.

I have been coming to these digs since 2015.

My dad's an archeologist and I just kind of.

Followed in his footsteps.

I think the training program is a great source of experience for anybody trying to get to the field.

And so how is first day with the vibe?

Good.

The first day was good.

We did a lot of set up.

We were setting the grid, so we set those pins for the units that we're going to excavate.

And then we were also setting up like the screen location.

So where people are going to take the dirt that they've been working on and then go sift through it and find everything.

And then we also were able to actually open some units yesterday.

So we did find some things and started finding.

Lakes down, some pottery on the surface.

So all of that got collected?

Yeah, the first day first day went pretty smoothly.

Put that at, after we put it back to normal make it 35.

It's called a feature.

So there's quite a few holes now that have a feature.

Is that another rodent run?

Yes, it's a rodent run, yep.

Did you find anything?

I have a flake.

Somebody set over there and tried to make arrow points or tools, and there's a flake left from what they did.

This is Nikki Klarmann.

And how long you've been with the State Historical Society?

So I've actually been with the Historical Society for five years.

I started as the public outreach archeologist.

I replaced Virginia Wulfkuhl when she retired in 2017.

And then when Robert Hord, the former state archeologist, retired in September of 2022, I served in the interim for a couple of months, and then I was officially hired at the end of December.

Good for you.

So six months on the job, so far.

That's all right.

It counts.

It all counts.

It does.

So what was your research plan when you came out?

Right.

We had done a shovel test survey out here in 2020 trying to better define where may be the high potential areas for archeological features would be.

But we revisited the plans to come out here again.

I know that everyone had a great time when they were here in 2009.

And this site is kind of interesting because there hasn't been a ton of work done at it yet.

And our shovel test survey determined there were high areas of high likelihood for there to be archeological features.

And we wanted to further determine if the site itself is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

So we are looking to see if there were buried archeological features.

We found what I think is probably a structure.

We've got several posts.

I think we're up to five now.

We haven't found a lot of artifacts, but we have found those features themselves, which is really well exciting.

Well and that it the thing, And a lot of people are disappointed in not finding artifacts.

I mean, everybody is, archiologists or whatever.

But as we always said, they can't be everywhere.

Yeah, exactly.

And the other thing is that negative information is good, too, because we know where they weren't.

Is it complicated to get this many volunteers to.

It's a lot of planning.

You have to be very detail oriented to coordinate.

We have great partners with the Kansas Anthropological Association, a partnership that's been going on since 1975, the first field school that was here at El Cuartelejo.

So we really value that partnership with them.

To fund the program.

We apply for a historic preservation fund grant, which is a federal grant.

And the fact that we helping to determine if the site is eligible for the National Register is a big push for us to get the grant and things like that.

And people pay a small fee to be here, which helps cover other costs that might not be covered by the grant.

And it also kind of helps, you know, we want people to show up when they sign up.

It's not just a sign up.

It's like you've paid money to participate and we want to see you here.

We were excited to have you.

And the fee is higher for people who are not members of the Kansas Anthropological Association or the Kansas Historical Foundation, which is our private foundation that helps fund kind of our gallery and things like that.

But KAA often purchases equipment for us.

A lot of our equipment was purchased by them as a nonprofit, and that's been great.

That means people have tools to use.

But the KAA also has funds for research.

Oh yeah.

Because basically it used to be the old rule for every day you spent in the field, you have five days of paperwork.

Yep.

Analysis.

Has that changed?

Is it worse?

No.

There is a lot of paperwork.

The great thing that the KAA does is they have their own journal, the Kansas Anthropologist, and it's a great... Yeah, It's a great avenue to publish work, to write summaries of the projects we do to to get to the the membership who have paid their dues and want to see the journal and want to see what they found.

And the membership, even in foreign countries.

You have members in foreign countries.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We have a person here.

She's from Kansas, but she's going to college in Hungary and she's actually here for college credit.

But it's a fantastic program.

It gives people this experience to see what archeology really is about, that it's not just digging in the dirt, it's we're asking questions.

We want to learn more about people to hopefully add this site to the National Register to further protect it.

I mean, the field school itself, the fact we move kind of all around the state.

So you get to experience different types of sites and ask different kinds of questions.

And it's a lot of manpower within a very short period of time.

So you can address really targeted research questions in that amount of time.

At the core of that are the volunteers who give their time to the program.

Are you finding anything?

I know.

Yeah.

I told Norman, A while ago, Oh, you'll start finding it when I leave.

Have you found anything cool?

Yes.

Yesterday I found a scraper.

I got very excited about it and sent pictures to my kids and my husband.

So, how are you been?

Good.

Good.

Retired now.

Good for you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So.

So you come out here and work?

Yes.

Come out and get tired.

This is, you.

Know, this is our vacation.

You know, I'm just the grunt, you know?

They get me in, you know, and I dig it.

Do it.

How's your day?

Well, my unit looks really, really nice.

The best I've ever done as far as keeping the floor level.

But we've only found two little pieces of debitage so.

My name is Nadine Cheney, and I was on the first day here in 1975, and I'm over here visiting the dig that is going on now.

It's a totally different area.

than where we dug.

Any point I pick up, or scraper or pottery is important because it talks to me and we try to pick out the tribe and culture what they did with this tool.

And so it's all all very interesting.

And where they screen over here that's gonna to pick up on any chips or flakes or anything.

So I'm just enjoying the day and meeting the people, new people.

It's going pretty well.

Some flakes and some pieces of pottery.

So Norman Dye is from Mead, Kansas, down, down the southern part.

Norman's been digging on the KATPs for a lot of years.

He's an old hand at this.

He even has set up a laboratory on his place so people can use his lab, and it's furnished to do water flotation.

And there's microscopes in there.

And he offers it to any archeologist or paleontologists or anybody that's studying the history in the area.

So how long have you been with your.

My first dig I went on was 1998.

I worked for the county road department for years, and archeology was something I've always been interested in, but never got around to pursuing it.

And then when I found in 98 heard about this group of archeologists that where going to be being Meade County.

I've been doing it ever since That 1998 dig was.

There is a lot of stuff there, and a new culture that we didn't know about.

Archeologists told me I got spoiled on that one, and that was my first one.

Yeah.

No, I was going to say that would have made any difference if you had dug a site that didn't have much on it.

I doubt it.

Okay.

I've played in dirt all my life.

At least a thousand.

Even very close.

I go by zeros.

I think that's the same rodent in that rodent run.

We had we had a a darker and different type of soil here, slightly.

An intrusion that was probably created by people.

Well, it hasn't had any artifacts in it except for this chunk of burned stone here.

So it hasn't it and it's had, um, a couple of small bits, very small bits of charred material.

Discoveries in the field of the training program are brought to the temporary lab where participants clean and catalog artifacts.

My name is Christine Garst.

I prefer Chris Garst, though.

I'm an archeologist with the Kansas State Historical Society.

My particular task there is to supervise the archeology lab and coming to field schools.

In the lab I'm responsible for packing up the lab and go to wherever it's going to be held.

I have to not, just bring supplies that we need to process material.

But I also have to bring in material to work on in the opening days when the artifacts are few and far between.

But that's okay because there is the word training in our title, Kansas Archeology Training Program.

So we have really emphasized the training.

Usually I pick collections that we are currently working on and I did bring some of that this year.

I've got some collections from Cottonwood Ranch.

We were there in 2002, I believe it was, and I was a very green lab director at that point in time and I am now not at all happy with the way we cataloged that.

This one has got the number 30 on it, and it's also big.

I can just tell that from the curve and seeing hundreds of thousands of these.

This is part of a canning jar.

So we are literally re-cataloging Cottonwood Ranch artifacts in a more modern style and finding out new stuff.

And I'm encouraging that.

So we're in the lab and so some of the stuff that's coming in.

I know we talked to the people at the site and they said that things are kind of sparce.

Here in the lab where you clean stuff up or what your current interpretation of what's going on.

Okay, so it looks like a collection of dirty pebbles, but there's also some other artifacts in here that we get mildly excited about seeing.

There's a lot of chipped stone tools.

I'm here to see if I can't... and a lot of that is Smokey Hills silicified chalk.

We are finding a little bit of material from the Flint Hills, and I might have seen one piece of alibates from Texas, but across the board, the vast majority of it is little debitage flakes.

We do find a very few finished tools, a couple of scrapers, a knife, a small dart point.

And then we are finding a little bit of pottery, very, very little.

And that could be very easily overlooked.

It could be.

if it wasn't for the screening and stuff.

Yes, yes, yes.

This all came from one unit, one excavated unit that's not very far down, only 10 to 15 centimeters.

This was not a really red hot activity here.

Something was going on there, but this was not a place where they were dumping all their trash.

So it's kind of intriguing in a way to see what we can make of these little bitty pieces of information and hopefully build it up to a somewhat bigger picture.

As part of the training program, participants also have opportunities for education about the work and methods of archeology, as well as the history of the surrounding area and state.

And with the Kansas Archeology Training Program, it isn't just the excavation which you have, but you also offer classes.

And what classes did you offer this year?

This year we this year we offered a basic archeology lab class that's taught by Chris Garst, our lab archeologist.

In the lab is every bit, if not more important than fieldwork, because if we can't process the artifacts and understand what we've we've gathered, there's not really a point to why we're digging.

And then this week we are offering the archeological site Survey class.

And then we also taught a project archeology workshop.

Project archeology is a nationwide curriculum that is used to teach people about archeology, but it also incorporates math, critical thinking, things like that.

And one of the lessons is actually based on El Cuartelejo.

It's based on migration.

And so they're right there.

They were right by the Pueblo and got to go visit it.

So it was a perfect opportunity to teach that workshop as well.

Those classes vary from year to year.

Right.

We have a list that we we offer and the Kansas Anthropological Association has a certification program which is kind of like a merit based merit badge kind of idea.

But if you're gaining personally experiences, it doesn't certify you to be an archeologist, but you're learning.

And as part of that program, we offer certain classes and we try to rotate them each year of what we're teaching and things like that.

Yeah, this is a great program.

It serves hundreds of people.

Yes, we had 138 people signed up this year.

Might be more.

And that's good.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

I know we have all classes, but there's also evening programs.

Right.

Yeah, we have programs that are open to the public.

We have a great set of speakers, including you.

Cottonwood Connections host Don Rowlison has a long history with the people of the Kansas Archeology Training Program, having worked many years with the Kansas Historical Society and served as the state's public archeologist.

Don was a wealth of stories at the Kansas Historical Society.

When I came, he had already been there for many years.

He was a staff archeologist and there were a number of them.

But he really took the role of public archeologist, which now they call outreach archeologist.

And I was also in that role for a number of years after he went on to be the site administrator at Cottonwood Ranch.

He was just a very good teacher, always, and always good for a smile and and a joke.

When I when sometimes I would get a little discouraged or something like that, it was always good to talk to Don on the phone or whatever.

And because he would lift your spirits.

Could you come in and define for us what we're seeing and why?

Explain to us the history of, okay.

I can try.

You, be nice to me.

Give us a little bit of Don Rowlison history.

So one of the first times that I met Don, we were out surveying and actually how I really got acquainted with him.

Was he has this favorite thing he likes to do is he'll, you take a rock to him or an artifact that you think is an artifact.

And he'll get really excited about that and he'll look at it like, Oh, yeah, that you know what that is?

That's a leveright.

You know what leveright is the leave 'er right here?

And he put his hand behind his back and he dropped it, left it right there.

So but you got to be kind of a joke between Don and I.

And we were out surveying and then I picked up an artifact, I was pretty new, and it looked like a flag.

Took that over to Don said, here, Don, what do you think this is?

And he holds his hand out.

I put it in the palm of his hand.

I turn around and I'm snickering, thinking he's going to throw it away, leave 'er right there.

And he says, Oh, my gosh, where did you find that?

And it ended up being a base of a Clovis point.

So Don and I just built up a pretty good rapport that year, and I'd come back from surveying and during the noon break, I'd find Don sleeping like this in a wheelbarrow.

He had his hat tip down.

They're portable recliners.

That was one.

Of the memorable events that I have of Don Rowlison.

You make permanent relationships.

Yeah.

I think what's really beautiful about this program is the family aspect.

It's like we are all a family.

I've been doing it for eight years.

Are you having a good time?

Oh, yeah.

I love to dig in and I love the people.

A little bit more.

So we could not begin to do the amount of archeology that we do without our volunteer help.

Be that members of the public or KAA and also each and every one of these programs from the first one that was out here at the state park to this one has the word training.

So it's a teaching opportunity and we're all about that.

That's what Virginia's back here doing behind us.

That's what each one of my volunteer are sitting down with someone a little new sometimes and training them.

And that's a very important part of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's an incredible program.

This is, I think, the 46th year.

And so it's exciting that we get to be a part of continuing this legacy.

It is.

Yeah.

Because I know we have sometimes second generations and at times third generations.. Yeah.

Of archeology.

And it's a cross cut of people that really do something scientific work, and they can see what's being done.

They get results, and that helps the preservation of the culture and the history of the state of Kansas and even the state or even the history of the Great Plains.

Yeah.

Definitely.

And we do towards the end of the field school to kind of reward everyone, we do a big dinner and we present what we found so far.

And I met a lot of.

Really great people.

But I'll be back hopefully next year.

I've probably been with Archeology probably with this program 15 years.

at least, probably just got hooked on it.

Just said this is it.

It's what we're doing.

And so I like it.

And, you know, I'm really going back, you know, to my people, find out what they did.

Oh, how they were doing it.

It's great to have kind of all these different people from different walks of life coming and experiencing archeology.

It is, and the KAA, it's just kind of a cross cut of the Kansas population or out of state population, because I know you have doctors and lawyers and grocers and bankers and farmers.

We just want to invite everyone to join us.

We try to kind of serve all of this of the state, right, and move to different locations each year to different types of sites, so that everyone can kind of can get that experience of archeology in different ways.

We have people that have been digging for decades that are out here training people that are probably new and this is the first experience they've had in any archeology.

So that's why it is a archeology training program.

It's to train people how to do the excavation, but also it's help to communicate the preservation of all the prehistoric stuff and the history and to do it right so that we can do this and save it for in an abstract way with the records and the artifacts so it can be reanalyzed even in the future when other things are found.