One of the key features of Cottonwood Ranch historic site is how it can tell a story of settlement in the Great Plains region.

But settlement of the area did not start with European immigrants or the expansion of the railroad in the late 1800s.

In fact, the ebb and flow of people settling in the region has been going on for many thousands of years.

We know from archeological investigations that there have been people along the south fork of the Solomon River for 13,000 years.

About 45 miles southwest of the Cottonwood Ranch there was a site found in what is currently Logan County, Kansas, called the 12 Mile Creek site.

Throughout western Kansas, called the 12 Mile Creek site throughout western Kansas in the High Plains area and the short grass country.

There are a lot of eroded what are called cut banks by geomorphologists and geologists, which is where the stream of water has cut a steep bank out in the soil.

But in 1890s paleontologists and geologists from the University of Kansas were actually looking for fossils in western Kansas and in Logan County, Kansas, and north of the Smoky River, they found a site called the 12 Mile Creek site, which was very controversial at the time because they found extinct bison remains with human artifacts.

That is spear points, projectile points that killed these bison.

The projectile point was found in situ that means in place where it had been for thousands and thousands of years.

And that was controversial inasmuch as they didn't think the native Americans had been out here that early.

And also, it wasn't until the 1920s when other sites were found, such as the Clovis site and the Folsom sites farther to the south west before it was actually accepted.

But it was in a very similar environment as we're seeing this dirt bank behind us.

A cut back like this makes it very visible to the archeologists or the avocational archeologist or just somebody out looking for fossils because you can't see under the ground.

And here we have thousands of years of exposure from the oldest being at the bottom, of course, to the top.

You can see where it's cut and very steep and stuff.

But there is some stratification in there that is layers of how they were deposited.

This happened to be layers of dust and dirt that was blown in from the north after the last glaciers.

But you can now see subtle lines going horizontally across this.

These are probably different layers of soil and different areas of deposition.

They might be seasonal.

In the summertime, the the material is a lot coarser because there's more water.

And in the winter, it was all fine dust.

that was blowing.

But I'm going to trim this and to see if we can make some of the stratigraphy or the soil layers in this case look a little bit better.

As I'm trimming I'm seeing more distinct lines in here.

There's white stuff here and scraping it it's still lighter.

This is darker.

So we get the different texture of the sandy texture.

We get a fine clay.

Another sandy texture.

I'm finding little particles of shell.

stuff called caliche where a root channel has gone down.

This is caliche.

This is lime that, if there was grass on or some time and there's a lot of lime in the soil sent to go in root channels.

So these were probably surface layers for a short time in the past, but the thicker layers are probably summer layers.

The finer layers are probably winter layers.

And in this are little black marks, which is charcoal from some burned debris from the past.

And so that can be dated by today's scientific techniques.

So we could get a index soil line somewhere and have that dated.

We would then be able to get a relative date if we found artifacts or humanly modified animal bones in here where they butchered, which would be an archeological site that we would certainly be very interested in.

These are throughout the Northwestern part of the state in these banks, because we have the deep soil.

The people were out here early on and there's been a lot of changes.

So look closely, look into it.

And also in these there could be large animal bones.

They might be on the on the slope on the down side, but look at the bank and see if there's anything coming out, particularly a certain soil level.

Also, you could find white spots, which is nothing more than a ash that was in there.

But you could also find maybe dark sections of soil that had little rocks and a little pebbles like flint chips.

Pieces of pottery.

Usually in the high plains The topsoil layer is the dark layer on top And what some of the soil people say that if everything is just right in the short grass prairie, that is the buffalo grass, that the soil will basically only grow one inch every hundred years.

So if you find something six inches deep, there's a possibility at that time it's that it's never been plowed and hasn't had severe erosion that that might be 600 years old.

So when you get two feet deep, we might be talking 2400 years old, but not always because it depends on a lot of variables, but it takes a professional to really be able to analyze and figure it out.

But there are treasure chests and so they are very important to look at and very important to report them so we can increase our scientific knowledge of the area and of the past and also the archeological knowledge Fossils will be in here.

In this it wouldn't surprise me some time that it would expose the remains of a camel in here because they were humpless camels, but they developed in North America or bones of a horse or even something as large as a mammoth or mastodon in these.

When the first people came to North America, it was like the early, well, even currently now, of space exploration.

There was some place another world where the animals were different.

You knew nothing about it.

No people there.

And so it was all brand new.

And so they came in.

They had the technique to Chip Stone.

Today we have the pleasure of having Rob Thompson, who lives about 40 miles from away here in Grinnell, who has collected artifacts, both prehistoric and probably some of the historic material made from the native stone.

And today he's going to talk about the native stone and the process of chipping this stone into usable tools.

What this is, is this is the native material that actually was found.

And what they had done is, you can see that they had these great big scalps that were taken out and they would have taken a hammer stone like this and they would have hit it down and it would have knocked off a flake that looks somewhere similar to like this.

And at this point, they could have actually used it as a tool itself because it was very sharp after after the tool itself would have been dulled.

They would have taken an antler and they could have pressure flaked and made it sharp to where it's now actually like a serration.

What they also could have done is once they get a big chunk taken off of here, they could have reduced it with another hammer stone and created what they call a bi-face.

Bi-face meaning that it was actually flaked on both sides.

But what they would have done as well was reduce this down to a smaller what we call a preform.

Now, this is kind of a pre form.

It has a similar shape to it.

Again, as you can see that there's flaking on both sides and then from here, it would have been much easier to get down to the final point as a projectile point.

This is an ax.

I'm sure there is a specific name to this ax.

Chip stone ax.

Chip Stone ax And yes, it would be hafted around the top with a handle on it.

Right.

The interesting fact on this one is if you look at the back side of it, I believe this one was not finished.

It's interesting to think back.

Why did they stop?

Well, sometimes we think that they probably stopped because there's a flaw in rock that you couldn't see and there might be a microscopic crack in it.

Or they were interrupted possibly.

That's right.

The kids came and jumped on their back and said, hey, dad, you know, so... Sure.

One important thing is if you're at all interested in hunting artifacts, one of the most important thing is to do is have permission of the landowner permission.

You know, I don't recommend going on public land, state land, game land, anything like that.

And you're right with it because there is a law, a federal law that you do not go on public land as in city, county, state or federal.

So do not go to a lake and think you're going to find it.

Pick up arrowheads along the shore because the public land, this stuff belongs to the public and they don't want one person stealing from the rest of the public.

So with flint knapping, there's actually a couple of different types of flint knapping that we have.

We have the what we'll say the olded dat flint knapping.

They call it the aboriginal flint knapping, That's where they use nothing but hammer stones, pecking stones, and pressure flackers with native material that they get out of the wild.

I, again, I'm self-taught and I am a modern knapper.

So with modern day knapping, I use a lot of copper.

Copper's soft.

It grabs hold of the material and it takes it off where the, the, the Aboriginal style, they just use stone and then they'll use their, their antler for, for flaking.

I actually have done both.

I prefer the modern day knapping just because that's how I taught myself.

But I do use hammer stones as well.

So what we're going to do is we're going to take the raw material.

I'm going to take a piece off of here and then we'll knap it down Always a good idea to have a set of gloves and eye protection.

Also, not a bad idea if you're going to be knapping to knap with either a fan or in the open so that you're not breathing the dust that is produced from knapping.

So what we're going to do is we're going to take the raw material and what we're going to do is study the material.

And on this particular rock, I can see an imaginary line right here.

It's right through the center.

We're going to call that our center line.

And we're going to look at these these hills and these valleys.

And so as I come across here, I see that there's a chip already taking out of here.

And so that's below my center line.

So I know that if I hit in this way with my hammer stone that that's going to produce a pressure wave and knock a flake off the bottom of it.

I'm going to attempt to use the hammer stone.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to get a good angle, or I come down here to try to get a good pressure wave to knock this piece off.

Some tough stuff.

Here we go.

So what I'm going to do now is take off.

And this is a very, very sharp edge.

I'm just going to take off that sharp edge And again, there's cortex here on this All right.

Let's try the bopper again.

I'm just looking at my center line, trying to get a good platform to hit down.

This is a 90 degree angle.

That's a very tough to do.

There we go.

So what we can do now is that's very, very sharp.

In fact, if you look I could cut right into there.

And as you can see, that's very sharp.

So we can actually take this piece now and make a point out of that.

So this is where the indirect percussion comes from.

So here's my center line right in the center of that.

So everything down, I'm going to flake.

Abrading it takes those sharp edges off and everything that has what we call the platform.

You see that?

I'm going to put my copper tool right here and I'm going to flake that off and you can see here where it chipped a little piece off.

You see how that one took a nice big chunk out of there.

And I broke it.

But we can still save it.

What I'm doing now is I'm just kind of getting this back into a triangular shape.

And as you can see, it's starting to get a little bit of a shape to a point.

You know, those great big, beautiful points that you see in museums.

Great big spear points.

It takes a long time to make one of those What the archeologists feel that there might have been, from historic accounts and other things, maybe an arrowhead maker in the village that was basically a business.

So what I'll do now is I'll use my pressure flanker.

This area here is below my center line.

So I'm going to put pressure here.

I'm going to push in and push down again and see that little flake right there.

So you're pressed on the top and it comes off the bottom.

So, yeah, well, actually, not really on the top.

On the edge.

I'm pushing in to force the pressure in, and then I'm coming down Now, this is what we call an ishi stick.

This is designed to get actually a larger flake.

This is a pretty small piece of it may not work very well.

And those master knappers that created some of those amazing Folsom points, they are artisans for sure.

There we go.

We're getting the shape And what this is, is just taking tiny, tiny little flakes off I have spent an hour alone before just pressure flaking and sharpening.

And that's kind of a kind of a finish point So, Don, you know, I have been asked time and time again what was the driving factor of of taking stone and making a projectile point?

There's almost a magic to it.

When you go, I know for me, anyway, when you go out and you look for artifacts that very first time you stumble across a projectile point and you pick that up and you look at it and you think, how in the world did they go from this to this to this to get that out of there?

Or to think when you when you when you pick that up out of the dirt, when's the last time that was touched by human hands?

If a significant number of artifacts are found in a concentrated location, it may merit deeper archeological examination, such as with the Albert Bell site located a few miles from Cottonwood Ranch.

This was a site where a house site was dug along a creek called Museum Creek.

These people lived here, well, about a thousand years ago, basically.

They were hunters and gatherers, but also horticulturists.

They grew corn, beans and squash.

To learn more, we visited with Tod Bevitt in the Kansas Historical Society archeology lab.

Tod, an archeologist and owner of Buried Past Consulting, is analyzing the Albert Bell artifacts on behalf of the Kansas Anthropological Association.

As far as the Albert Bell site, it had been excavated in 1990 and 2002.

The Kansas Anthropological Association, who I kind of came up in the ranks of as a as a young person they had sought somebody else out to research this collection and finish writing it up in order to provide the results of these years of work that they had done.

Which is very important not just to go out and dig up the stuff but to then synthesize it and provide some information to, to other interested folks about what was going on out there.

So the folks at the Albert Bell site are part of what we call the Central Plains tradition, and it's kind of broke down to different phases regionally.

Smokey Hill phase, upper Republican phase, It was a peaceful time for these people called Upper Republican, and they were probably ancestral Pawnee.

These folks basically were all Plains Village folks.

They they settled in isolated farmsteads, homesteads along small creeks, usually kind of an extended village pattern.

So everybody kind of knew knew their neighbors and everything, so to speak.

This was probably had three houses on it.

And these structures were fairly lightweight, not real heavy.

They would be called earth lodges.

Or maybe mud lodges.

They would be thatched.

You'd have the whole structure, usually like a willow pole or something fairly flexible and lightweight.

And over that then you would have grass, thatch and then usually plastered with mud.

That's what some of this material is.

And when it's when it's plastered on, it kind of molds into the pattern of whatever it's being plastered up against.

So you get little linear patterns of poles or sticks or grass impressions and then if that structure then burns, it becomes a low fired ceramic kind of like pottery, only It's just the remnant of that wall material.

One part of the site was a midden area where there was quite a bit of bone material that was found.

And in that bone material you think of animal remains.

Sometimes they're very easy to identify because they're still relatively complete.

But at Albert Bell, the lot of it was butchered up, broken up bone that they were processing for marrow extraction or for boiling down for bone grease.

These are these are parts of probably bison bone.

You know, they were in an environment where you didn't let a lot go to waste, probably.

But we did recover at least one scapula hoe that was pretty much intact from the site, which was very interesting.

And it was found just maybe four to eight inches below the ground surface.

This this is just an example of a of a bison shoulder blade or scapula.

These were very important items for folks like the folks at Albert Bell because they did do some gardening activities.

We have some evidence of corn, possibly sunflower and maybe some other items that they were encouraging to grow.

And so they would make hoes from scapula like this.

They would reduce it by cutting off this portion.

They would cut down some of the sides of it.

And trim it down to something that was a more compact unit.

These folks during the Plains Village period, the ceramics are a very important thing, not just for cooking, but also for storage of grains or other other other products.

And so this is something that we see in that period of time and maybe a little bit earlier in time as well.

But ceramics are a fairly late introduction to to life out on the planes.

These are a couple of examples of pottery from the Central Plains traditions.

Albert Bell would have been part of that tradition of life, just as an example of what you would expect to see kind of small, small to medium sized kind of globular shape vessels.

Usually they have this roughening on the outside cause, you know, from from helping to create and paddle the surface.

You have kind of a cord wrapped paddle that you're doing that with as part of the process of of of forming and shaping the vessel.

Usually we don't find whole pots when we're in sites, so we're finding just pieces and parts.

So you have a lot of material that's usually broken up.

And so sometimes if you find enough of it, you can reconstruct what the vessel looked like.

But a lot of times we're just left with, you know, a part of a pot.

So just maybe the rim.

And sometimes they're decorated and sometimes not.

These folks, if they're building making pottery and stuff, they'd probably staying in one place for a while because you're not going to load up a lot of ceramic vessels in and head down the trail for very far So this is another indication of that longevity of the settlement.

There was a material called Smoky Hill Jasper that's available out of the chalks, the Niobrara chalks out in the northwest Kansas.

This is stone and it's called the official name for it is Niobrarite.

It's also called Smoky Hill Jasper.

This would make a very good stone tool for arrowheads, spear points, scrapers, and knives to skin the animals.

This was this was their steel.

And they would use that to make pretty much any any items that they needed.

They would use it to make small thumbnail scrapers for processing bison hides or other hides.

They would use it to make their arrow points.

They would use it to make perforators such as little little drills or even awls for maybe perforating hides.

These folks probably lived here at this location for a number of years, mostly with, you know, sedentary.

They they didn't roam the plains hunting, hunting bison up and down the plains.

That was more of a late convention when you had the introduction of the horse, you know, late in the late 18th century or so, So with archeology and experimental archeology of trying to replicate what happened in this bank, it might be a treasure of paleontological stuff, that is dead animals or archeological stuff that is only related to the past activities of the humans.

People have lived here for thousands of years, in fact, in the vicinity, in the Studley vacinity there are prehistoric archeological sites, even on the Cottonwood Ranch there's been artifacts, prehistoric artifacts found, as well as historic Indian artifacts.

If you would find some, please contact the State Historical Society or one of the universities whether it's paleontology or archeology or anything.

and report it so that these things will be preserved and we can learn more about the pre-history of northwestern Kansas, the Central Plains, and even the Great Plains and even America on the peopling and even the Great Plains and even America on the people and the settlement of this whole area.