- We're standing on the overlook at trapper's point, just west of Pinedale.

- Humans and pronghorn have been interacting with each other on this exact spot on the landscape for at least 8000 years.

Behind me is a small hill that was designated as an archeological site in 1986.

And the then Wyoming highway department was contemplating building a new alignment of US 191.

Between Pinedale and Daniel Junction, and they asked us to come out and take a preliminary look at that new alignment.

So we initiated a test excavation program to simply find out what was there, and what we immediately starting finding hundreds of chipping debris, flaking debris, butchered antelope or prong horn bone.

Fire cracked rock, many different types of tools such as knives, projectile points, scrapers.

And what's sitting in front of me are some examples of the types of materials we found in the Trappers point site.

First I have a small assemblage here of antelope remains.

but what you see here is what your typical prong horn carcass would look like.

Throughout excavation, there were numerous carcasses of prong horn remains found.

It looked like a jumble of the bones you see here in front of you.

- In compliance with the national historic preservation act, we were evaluating what might be adversely impacted by the proposed construction.

This site turns out to be the oldest antelope kill processing area that's known in the state of Wyoming.

As the sediments were preserved on the lee side of the hill, we found three different cultural layers, the oldest of which was about 7200 years ago.

The second one was about 5500 years ago, and the top one was about 4300 years ago.

Filled with butchered antelope bone.

What we were able to determine as well is that antelope, which we saw plenty of while we were out here excavating, used this ridge as part of a migration corridor.

- One of the unique things about trapper's point is that it occurs in the middle of a migration bottleneck, and what's interesting about this bottleneck is that it's naturally occurring.

It's essentially a one mile wide by one mile long sage brush ridge that connects the winter ranges of thousands of ungulates in the green river basin with their summer ranges in the northern part of the green river basin, and the mountains of northwest Wyoming.

Seeing prong horn on the side of the highway, is an every day occurrence.

We're used to it, we associate prong horn with Wyoming.

But it's rare that we really have the perspective to look at prong horn across a huge landscape and to understand their movements, both contemporary, on a seasonal basis, and through prehistory.

It's clear from excavations at the trapper's point site that I assume people living 6000 years ago here in Wyoming thought seeing prong horn was pretty pedestrian as well.

But they had this much larger landscape view of where those prong horn were going on a seasonal basis, could predict where they might be on the landscape, and really capitalize on that.

We know they were at that particular site to intercept those prong horn as they were migrating, and would take advantage of that aggregation of prong horn.

So some of what we learn from excavating these sites in a sense sure we knew prong horn were out here in Wyoming.

And we've recently documented those migration roots, but it really gives us an insight into how people of the past understood this landscape and their relationship with the prong horn.

And we were able to demonstrate the antiquity of that route and I think starting to get a very multlidisciplinary approach in terms of broad termed landscape use, long term landscape use, and really adding to the knowledge both of prong horn behavior and human behavior in the process.

- People could have sat up on the ridge, maybe up here, maybe down a little bit lower, simply waited for small groups of animals to come by.

Dispatch them with maybe a throwing stick or in later times, a bow and arrow.

And then brought them to the top of the hill, butchered and processed them, for future use.

To butcher and process so many prong horn carcasses probably took hours if not days.

This would have been a major source of food for these populations.

They would have spent quite a bit of time butchering and preparing the meat from these prong horn animals to be consumed there at the site, and probably later through their travels as well.

- From a contemporary wildlife management perspective, archeological work that's been done at trapper's point is really fascinating because it has shown us that these animals have migrating through this bottleneck for five six or 7000 years.

And that's really interesting because these migration routes are culturally transmitted.

That is they're learned from mother to offspring, and passed on from generation to generation.

So the fact that this migration could go on through millennia is really interesting.

And this site here demonstrated that this corridor has actually been in use for thousands upon thousands of years.

And that the people who have lived here long before we did, had very sophisticated knowledge of the landscape.

For me this was very much of a game changer.

In terms of how I started looking at the archeological record of what we can learn from it.

How we can start approaching landscape use.

- Trapper's point is used by thousands of prong horn and mule deer.

The prong horn that migrate through there migrate anywhere from 20 to 100 miles.

The furthest of those prong horn make it all the way to grand teton national park.

at least on the national forest.

Based on years of radio telemetry studies, it's become clear how important trapper's point is for thousands of migratory prong horn.

And mule deer.

And because that area is bisected by us highway 191, wildlife vehicle collisions began to increase as traffic volumes increased, which became a problem for both mule deer and prong horn.

- It was a killing field out here with the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of vehicles, trucks, passenger cars, some loss of life, human life, as well as loss of prong horn.

And we tried several different things in terms of warning systems to get people to slow down.

To be aware that there were animals on the road, particularly during the migration periods.

None of which worked pretty well, we weren't seeing any particular success.

- So to mitigate that issue, in 2012, the Wyoming department of transportation took on a really progressive and cutting edge wildlife crossing structure program.

Where they installed two wildlife overpasses, and six wildlife underpasses in a 12 mile stretch of that highway, that encompassed trapper's point.

- With a great deal of input, with a lot of data about where we were getting our most collisions, where the most dangerous spots were.

Of course this particular area with the world's neatest archeological site on it was elected for an overpass as one of the primary migration routes.

Based upon our old test excavations and also additional ones that we did 20 some odd years later, we were able to determine that that particular location had very minimal archeological deposits because it has been very eroded and blown and there was not the same type of cultural remains as on that hilltop.

Designed the bridge so that animals cannot see over the top of it as they're walking across it.

A truly multidisciplinary project along this wildlife corridor that it starts off with overpass where we have essentially recreated the hillslope that antelope would have been using to cross before the highway was down cut into that ridge.

The other critical element in all of this, are you see the wildlife fencing that goes into all of that.

And also funneling animals to the underpasses.

For really close to 15 miles along this stretch of 191.

- We monitored those wildlife structures, those crossing structures for three years after construction, and we found those structure were used nearly 85,000 times.

60,000 mule deer crossings, 25,000 prong horn crossings.

What was interesting there was the species specific differences.

Mule deer deer tend to move underneath the highway, but prong horn not surprisingly really preferred the overpasses, and more than 90% of those 25,000 prong horn crossings were on the overpasses.

The construction of overpasses and underpasses in and around trapper's point has effectively reduced wildlife vehicle collisions by more than 80% So it's been a win win, a win for wildlife, and also has improved highway safety for motorists.

deer and prong horn.

- I think the success of the wildlife crossing structures at trapper's point has served as a model for not only Wyoming but for other parts of the west in areas that have issues with wildlife vehicle collisions.

it was a really neat neat project in that here we have the archeological data, that we know is going on, being used to address a modern transportation problem and a modern safety issue, that we were able to bring the public, bring many different agencies and bring all our different expertise into the area, and to solving the problem.

And at the same time, preserving the archeological site and helping restore some natural landscape movements so, in that respect, this is one of the major contributions of the national historic preservation act in Wyoming.

And it demonstrates how the past and the future can work together.

- For many people who will be driving down this highway, you'll just think its another highway, and there happens to be some kind of funky overpass going on top of it.

What that really indicates is that humans and prong horn have been interacting with each other on this exact spot on the landscape for at least 8000 years, and perhaps even longer.

And hopefully we will continue to be interacting between humans and prong horn on this landscape for many many thousands of years to come.

(light music) to fruition.

Trapper's point was first identified because of highway construction.

At the site itself, we not only learned something unique about the past, we found an amazing archeological site that tells us something about how folks here in Wyoming six 8000 years ago planned their subsistence activities, how they utilized their landscapes, but in a sense we also rediscovered something in a sense we already knew.

It took contemporary biologists, zoologists, and ecologists an enormous amount of work to recognize and document that there was a prong horn migration corridor running right through this area.

When we excavated the site, it became very clear that the occupants of Wyoming 6000, 8000, maybe even 10,000 years ago already knew that.

They knew exactly where to put themselves on the landscape to intercept those prong horn.

So sometimes what we learn through section 106 is new material about the past, and sometimes we rediscover something humanity already knew.

And that we can appreciate in a new way.

(light music)