A hole in the ground was a window into time, and researchers found what may be the only pottery firing pit ever discovered on the Missouri River.
Tests must confirm what archaeologists suspect after probing the remains of a 500-year-old fire pit that was revealed by 2009 flooding on the Knife River.
The blackened remains were found in the bank after the flood waters receded.
Last week, a team of archaeologists and students from the University of North Dakota and the Midwest Archaeological Center in Nebraska unearthed the layer and found more than they expected.
“It’s an awesome find,” said Brian McCutchen, superintendent of Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, where the river is digging into an old earth lodge village site identified in previous archaeological digs.
It appears that rather than a simple ancient fire hearth, the blackened layer could be where Hidatsa women dug out a concave area to build a hot fire, piling pottery to harden the clay on the glowing coals.
The find was made just in the nick of time. The weakened river bank continues to slough off into the water.
The scientific excavation is part of an emergency mitigation so that archaeological information can be retrieved before future flooding takes it away forever.
Kacy Hollenback, a doctorate degree student from the University of Arizona, is at Knife River as part of doctoral work on Hidatsa pottery.
Hollenback said the concave shape of the pit and the condition of the pottery found in the ash layer are reasonably strong clues.
She said the researchers’ educated guess will be confirmed by analyzing the pottery, a core sample of the fire remains and the temperature of the fire.
“I was super excited,” she said, when word of the archaeologists’ find reached the park headquarters less than a mile down the road.
She said it’s impossible to determine the original size of the possible firing pit, but it looks like more of it has been lost to the river than remains.
Her specific area of study is the change in pottery after the smallpox epidemic of the 1830s, when the oldest, most experienced Hidatsa potters, along with their young apprentices, were killed by the disease.
This pit predates smallpox by at least 300 years.
Jay Sturdevant, archaeologist with the National Park Service at the Midwest Archaeological Center, said confirmation of a firing pit would have significance.
“It would be one of the only instances of prehistoric pottery manufacturing in the Northern Plains,” he said.
However, it’s too soon to know. It may be that all that was found was a broken pot left on a cooking fire hundreds of years ago.
Hollenback said that’s the lure of archaeology.
“We’re never done,” she said. “There’s always more to learn.”
Source: Bismarck Tribune