SUNRISE – A group of high school students are spending their summer searching for clues into the lives of some of the first people who used this region.
Students from Torrington, Lingle-Fort Laramie, Wheatland and Crawford, Neb., schools are interning at the Powars II Project archeological site in the virtually-abandoned town of Sunrise. They’re helping the archeologists who’ve been studying the site for more than three decades as they search for artifacts from Paleo-Indian groups who once utilized the area for mining, tool making and more some 13,500 years ago or more.
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SUNRISE – A group of high school students are spending their summer searching for clues into the lives of some of the first people who used this region.
Students from Torrington, Lingle-Fort Laramie, Wheatland and Crawford, Neb., schools are interning at the Powars II Project archeological site in the virtually-abandoned town of Sunrise. They’re helping the archeologists who’ve been studying the site for more than three decades as they search for artifacts from Paleo-Indian groups who once utilized the area for mining, tool making and more some 13,500 years ago or more.
“All of this is pretty important,” said Jenny Mathus, 16, of Torrington. Mathus, who attends Lingle-Fort Laramie High School, is in her third year with the internship program, working as a crew chief with three other high school students under her.
“I make sure the work gets done, that we don’t miss any artifacts,” Mathus said Wednesday, June 15. “Usually, I know what’s going on. But, if I don’t, we hang on to a piece and ask George.”
“George” is George Zeimens, a former Wyoming State Archeologist and director of the Western History Center in Lingle. He’s been working on the Powars II site and overseeing the internship program for more than 30 years. On this particular day, Zeimens and his young assistants were working in two very different locations on an approximately 40-acre site surrounding Sunrise proper and the now-defunct iron mine which supported the town for decades.
Oldest mine
The Sunrise site is part of a much larger string of hills and valleys known as the Hartville Uplift, reaching from Guernsey north to the Lusk area. The Uplift is dotted with scores of former villages, camps and more from the Paleo-Indian era and later, Zeimens said. It’s one of the richest collections of archeological sites in the Americas.
There were actually two activities simultaneously at the Sunrise/Powars II site 13,500 years ago, he said. The Paleo-Indians groups who used the area dug chert, a strong, sedimentary rock – sometimes called flint – which can be shaped and used for tools. They used those tools to mine red ochre, a type of soft iron valued as a preservative, adornment and for ceremonial uses by the indigenous peoples.
“This is a quarry site for chert,” Zeimens said, working with Manus and her group in the old town of Sunrise proper, below the mine. “They were digging it to use for tools. Most of the tools at the red ochre mine would have come out of this site.”
The red ochre mine is the oldest mining enterprise in North America, Zeimens said. The value of that history isn’t lost on the high schoolers who are working there this summer.
“The mystery of this place is we really don’t know what they did here,” said Gabe Plante, 15, of Wheatland. “We’re digging down to find the layers, what the Paleo-Indians were doing here. We’re looking at the stratifications.”
Most of what Manus, Plante and the other interns are doing is carefully removing thin layers of soil and running it through screens, hunting for the sometimes-tiny chips and flakes of chert left behind from the tool-making process, known as knapping. They also find larger pieces, perhaps failed or abandoned tools, which carry the tell-tale marks of the knapping process.