Nebraskaland

44 Nebraskaland • October 2019 L ong ago on grassy hills, a hunter stalks a deer. Wearing skins of the same animal, he loads a thin-shafted spear onto a wooden spear thrower. Rising from cover, he whips the spear into a silent, shallow arch. The stone spear point strikes a mortal wound, but the still-mobile deer bounds away never to be found. Frustrated about the loss of good meat and his prized speckled brown point, the dejected hunter heads home, belly growling. Two thousand years later, wearing a pink plaid shirt, black sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, UNL anthropology student Jodi Enders walks a narrow river's shoreline in the Nebraska Sandhills. Sweeping her eyes along the base of a cutbank she spots a thin, glossy stone edge jutting from the sand, and the hunter's spear point is once again held by human hands. The prehistoric scenario is pure imagination; the hunter could have simply dropped the point, but Jodi Enders surely was the next human to see it. This was no chance discovery. Enders spotted the artifact after walking 12 days in isolated regions of the Nebraska Sandhills with a dozen other anthropology students on a quest to find human sites lost to history. Led by archaeologists Rob Bozell and Courtney Ziska, and by UNL Professor Phil Geib, this University of Nebraska field school targeted Nebraska's little-known Snake River, which discreetly rises from underground springs 20 miles south of Gordon, winds under two remote highways and then enters the Merritt Reservoir 60 miles east. "We are trying to determine what people were doing in the Sandhills throughout human history, who they were and when they were here," Bozell said. "To understand this one needs data in the form of artifacts. Projectile points, cutting blades, hide scrapers and other tools tell stories. Arrowheads can tell you when, and pottery can be linked with certain tribes." On massive ranches like that of the Sasse family, 30 miles southeast of Gordon, Bozell and crew were the very first to conduct systematic archaeological surveys. "We found sites ranging from 1800s ranching all the way back to 10,000 years ago," he said. The older discoveries place humans here around the time when the Sandhills first became habitable after grasses took root in the once- shifting sands. Though Nebraska's Sandhills provided ample game, it was void of crucial tool-making stone. People living here would have coveted the tools they carried; acquiring more lustrous flint meant travelling far. West toward the Rockies was one option, but rich pockets of high quality stone also existed to the east. Ancient people living in what is now the Central Republican Valley, or in Cass and Sarpy counties, lived in virtual hardware stores. After thousands of years of human inhabitance, the Sandhills are heavily peppered with artifacts, but most will never be found. "In Nebraska's remote Snake River region holds remnants of ancient peoples dating back 10,000 years, but most artifacts will be hidden for eternity. in the Sandhills FINDING HISTORY STORY AND PHOTOS BY MARK HARRIS

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