Stone-Age Rock Quarry Hidden In Cascades

MOUNT VERNON, Skagit County - They left clues wherever they lived, but in thousands of acres of high mountains, glaciers, rivers, lakes and streams, signs of the people who lived in the North Cascades 7,600 years ago are difficult to find.

So Bob Mierendorf and his crew of scientists spend more than two weeks every month in the North Cascades National Park scraping away soil 10 centimeters at a time, looking for arrowheads, stone tools and other relics of prehistoric man.

While much has been learned about early man in what is now Washington state, few Stone-Age sites have been discovered in the North Cascades, where leviathan ice walls 5,000 feet high ground jagged mountain peaks down to high, rounded hills.

The vast area and hard winters make finding and excavating sites in the park and surrounding Ross Lake and Lake Chelan national recreation areas a formidable job.

But Mierendorf and others have found signs of the people who were here before the white man: Indian camps hundreds of years old, wall paintings and thousands of stone tools - and pieces of stone tools.

Mostly pieces.

``I would say the most numerous artifacts we've found would be the flakes from sharpening and making stone tools,'' he said.

In one place in the national park complex, the flakes are so numerous that visitors frequently are distracted by the multitude of stones, nearly all of them bearing the distinctive, spiraling fractures

and sharp edges that identify them as being the work of man.

The place is a Stone-Age rock quarry, a source of raw materials for the flint miners of prehistoric North America, who had the skills to convert the stone into effective weapons and tools.

Mierendorf said excavations at the quarry have yielded man-made stone flakes all the way to bedrock, about three feet deep.

The depth of artifacts tells archaeologists that people used the quarry for hundreds of years.

No finished tools have yet been discovered at the quarry, Mierendorf said, leading him to speculate that people visited the site periodically to gather pieces to carry with them back to their homes.

Even though all the sites Mierendorf and his team study are within the North Cascades National Park boundary, Mierendorf asked that this story and accompanying photos not reveal their locations.

The reason for Mierendorf's caution is simple: He fears the sites will be overrun with non-scientists eager to find an arrowhead to keep as a memento or to sell.

``Unfortunately, one of my duties as park archaeologist is to protect these sites as well as to study them,'' he said. ``There is a black market for these types of things.''

More common, however, is the destruction caused by people who do not understand how much is lost when an artifact is taken from a site, he said.

At the scene of an excavation, Mierendorf's four-member crew was at work excavating a test-pit in an area where some artifacts were seen on the surface.

The work can be tedious and difficult.

``The `Indiana Jones' image is not to be taken seriously,'' Mierendorf said. ``No one would find it a very good movie if they portrayed what it is we really do. It's 90 percent paperwork, 9 percent creativity in developing solutions to problems and 1 percent logic.''

The loosened soil is swept into a dustpan and dumped into a bucket before being poured onto a screen suspended beneath a tripod.

There, one of the scientists shakes the tray until all the smaller soil particles have fallen through the quarter-inch screen.

One remarkable find was the discovery of a carved soapstone pipe bowl, found in 27 pieces in an area 10 yards square. Using Elmer's Glue, the crew was able to reconstruct more than three-quarters of the pipe bowl.

Since ash from a volcano that erupted 3,500 years ago was found below the broken pipe, Mierendorf was able to conclude the pipe was broken after that time.

The oldest artifacts discovered in the park so far are 7,600 years old - thousands of years before people began working with metal or building cities.

As Mierendorf continues his work studying the artifacts he and his crew uncover, an important part of his work is meeting with other Park Service officials to develop showcases for the materials.

``We have a responsibility to the taxpayers who ultimately pay for all this work,'' Mierendorf said. ``The challenge is taking these results and making it relevant to the public today.

``I guess one purpose of archaeology is to bring some of the knowledge we gain from the past and make our lives better today. Unfortunately, that's easy to say, hard to do.''