U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIORBUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT
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2008 Events

  • 2008 Cody Field Office Cultural Site Stewards.

    2008 Wyoming Site Stewardship Program
    BLM, Cody Field Office partnering with BLM, State Office, the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, the Shoshone National Forest, and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center conducted Site Stewardship training in May of 2008. The program was aimed at engaging the local public to assist in monitoring at risk cultural resources. CYFO targeted the Oregon Basin Petroglyph Site for monitoring. Volunteers were educated in monitoring procedures, preservation ethics, and safety.

2007 Events

  • Work continued on the Bighorn Basin Rockshelter Project, which is a systematic cultural resource inventory of the Paint Rock Canyon Archaeological Landscape District in the Worland Field Office. This project is an effort to relocate previously recorded rock shelters and identify previously unknown rock shelters to record their current condition. This project was expanded into the White Creek Canyon system with 64 additional rock shelters identified so far.
  • Worland Field Office also continued work on the Westside Irrigation District Land Conveyance Project, including American Indian Tribal Consultation and an inventory of the 16,500 acres to be transferred in accordance with Public Law 106-405 approved on November 9, 2000. 
  • Newcastle Field Office continued work on a traveling rock art exhibit which will answer common public questions, such as how rock art is made, what rock art styles are in Wyoming, what is the oldest rock art, what the images mean, and how we can protect rock art.
  • Casper Field Office garnered $48,000 from 1610 to conduct a landscape-level project which should complete the Cedar Ridge Sensitivity Model effort initiated in 2003.  In addition, CFO received $30,000 from 1310 to complete cultural resource inventory work at the Cedar Ridge site. 
  • BLM was a co-organizer for the annual interagency Island in the Plains conference on Black Hills history and archaeology.  Approximately 100 professionals and members of the public participated in the event.
  • Kemmerer Field Office negotiated a final ARPA settlement with the JR Broadbent Company concerning damages to a prehistoric site impacted by unauthorized range development project in 2006.  Subsequent excavation and mitigation of effect is in progress.  This will include recovery of radiocarbon and float samples from features and recovery of temporally diagnostic artifacts.
  • Rawlins Field Office completed the Atlantic Rim Programmatic Agreement for adverse effects to historic trails within the Atlantic Rim EIS area. This agreement was negotiated among several companies, landowners, interested parties, the SHPO and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
  • Lander Field Office finished reconstruction of the Sparhawk Cabin roof on Green Mountain. Several Wyoming Congressional Award Council members volunteered on the project. 

Legend Rock

Neffra Matthews, BLM NSTC, conducting photogrammetry at Legend Rock.
Neffra Matthews, BLM NSTC, conducting photogrammetry at Legend Rock. The images were used to create a digital 3-D model of the site to facilitate recordation of the petroglyph panels.

University of Wyoming & Wyoming Archaeological Society workers conducting excavations at the site during the 2007 field season.
University of Wyoming & Wyoming Archaeological Society workers conducting excavations at the site during the 2007 field season.

An interagency partnership between BLM, Wyoming State Parks and the University of Wyoming developed and implemented management actions at Legend Rock Petroglyph Site. The site is a mixed ownership locality with State, BLM and private lands included within the National Register of Historic Properties. Recent vandalism prompted the effort, which also includes Cultural Heritage Imaging, Inc., Buffalo Bill Historical Center and the Wyoming Archaeological Society.

State lands at Legend Rock receive the highest volume of visitor use and the most vandalism, so this year’s recordation and documentation effort was focused on that portion of the site. BLM staff conducted precision land survey and photogrammetry which facilitated recordation and excavation activities. All petroglyphs panels were photographed and documented and the excavations preceded conversion of an existing road into an accessible interpretive trail.

All graffiti that was not included in the site recordation in 1988 was removed by a rock art conservator, returning the site to its 1988 condition. The pre-1988 graffiti was not removed due to the historical nature of some of the names and the fact that the graffiti has been incorporated into educational efforts at the site.

This project is being used by the BLM National Science and Technology Center to develop new methods to record resources like rock art in both two and three dimensional aspects.  Based on the work conducted this year, the amount of time required on site by specialists is being dramatically reduced. Preliminary results of the project have already been presented at professional conferences in Billings, MT and Topeka, KS.

University of Wyoming & Wyoming Archaeological Society workers conducting excavations at the site during the 2007 field season.
University of Wyoming & Wyoming Archaeological Society workers conducting excavations at the site during the 2007 field season.

Tom Noble, BLM NSTC, presenting preliminary results at the American Rock Art Research Association meeting in Billings, MT.
Tom Noble, BLM NSTC, presenting preliminary results at the American Rock Art Research Association meeting in Billings, MT.

Newcastle Field Office

Professor Rick Weathermon (right) and student Andrew Woodhouse devised a tall rod for mapping logs hidden behind young junipers that grew up after the last use of the trap in the 1800s.
Professor Rick Weathermon (right) and student Andrew Woodhouse devised a tall rod for mapping logs hidden behind young junipers that grew up after the last use of the trap in the 1800s.

The Newcastle Field Office, in a cooperative project with the University of Wyoming, mapped a large portion of the Little Missouri Antelope Trap. The mapped basin contained multiple juniper drive lines and a catch pen used in prehistoric and proto-historic times for communal antelope driving. 

All wood remnants of the trap structure in the basin were pin-flagged and mapped with a total station. Students measured the length, width, and orientation of each log in order to record the trap structures as they lay today, after more than a century of decay.

 Additional survey of the trap structure discovered another set of juniper drive lines that would have brought antelope over a pass on the ridge top into one set of the wings. The newly discovered wings will be mapped in a future field season.

A very tall rod had to be devised to reach over the tops of young junipers that had grown since the trap was last used in the 1800s.

Professor Rick Weatherman (left) & BLM SCEP Archaeologist, Natasha Keierleber, are setting up the total station and communicating by radio with the students holding the rod on the mapping point.
Professor Rick Weatherman (left) & BLM SCEP Archaeologist, Natasha Keierleber, are setting up the total station and communicating by radio with the students holding the rod on the mapping point.

Pin-flags mark logs that have fallen to the ground from the original four foot high juniper fences used for trapping antelope. Students are mapping a log hidden by young junipers.
Pin-flags mark logs that have fallen to the ground from the original four foot high juniper fences used for trapping antelope. Students are mapping a log hidden by young junipers.

Pinedale Field Office

Bill Current of Current Archaeological Research, shows the group a prehistoric housepit that was discovered in the Jonah Field. The housepit is the darker soil in the middle foreground.
Bill Current of Current Archaeological Research, shows the group a prehistoric housepit that was discovered in the Jonah Field. The housepit is the darker soil in the middle foreground.

In conjunction with the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, Current Archaeological Research and Shell Rocky Mountain LLC, the Pinedale BLM archaeologists hosted a field tour for members of the Board of Directors of the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers.

 Approximately 40 people took part in the field tour, which included a stop at Shell's Pinedale office for a briefing on the oil and gas industry, a field tour of the Pinedale Anticline and Jonah Field, and a museum tour at the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale.

Pinedale BLM archaeologist Dave Vlcek talks about the Lander Trail crossing of the New Fork River.
Pinedale BLM archaeologist Dave Vlcek talks about the Lander Trail crossing of the New Fork River.

 
Last updated: 03-16-2009