UNRAVELING A TWISTED TALE
Montana archaeologist investigates historic Paleoindian site
When it comes to Paleoindian archaeological locations in Montana, none may be more unusual than the MacHaffie site near Montana City, just south of Helena.
Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in 2001 archaeologists uncovered what could be evidence of a "protective magic event" — a horse skull buried in the early 1900s with an iron band, glass fragments and a marble.
The man who brought the area to an amateur Helena archaeologists' attention in 1946 was killed the same year after his car plunged off a 400-foot embankment into an Idaho river. Coincidence or curse?
Tidying up the research
Unlike many other archaeological sites in Montana, this often-studied location is not known for being a campsite, a hunting or bison kill site, wrote state archaeologist Patrick Rennie.
Instead, it seems to have been a midpoint where rock quarried nearby was broken into smaller fragments before being hauled to a campsite.
What's also unusual is the quality of the rock wasn't that good. Better sources are nearby. Which all prompts the question: Why stop on this particular hillside overlooking Prickly Pear Creek to chip stone that wasn't that great?
Questions like these and more are what Rennie has contemplated while spending more than 2,100 hours of his evenings and weekends across the span of five years trying to make sense of previous archaeological investigations at the MacHaffie site.
"The MacHaffie site (24JF4) in southwest Montana may be the most name-recognized yet poorly understood archaeological resource in the northern plains," Rennie wrote.
During his investigation he found "lost, misplaced, unclear, contradictory, and non-existent records pertaining to work conducted."
"Additionally, some documented cultural materials have been lost, misplaced, or discarded."
National headlines
When first rigorously explored in 1951, the Columbia University excavation prompted The New York Times to hail it as one of the most significant inquiries into the prehistory of North America, Rennie noted.
That's because the findings extended the range of the Folsom culture, which occupied the Great Plains about 9,000 to 8,000 BC, farther north and west. The Folsom culture is associated with "atlatl and dart weaponry," Rennie wrote, before the development of the bow and arrow.
Similarly crafted stone points have been found embedded in the bones of a now extinct species of bison — bison antiquus — that was much larger than the ones now living in Yellowstone National Park.
"Folsom is rare in Montana," Rennie wrote. "This, in part, is what makes MacHaffie unique in the state."
The site also provided a clear delineation between the Folsom and Cody cultures. The Cody complex is dated to around 6,700 to 9,600 BC, so the MacHaffie site clearly showed that Folsom preceded Cody. The site may have been used up until the 1700s.
"An additional notable fact is that the MacHaffie site produced the first C-14 date for a Montana archaeological resource," Rennie wrote. "The date of 8,100 ±300 (L-578A) is assigned to the Cody component."
C-14 refers to a way to date sites based on a radioactive isotope of carbon.
Also found at the MacHaffie dig was a point made of dark green stone known from the Tom Miner Basin and Cooke City areas of the upper Yellowstone River drainage, Rennie wrote. The stone comes from ancient wood preserved after being impregnated with silica.
"Excluding trade, this suggests that the Folsom people who occupied MacHaffie visited the upper Shoshone or Yellowstone River drainages," Rennie noted.
History of site
The importance of the site was first noted by Helena resident A.J. Harstad, who found some chipped stones and animal bones on a cutbank caused by nearby springs.
He showed Helena businessman and amateur archaeologist Edmund MacHaffie the location. In looking around, MacHaffie then found a stone projectile point at the site.
It was MacHaffie who encouraged an archaeologist conducting survey work along the Missouri River, where Canyon Ferry Reservoir was soon to flood 30 miles of the river bottom, to investigate the site.
Later that same year Harstad died in a car crash near Bonners Ferry, Idaho. The horse head and other objects of protective magic found at the MacHaffie site were likely buried by a "local homesteader of European ancestry," Rennie wrote, and is one of the few such examples of this type of cultural features in Montana.
Rennie wrote the ritualistic burial of the horse head may have been seen as a way to give the person protection from evil or to "counter the effects of witchcraft." Similar burials have been unearthed in Britain and Europe.
Now protected
The archaeological site was well known to locals, thanks to MacHaffie's talks to service clubs, some of whom looted and disturbed the upper layer of the site.
In 2009, the landowner, Pamela Bompart, donated the MacHaffie site to the Archaeological Conservancy to protect the area from housing development that has spilled over as Helena has grown.
It's possible the site is associated with the Old North Trail, Rennie speculated, a route running along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains traveled for thousands of years by Native Americans.
"The trail is ideal to have brought people to the Montana City area and then either north or south along the Rocky Mountain Front," he wrote.
Rennie's article is titled "Revisiting the Ancients: A Natural and Cultural History of the MacHaffie Archaeological Site." Co-authors include: Edwin Mohler, John P. Albanese, Jr., Cynthia Riley Augé, Linda Scott-Cummings, Leslie B. Davis, James K. Feathers and T. Weber Greiser.