By Cynthia Flynn. One day several thousand years ago, a Columbia mammoth (larger than his woolly mammoth cousin) died.  His bones have lain in a rural area south of Kennewick, WA.  I recently met a paleontologist at his dig, where this mammoth was being unearthed.  Eastern Washington, he told me, has probably 300 sites with at least some mammoth bones, so this dig is hardly unique in that regard.  However, there are important differences between his dig and what is ordinarily done.  He explained that usually, the goal of a paleontologist’s dig is to get the bones out and back to a museum for preparation and analysis as quickly as possible.  It would not be unusual for a paleontologist to do test bores, identify where the limits of the bones were, and dynamite the earth beyond those limits to loosen the earth from the bones.  A site such as the one he was digging might take two months to excavate, however if the bones were thought to be fragile, perhaps it would take two years (seasons, actually, as digging does not occur in the winter in this part of the country). 

Interestingly, he said he hoped to spend 5-10 years at this site.  He wanted to excavate the bones using archeological techniques, i.e., careful delineation and recording of the exact locations of extracted items, carefully taking down the hillside in 2 meter by 2 meter by 10 centimeter layers using levels and small brushes and tools that looked like they belonged to a dentist, washing all the soil that is removed from the hillside to expose anything that remained of living things, and reviewing all the residue under a microscope back at the Burke Museum in Seattle where he works.

Why does he want to conduct the dig in this way?  Ordinarily, people just want to get the bones out.  So if he comes to a dig after most paleontologists have been there, everything (except the bones) is essentially destroyed.  In one case, he was able to get data from a 5% core sample before the bones were extracted, which gave him unique information that he was interested in, but this sample had all the limitations of any small sample as far as understanding the full universe of data from which it was drawn.  Even with this small sample, though, he was able to create a unique data base that received scholarly notice.

So why does he care?  He replied that most people actually don’t care, which is why this project is self-funded, uses volunteer staff, and occurs on the week-end, when everyone is not at their “day job.”  But exactly what does he want to find out?  The answer is that he wants the full story, or as much of the story as is still available after thousands of years, about what happened around the day the mammoth died.  Did the mammoth die here?  Or were the bones washed here by a flood?  Did they end up here due to a mud slide?  What can we learn about what else was going on at that time by examining the environment around the bones?  Were there rodents (which kinds?), insects, seeds (of what?), nests?  How much of the story of this mammoth can we reconstruct if we do a careful analysis of the site?  In other words, how fully can we describe this particular mammoth’s story?  And what happened before this animal died? What happened later?  The point is that context matters, the story matters if we really want to understand “the bones.” (more…)