Survival Strategies, 7,500 BC

Mark Allen marvels at the strength, endurance and adaptability of the people who have survived their travels out here, in the inhospitable midsection of the Mojave Desert.

He’s not referring to the tens of thousands of Army soldiers who come here annually, to be run ragged--on foot, as well as in tanks and personnel carriers--during 14-day training rotations.

Rather, he’s reflecting on the durability of the people who lived here as long as 9,500 years ago, among the first humans to inhabit what is now Southern California.

Allen is the chief archeologist at the Army’s National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, 30 miles north of Barstow. While most of what glitters here are spent ammunition casings, a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts has been uncovered just inches beneath the hardscrabble surface, showing that this desert region has been populated for nine millenniums.

When brigade commanders are not running their troops through the desert washes and rugged mountains, Allen and his assistants scour the same terrain for evidence of past cultures.

They have not been disappointed. Unlike many other sites that sustained prehistoric people--only to be ravaged by collectors and others who scoopup artifacts--this 1,000-square-mile federal facility has not welcomed the public since 1940.

As a result, several hundred prehistoric sites have been found here, relatively unscathed over time and protected by a few inches of sand.

Contributing to the Ft. Irwin archeological bonanza is the mandate of federal law--coupled with the Army’s own guidelines--that the archeology of military bases be painstakingly located, identified and cataloged.

“This military land,” Allen said, “is a huge wealth of information.” Searchers have found rocks shaped into spearheads, cutting tools and grinding stones, as well as debris left behind as so much rubbish in the tool-making process. The bones of animals that were their prey have also been uncovered.

Protecting the Area

Most artifacts are recorded and moved to the safety of a warehouse so they won’t be trampled by Army maneuvers. But some sites are deemed so valuable they are marked off limits to troops.

What archeologists have detected are many generations of hunters and gatherers who traveled through this desert during nonstop quests for food, revisiting the same general campsites during their seasonal treks.

Little about their basic lifestyles changed over time, based on the archeological findings.

They built small, igloo-shaped shelters made of twigs from creosote bushes, held in place at their base by rocks, Allen and others surmise. “Allergy havens,” he called them.

They flaked off pieces of rocks and broke them into triangular shapes to use as hunting spears. Over hundreds of centuries, the spear tips became slightly smaller and more finely honed. Their targets would have been coyote, rabbits, lizards and rodents.

In time--say 4,000 to 7,500 years ago--grinding stones became more commonplace, suggesting a culture that began processing plants--grinding, for instance, the seeds of spear grass or chia into bland paste that probably tasted like paper.

They would have dipped their hands into natural springs to sip water made bitter by minerals--but they would have unwittingly treated the resulting chemical imbalance in their bodies by eating plants that thrived near the watering holes despite the alkaline water.

And they would have collected rainwater in the depressions of boulders--then protected it from animals and evaporation by placing smaller rocks on the boulder as a kind of lid.

These people, Allen said, were nothing less than ingenious in their ability to survive the harsh environment.

“I ask soldiers how long they’d last out here without their MREs [Meals Ready-to-Eat combat rations] and water, and they say two or three days,” said Allen, who also teaches archeology at Pomona College. “They appreciate how hard it is to survive out here.”

The irony of studying people who traveled through this region--but never resided here full time--at a place now used by the Army for grueling, two-week training rotations, is not lost on archeologists. Adding to the parallel: The desert rock paintings of the prehistoric people are not far from the insignias of hundreds of Army units, painted on a huge rock pile near the base’s entrance as reminders of their own short-term visits.

M.C. Hall, director of archeological research at UC Riverside, has extensively studied sites at Ft. Irwin. He said the prehistoric people who resided in the desert were constantly on the move, sometimes traveling as much as 200 miles a year in search of food. Such travel patterns were detected by the discovery of tools made from rock indigenous to one area and discarded elsewhere.

These people probably found more hospitable environments along the Mojave and Colorado rivers, but nonetheless foraged into the desert--and liked enough of what they found that they would return.

They probably moved in extended-family units of 10 to 20 people and, at any given time, perhaps 100 of them would have been searching for animals and vegetation in what is now Ft. Irwin, Hall speculated.

Even though an ice age was ebbing, the area had meager vegetation, though it was not as foreboding as it is today. At best, there may have been more pinyon pine, junipers, Joshua trees and desert grasses.

Hall said he was amazed by the hundreds of prehistoric campsites that archeologists have discovered on the base--and said that, if it were not for the Army mandate to study each one in detail, many findings would have gone overlooked.

Varied Treasures

He recalled one early expedition into the desert during which he and a fellow researcher happened upon a site with 11 unspectacular rock chips. Such a finding would not normally raise eyebrows, but because of the government’s requirement that it be studied in detail, it was flagged for follow-up investigation.

“We did some excavation just beneath the surface and found several thousand pieces of chip stones, a small hearth, a modicum of burned animal bones, and tools for processing not only animal food but plant food,” he said. “It turned out to be one of our more interesting sites.”

That discovery led to others like it, he said, and collectively the findings showed “how small groups of people were moving across the landscape, leaving behind very uniform signatures of their lifestyle--of how they’d come to a place, maybe stay for several days or weeks, then move on.

“And within the same general area, we’d find artifacts that have dated back 500 years, 2,000 years, 8,000 years,” Hall said.

“The work at Ft. Irwin,” Allen said, “has provided tremendous, detailed samples of 10,000 years of human history in that part of the Mojave, making more clear the subtle aspects of how people lived in the desert over that long a period of time.”