Vacationers Pay Forest Service to Let Them Help Preserve Ancient Sites

Instead of lounging under a lanai on some tropical island, Linda Moschell took her vacation at the Siskiyou National Forest this summer, helping to document and preserve ancient rock art left by the Indians of the Rogue River.

“I guess I’ve outgrown lying on the beach,” said the Lafayette, Calif., learning disabilities tutor, who admitted feeling a little like Indiana Jones. “It was kind of like an adventure.”

The money each of the vacationers paid to the U.S. Forest Service goes toward preserving and perhaps someday showcasing the hidden heritage left by the Rogue River people before they were driven out and nearly exterminated in the 1850s in the name of gold fever.

The lessons in history and archeological preservation techniques were one of the Heritage Expeditions the Forest Service offers under a pilot program that charges fees for recreational opportunities at a time when revenues from logging are steadily declining.

“This law was passed by Congress, and we saw a way to augment our budgets and provide an experience people wanted to have,” said Jim Keyser, northwest regional archeologist for the Forest Service. “Some folks want a more upscale experience. We made it available to them.”

The 10 people who joined Keyser and Siskiyou National Forest archeologist Janet Joyer paid $495 each for three days and two nights of hands-on archeology and history, gourmet meals, transportation by jet boat, and two nights in wilderness lodges.

They visited a sacred site on the lower Rogue River where Indians to this day perform rituals; walked the grounds of the Battle of Big Meadow, the Rogue River people’s last stand before being forced to leave their homes and live on the Siletz reservation; and helped to document and develop a plan to preserve a newly discovered rock art site in the wilderness canyon.

“That’s how I got interested in archeology--through the Forest Service,” said Pat Lyttle of Milwaukie, Ore.

“It’s an obscure part of the world, but it’s interesting,” said George Hoyt, a retired newspaper publisher from Sandy.

Besides rock art, people can learn horse-packing on a weeklong wilderness excursion in Montana, historic building preservation outside Yellowstone National Park and how to make arrowheads and do an archeological dig in the Modoc National Forest in California.

The rock art of the Rogue Canyon is very different from the painted images of animals, spirals and sunbursts that can be seen in other parts of the West. Unless you know what you are looking for you can walk right by it and never notice it.

“It’s made not so much for what it looks like when you’re through but for the spiritual process,” said Joyer.

More than 60 boulders bearing the marks of rituals to enhance fertility, call for rain or entice the salmon to return have been found along the river, said Forest Service archeological technician Tex Martinek.

Generally they lie between low and high water, though some are on higher ground. The most common artifact is a simple cup-shaped depression--technically called a cupule--that has been left from someone hammering a smaller rock against the boulder while saying a prayer. Some rocks are covered with them.

Occasionally there is a zigzag design that might represent lightning or spiritual power, or a design known as a vulvaform representing female genitalia.

Even the descendants of the Rogue River people are unsure about the exact nature of the rituals, said Robert Kentta, cultural director of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz.

Extrapolating from stories told by other tribes who left similar petroglyphs in Northern California, the rocks along the water’s edge are probably associated with rituals to bring rain and the return of the salmon, Keyser said.

The idea was that when the river rose and covered the rocks, the prayers would go out to the ocean, asking the salmon people to turn into fish and swim upstream to feed the Rogue people.

At the site farther up in the canyon, archeologists theorized the rocks were connected to fertility rituals. One big rock located near a village site was marked by 131 cupules. Women from the village may have come there to say prayers to help them get pregnant. The women may also have eaten the rock dust pounded out of the boulders, ingesting minerals that helped them have healthy babies.

Members of the Heritage Expedition spread plastic sheets over the rocks and traced and photographed the forms, so they can be studied later. They took samples of the moss on the rocks, so it can be analyzed to see if it will damage the rock.

The style of this rock art came out of the Great Basin, the high desert area covering eastern Oregon, northern Nevada and southern Idaho, Joyer said. It is usually associated with speakers of the Hokan language.

Here it was practiced by the Shasta Costa band, speakers of the Athabaskan language of the Alaska interior who apparently came to southwestern Oregon about 2,000 years ago. The language is shared by the Navajo and the Apache.

Ultimately, Joyer and Keyser would like to see facilities on the Siskiyou developed to tell the story of the Rogue River people, showcasing the petroglyphs and the Battle of Big Meadow. The work of amateur archeologists is helping to document and preserve that story.

“We’re not just schlepping around tourists,” Keyser said.

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On the Net:

Forest Service Heritage Expeditions site: https://www.fs.fed.us/recreation/heritage/expeditions.shtml