Cooper's Ferry - Skim Shoveling (Video 1 of 6)

The Oregon State University (OSU) Archaeology Field School, lead by Dr. Loren Davis, has performed excavations at the Cooper's Ferry site. The field school, funded through a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) challenge cost share program, allowed students from OSU, under the direction of Dr. Loren Davis, to excavate this area and gather data about how people lived in the canyon thousands of years ago.

The Cooper's Ferry site is located in the beautiful lower Salmon River canyon of western Idaho and contains some of the earliest evidence of humans in the Pacific Northwest. The 1997 OSU excavations at the Cooper's Ferry site revealed a long record of repeated human occupation, beginning with a Western Stemmed Tradition assemblage associated with radiocarbon dates of 11,370 and 11,410 14C years BP. These dates are controversial and, if true, support arguments that peoples bearing the Clovis tradition were not the first to settle the Far West.

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• Cooper's Ferry
• Skim Shoveling
• BLM
• bureau of land management
• cultural
• archaeology
• cultural field school
• lower salmon river
• lower salmon river culture