November 13, 2000
New archaeology kits will recreate 4,200-year-old Puget Sound Life
A new set of unique archaeology kits will be available next month to help Puget Sound students travel back in time to learn about how people lived in the region during the last 4,200 years.
The kits, which are designed for use in fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms, explore the archaeology of the West Point site in Seattle’s Discovery Park. The kits are the product of a cooperative effort of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, the Muckleshoot, Suquamish and Tulalip tribes, the King County Landmarks and Heritage Commission, and the Auburn School District.
Thousands of artifacts were recovered during a 1992-94 excavation at West Point during the expansion of a sewage treatment plant. Replicas of 15 artifacts, representative of what archaeologists recovered from West Point, are included in each of the kits. But they are not your run-of-the-mill plastic copies.
“We want students to be able to experience the replicas in the same material as the artifacts were made from thousands of years ago,” said Shaine Gans, project coordinator of the kit project and a recent master’s degree graduate of the UW’s museology program. Museology is an interdisciplinary program designed to equip people to work in museums.
“Typically, artifacts are replicated from resins and epoxy, and the texture and weight of the copies are quite different from the originals. It is very unusual to have archaeological kits with replicas of such an incredible quality.”
The 15 items in each kit were made from such materials as deer bone, elk antler, beaver tooth, seashells and different types of stone. They were crafted by anthropologist Jeffrey Flenniken, who operates a Pullman, Wash., firm specializing in stone tool analyses, and Jim Woods, a College of Southern Idaho professor of anthropology. Flenniken and Woods, who are skilled flint knappers (tool makers), spent two months making six sets of replicas, relying on traditional techniques without using any modern or metal tools.
Among items fashioned by the two are bone pendants, stone labrets (decorative lower lip plugs), bone gaming pieces, shell beads, a variety of stone tools and beaver-tooth gravers for incising other materials.
In addition to the artifacts, the kits contain a variety of teaching aids to help students learn about the archaeology of West Point and the people who inhabited it for more than 4,000 years. There are a number of graphics showing how the site has changed over time, a bagged sample of sediment that an archaeologist might study and tools used by an archaeologist. There is a 30-minute video about the site and a slide show describing some of the artifacts found at the site. The kits also have 10 lesson plans for teachers to use to interpret such topics as the archaeology, past environment and natural resources at West Point and how the inhabitants used local resources.
“The kits were designed to be hands-on and interactive,” said Gans. “We wanted to have elements that student can hold, study, analyze and draw. The idea behind this is to let students experience artifacts as an archaeologist would and provide information and materials from a real local archaeological site for teachers to use in their classroom.”
Of the six kits produced, two belong to the Burke. Schools interested in borrowing a kit should contact the Burke Museum’s education division at (206) 543-5591. The kits will be available starting Dec. 1.
Two of the other kits will be the property of the Tulalip Tribes. One will be used at the Suquamish Museum and the final one will go to the Auburn School District in an agreement with the Muckleshoot Tribe.
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For more information, contact Gans at (206) 685-3849 or shaine@u.washington.edu
