Friends of Wolf Village

Hello all you Friend of the Fremont. As most of you probably know, and some of you have firsthand knowledge of, the BYU archaeology field school has been excavating at Wolf Village for the past two and a half seasons. Wolf Village is in Goshen Utah near Current Creek and spreads across a series of ridges near the mouth of Goshen Canyon. The site is a large Fremont village with adobe surface and pit structures. Most of the C14 dates from the site (all taken from corn samples as far as I know) date the site to around 1050 A.D. One structure, a ramada excavated in 2009, has a much earlier date in the 900s A.D.

The first documented adobe structure in Utah Valley was found at Wolf Village in 2009. This turned out to be a two room structure approximately 6x4 m. The main room was about 4x4 m with a hearth and a meter deep storage pit in the southwest corner. It looks very similar to a two room adobe structure found at Nephi Mounds.

Less than half a meter west of this structure is what was once thought to be a deep storage pit, and is now thought to be a deep tunnel leading into one of the largest Fremont pit structures ever discovered. Near the end of the 2010 season we discovered what we thought was a small pithouse, but further excavation in 2011 revealed that it is more likely a giant subrectangular central pit structure (71 m²). The main room of the structure is 8x7.5 m with tunnels on both the east and west sides (though the one on the west might be an antechamber of some kind, we’re not sure). The eastern tunnel is about two meters below modern ground surface and a meter below prehistoric ground surface.

The structure was burned and the pattern of the burnt beams on the floor looked awesome (there is a picture below). There is also a very rich thick midden layer right above the roof fall. We found lots of proj points, a figurine head, over 30 gaming pieces, an incised crystal, an unusual number of handles, and lots of other really interesting artifacts.

We have found at least three other pit structures over the past three years, most of which have been in pretty poor condition due to erosion. One of the pit structures we excavated this year had a deep vent shaft to the east with multiple openings into the structure.

We have also excavated two ramadas up on the top of the ridges at Wolf Village. We thought that one of them was an adobe structure for a while, but later decided that it was a pit structure and upon further investigation have concluded that it is likely a ramada.

The last structure that we have excavated is another unique structure. It is a large adobe walled surface structure near the top of one of the ridges. The structure is large (5.5x at least 4.5 m), and has a long deep vent shaft extending to the east. The vent shaft contained many artifacts including multiple deer mandibles. The southern end of the structure had eroded. Surrounding the outside of the extant walls were diagonal beams sloping into the structure at a steep angle. We are not entirely sure of their purpose because the point where they would have intersected the structure would not have been far off of the prehistoric ground surface. One of the other really cool things about this structure was the two figurines that were found just north of the north wall on either side of the center lines of the structure.

I know that this is a really brief overview, but I need to stop myself or else I’d go on all day. Hopefully there will be actual publications on it soon. We are trying to get a preliminary report together right now, and Lindsay and I are trying to find time to put together an article about the architecture. There will also, hopefully, be something about it at the SAAs, and Dr. Allison is going to present a poster that Lindsay and I made about architecture at Wolf Village at the Pecos Conference this week. We haven't taken artifact photos for this year yet. I'll post some once we have taken them. Here are some structure photos and drawings and some pictures of artifacts that Ren Thomas took:

This is the large central structure. We only had time to trench it and find the edges, we will fully excavate it next year.

Beam pattern in the trench of the large central structure.

The two roomed adobe structure facing west.

The adobe structure near the ridge top with the ventilation shaft on the eastern side, facing east.

Figurine found in the central structure

Knife found in the central structure
Incised crystal found at in the tunnel into the central structure.