Washington State...July 2002
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| Starting Down | Waterfalls | Snowbank | Tunnel | Fourth night | Quinault River | Twelve Mile Campsite |
I thought this was a interesting article, heres a copy of the article.
OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK.... Tests show a fragment of an Indian woven cedar basket that was found in 1993 is about 2,900 years old, making it the oldest dated artifact found in Olympic National Park.
Unusually warm temperatures at the time exposed the fragment, which was found by a Florida family at the edge of a snowfield 200 yards from the parking lot at Obstruction Point, about 18 miles south of Port Angeles, park archaeologist Paul Gleeson said.
The piece remained in storage until last summer, when park officials scrounged up the $800 to pay for a radiocarbon analysis that determined it dated from about 900 B.C., 150 years before the founding of Rome, Gleeson said.
"I was flabbergasted," he said. "I figured it was maybe 500 years old, but to find it was 2,900 years old, it was just really great."
The fragment was found in a place that "obviously was a very good campsite area," Gleeson said.
"It may very well be that the basket was damaged and abandoned or had blown away but ended up at the bottom of the snowfield," he added.
The find links the Obstruction Point area with other aboriginal sites on the Olympic Peninsula, including the Hoko River and Ozette archaeological digs, proving that Indians who lived on the coast ventured into the Olympic Mountains during summer, Gleeson said.