Display captures Range Creek secrets

Previously hidden treasures of Range Creek Canyon are featured in an extensive new exhibit in the Utah Museum of Natural History, opening today.

Arrowheads, beads, corn-grinding tools, recreations of a pit house and a cliff-side granary — even a set of what were once called "mystery sticks" — are a part of "Range Creek: An Anthropology of Place." The display is to be open indefinitely at the museum, located on the University of Utah campus on Presidents Circle (top of 200 South).

At 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. today, Duncan Metcalfe, archaeologist who is lead researcher at the site, will lecture about Range Creek. A flint-knapper will make stone tools during the day, and visitors will lean about ancient pottery.

Until about two years ago, few had heard of Range Creek. A largely undisturbed archaeological region behind the Book Cliffs near the Carbon-Emery county border, it was acquired by the state in 2004.

A thousand years ago, Range Creek was inhabited by the Fremont Indians. To this day, it retains a stunning assembly of Fremont material that was never looted, thanks to the remoteness of the site and the efforts of the previous owners, Waldo Wilcox and his family, to protect it.

Since the state acquired the Wilcox Ranch, archaeologists have been assessing the huge number of ancient structures and artifacts, although they have not done any excavations.

Ever since the purchase was announced in 2004, said museum spokeswoman Patti Carpenter, the public has been tremendously interested in the discoveries. "I think this will be very popular with our visitors," she said.

Museum experts were assembling the exhibits when the Deseret Morning News visited recently.

Will Black, preparator, was installing rocks in a ring on the floor; the ring continued on a photo mural on the wall. The rock ring was typical of what a visitor might see in Range Creek.

Although it did not look impressive, the ring in the photo was part of a ruin. It was the lower wall of a pithouse, a structure the ancient inhabitants used as a home. Nearby, a recreation of a pithouse shows visitors what they looked like when inhabited.

"The Fremont culture is very interesting," said Michelle Knoll, assistant archaeologist at the museum. "Archaeologists like to argue about this nonstop."

She noted that some groups of Fremonts were largely dependent on agriculture, like those at Range Creek, while others were more focused on hunting and gathering. Like their neighbors, the Anasazi, they were hard-hit by climate changes.