USU researcher says arrowhead could change history

LOGAN — There are few people in the world who could get downright giddy about an arrowhead, but one that dates back more than 13,000 years is making Bonnie Pitblado's head spin.

Pitblado, Utah State University's director of anthropology, can't wait to get to Driggs, Idaho, to look for more artifacts in the area where the arrowhead was found.

"Finding something belonging to the Clovis period is the rarest of the rare. It pre-dates even the Ice Age," she said. "The thinking is that they were the first people here."

The discovery could change what researchers know about the nation's earliest inhabitants, who were believed to have lived in low-lying areas instead of the often treacherous and cold mountains.

The arrowhead was initially unearthed 40 years ago but it had never been made public. That changed Saturday when it was brought to USU's second annual prehistoric artifacts roadshow.

"I'll probably never find one of these in my lifetime," Pitblado said. "This thing was perfect."

Before this discovery, anthropologists had found little reason to believe that any prehistoric civilization lived in the overly dry, salty region of the state of Utah, specifically with its rough mountains and rocky terrain. But Pitblado says this discovery, and others like it, is about to change what we know about the earliest inhabitants in this area.

"There's every reason to believe that they were here," she said, as the civilization was highly mobile and followed the food sources, specifically big game, which is indigenous to this region.

This summer, students will accompany Pitblado to not only Driggs, but to areas in Cache and Rich counties, where other artifacts have produced leads that prehistoric civilizations most probably existed on Utah soil. They will survey the region and determine where future groups might perform actual digs to discover more information, and hopefully gather armfuls of artifacts.

Last year, southeastern Idaho resident Lawrence Fox welcomed Pitblado's class of budding archaeologists to his approximately 3,000 acres of land, where he had found a significant amount of artifacts while out farming.

"I've known that there was a resource of it in the area for a while now," he said, adding that he's found pieces ranging from as small as a fingernail and as thin as a dime to other arrowheads as big as eight inches in length. In his 30 years of owning the property, he's found items that date back to 8,000 years. Rumor has it that arrowheads were so prevalent in the area that previous residents often traded them for candy.