Dr. Daron Duke excavates a 12,000 year old human footprint in the Utah Test and Training Range.
Its hard to imagine but the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah, this hot, flat, white, sun-blasted landscape, was once a lush marshland.
13,000 years ago, as historic Lake Bonneville retreated to become the Great Salt Lake, a now dead-dead overflow river formed a rich, wide delta across much of North Central Utah. If you’ve ever looked out the window on landing in Salt Lake City and seen that marshland, you have practically looked into what the land of the Great Salt Lake Desert once was.
It was a vastly different world. The weather was cooler. The Old River Bed Delta —as archaeologists now call it— supported wildfowl, bison, and other quadrupeds.
A presumed 12,000 year-old human footprint in the Utah Test and Training Range.
About 12,000 ago, it appears a person was walking in one of the delta’s braided streams. Their foot sunk into the stream’s mud, and sand quickly filled the print. More mud soon covered that sand sealing the print.
12,000 years later archaeologist Daron Duke of the Far Western Archaeological Research Group was driving across the same land with researcher Thomas Urban. They were conducting an archaeological survey of the Utah Test and Training Range for the United States Air Force. In the morning light after a rare rain, they noticed evenly spaced marks in the desert floor that reminded Urban of trackways he had discovered at White Sands in New Mexico. The trackways were near a hearth site that Duke excavated in 2015. That site—called the Wishbone site— revealed bird bones, willow charcoal, spear points used to hunt very large mammals and most intriguingly, tobacco seeds. Radiocarbon dating put the finds at 12,300 years ago. That date pushed back known human use of tobacco by over 9,000 years.
Northwest Shoshone elder Rios Pacheco performs a blessing for tribal members and archaeologists on the Utah Test and Training Range.
This past July I accompanied the Air Force and Far Western to the Trackway and Wishbone sites while they were doing additional work aimed at providing concrete dates for the footprints.
Also visiting were elders of the Goshute and Northwest Band of the Shoshone. Shoshone spiritual leader Rios Pacheco blessed the site and archaeologists with prayers and burning sweetgrass. He also gave members tobacco seeds to offer to the site, spiritually replacing what had been removed.
I asked James Cawley, Ancient Art Archive collaborator, Creative Director for the Northwest Shoshone Nation and tribal member how he felt about the footprints.
“I feel good about these old footprints. These footprints make me feel proud of my Native heritage and thankful for those who walked before me. The footprints represent a vast history of Indigenous people who called this continent home for over 12,000 years. This story may not yet live on the paper pages of our history books, but its been preserved here, embedded into the fabric of our earth.”
You can see James' vision of the land as it looked to his processors in this Instagram reel (HERE).
The trackways themselves don’t change the timeline of humanity in North America like the White Sands footprints did. However, they certainly personalize the past. It’s hard to look at the imprint of a human foot and not think of watching our own footprints on a beach as an incoming tide fills the prints with water and sand. They provide a direct connection to an individual in the deep past.
I’ve often said that the landscape tells its own story. That is one of the reasons that I’m drawn to ancient artwork on the landscape. There is a story told out there so long as we choose to listen.
Stephen Alvarez
September 2024