Sometimes in archaeology, it’s just the one thing you find at a site that hints at what was happening there. A single clue that unfolds into a story, drawing lines between the artifacts, the place, and the people who lived there.
This week, in a green little valley northwest of Skeetchestn, it was a whole bunch of the same clue: distinctive stone tools known as scrapers, popping up on our spring surveys with unusual frequency.
Scrapers are implements used to remove flesh and hair from animal hides, and they’ve been perfected for use here over thousands and thousands of years.
Unlike blades like knives or spear tips, scrapers are characteristically steep-edged, so as not to pierce the hides they’re pressed into. Scrapers are often fastened to handle of wood or antler, but are also used simply gripped in the hand—when their shape and use earns them the name “thumbnail scrapers”.
When skillfully applied, a scraper’s smooth-sharp form not only cleans the skins, but also softens and stretches them with each stroke.
Used for millennia to prepare animal skins as fabric, scrapers are a common enough artifact on the Plateau—and indeed across the Indigenous world.
But the number turning up in this lush little spot off the Deadman Valley is suggesting that whole animal processing has been going on here for a long time. While our work here is only preliminary, the number of scrapers here relative to other kinds of tools is already intriguing.
And “here” matters, as it so often does in Indigenous land studies: the closest named place to our survey area is an ancestral site called K’ésce7ten.
In Secwepemctsin, the name means “dry meat place” and is known to have been a Skeetchestn village for ages. There are pithouses, mounds, and stone platform features here built, and occupied, well before living memory.
And, as the name suggests, it’s a place well-suited to procuring and processing game, which means not only curing meat for storage but working the hides (and hooves, sinew, bone and antler) into useful goods.
There’s really no overstating how important this hide preparation has been to keeping people warm, dry, and stylish for millennia. Animal skins have been a ubiquitous fabric for, well, ever.
Skins have not only been essential for outfitting people from head to toe, but for slinging and swaddling babies, wrapping and carrying goods, for use in households for anything from shelter to décor.
In order to be made—and kept—durable, pliable and waterproof, skins require serious work: cleaning, scraping, soaking, scraping, tanning with brains and smoke and scraping, and then scraping some more. Did I mention the scraping?
For archaeologists, all that work can be seen in a dedicated toolkit, a collection of artifacts that appears regularly enough to be correlated with an activity.
The stone scrapers we’re finding on site are an essential part of that gear, and their occurrence over time and space can tell us a lot about continuity and change in animal use, textile manufacture, and even toolstone selection.
In archaeology, as with Indigenous place names, even small things can be a big clue, part of a story to tell and preserve.