It was painted up there approximately 2145 years before, you have a 2000yearold hurtle. You have a millennium of time. When we consider the value of pictograph cave state park, the park is named for the pictograph and that is a significant part of the occupation story but for archaeologists and anthropologists there is more cultural value in the artifacts that were excavated. Excavation started in 1937 but people were here well before that digging in the cave. This road here was called the reservation road for a lot of years because it was the most direct route to prior. During the stagecoach times people would stay here, they would water their horses and go up and look at the pictographs and some of them would dig for artifacts. That continued up until it became a wpa excavation and that went up until 1941. Excavation that happened was a group of local people from billings, they saw the value in the number of artifacts that seemed to be there in the deposition that was present. And thought that this would be an Excellent Research tragic project rather than just having people go out there from town and dig around in take things. And take things, that there was some historical value. Through the efforts of some local people, the property was obtained by the state. It became the first archaeological project in montana and one of the first in a pretty major region. There is 30,000 artifacts that were recovered here. Baskets from the southwest. And caribou horns that were carved into harpoon points and those came from the northwest area there was a paint applicator. Everything from game pieces to turtle effigies and there is even a soapstone, piece of soapstone carved in the shape of a human head. Beyond what we would call occupational debris or things you would leave behind when you stayed someplace for an extended time, there were these valuable, unique oneofakind artifacts that were here, too. Over the last few years, the collection has been curated. It has been sorted and has been reviewed and taking care of. Taken care of. There has been a resurgence in looking at the documents that we have from pictograph cave. The original supervisor of the project and to me this became personally interesting was a drafter for the Highway Department who went to work there. Being a drafter and myself aiding and drafting and design, i took some particular interest in his civil drawings. His plan and profile drawings that he did because that is the key to the collection. That is the key to the excavation. How far down were they, where is the strata, what were they fighting . With the plan and the profile of individual drives would begin a drawings, we began a project where we scanned all of those documents, bring them in to a cad environment and see if we could reengage or reconstruct a digital reconstruction of the cave so that we could recreate where they were working. To some extent, see if we could take these artifacts and place them back in context in threedimensional space. So we can see what the surface of the cave look like. Looked like. The cave floor before they started the excavation. We can see the contour lines that we traced over the top and then using the software we can turn that into a surface and so this is the east end of the cave and the west is near us here. It shows the contour of the cave before any excavation took place. Using his documents we can trace those contours and we can get a feel for how much material was removed from this site when they did it. We can see these excavation depth. This began gives us a threedimensional environment that we can reference within. What we can do since we have this reconstructed, we can take the labels from the artifact where they said they found them, whether they were to the east or west and we can take those coordinates and place them into this threedimensional space. Basically we can take the artifacts that we have and we can put them back into their original context and try to reconstruct how this cave was put together. One of the applications is that the data we have we can take further. Maybe recreate the panel on the back of the cave so that people cannot make the hike we can recreate it to some scale at the visitor center. We can do this digitally. So that the work that the archaeologists are doing referencing artifacts back into this, at some point in time, we envision a digital model so that people can interact with the cave from a distance, perhaps even at a research level. If a researcher wants to know what particular point was they could access that point. Or the tourist wanted to go, they can manipulate the model to see what to expect when they get there. Anyone can get more information about the story of what happened here. Not only from the archaeological sense but the historical sense of the people who did this excavation and what they did and the late 1930s. The people of billings in montana see the value in a site like this where you have 2000 yearold images where you had 30,000 artifacts. And very unique items that were left here by people. Even today, where less than five miles from the reservation. A large amount of the community in billings or native people. We bring a lot of School Groups here and a large amount of Educational Programs that we offer to teachers to tell the story so that montanans can get a sense of what what people were like thousands of years ago before there was a montana. Cspans American History tour continues with a visit to the colusa heritage trail. The closer indias lived along southwest floridas coast for 1500 years. We are here at the randel in tampa. Enter we are standing 150 miles south of modern day tampa. There is a well known map that shows the native place name. This was one of the largest of the colusa towns. It was one large Big Community including one in estero bay and the other at big mound key. The colusa were controlling many other towns but there was a mapmaker in the early 1700s and the name tampa got shifted to where it is presently located. We are also here at highland on pineland on the shore of an estuary. It is placed wherever freshwater and saltwater mix. The colusa had she, bringing freshwater in. The produce one of the most productive habitats. Estuaries supports mangrove and seagrass systems. It was the system that the colusa and their land ancestors used to achieve great success. By understanding the Natural History of the estuary and the Natural History of the organisms that live there, archaeologists have been able to understand the past of the people who first settled here at 100 a. D. And there is no written record from the colusa until the 1500 s. As far as we know they had no written language. For that first 1500 years of life, in order to understand the people and know about their culture and preserve their legacy, we excavate and what are known as middens and the landscape features. Archaeologists have had 75 excavations in over 30 years to understand this place and these people. A midden means debris of life. So essentially garbage. Within the middens are indicator of environmental change and artifacts that were left behind. These are eastern oysters and these are crested oysters. Crested oysters exist in higher salinity waters. To get higher salinity at various points but also when there are prolonged periods of