INL archeologists study the history of the site, which they say, supported human life thousands of years ago

EDITOR’S NOTE: Throughout 2024, EastIdahoNews.com is working with the Idaho National Laboratory to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Each month, we’ll publish stories highlighting the history, achievements, and trials of the U.S. Department of Energy’s desert site. We’ll explore the INL’s influence on eastern Idaho and its day-to-day impact on local people.

IDAHO FALLS — Imagine a valley of lush green plains and a lake large enough to attract mammoths, sabertooth cats, American camels and other “megafauna.” Imagine people flourishing in this valley, hunting and eating these large animals. Now imagine this all occurring right here in eastern Idaho.

According to Idaho National Laboratory’s archeological team, artifacts found on the INL site date back 14,000 years and confirm that this imagery was a reality — just a few miles outside of Idaho Falls.

That team of archeologists and historians — the Cultural Resource Management team — is responsible for locating, identifying, cataloging and managing items of historical value on the roughly 890-square-mile INL site.

“The INL Cultural Resource Management office helps to maintain the archeological sites, and also their built environment resources they have here at INL,” said Reese Cook, one of the archeologists on that team. “…Part of our job is to identify those important properties, those cultural resources, and help DOE (the Department of Energy) preserve them for future knowledge, and also to learn from our past as well.”

The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 made federal agencies like the DOE responsible for the cultural resources on the land they administer, according to the INL website.

Cook and Marie Holmer, another of the INL archeologists, guided EastIdahoNews.com on a tour through one of the areas marked as being of historical value — what was once, more than 100 years ago, the Big Lost River irrigation project.

As Holmer explained, the project was launched following the signing of the Carey Act.

Part of the act, signed into law in 1894, allowed U.S. states to reclaim desert land, parcel it out, and sell lots to settlers intending to develop the land.

The Big Lost River project saw the construction of dams to divert water to what was an arid and barren chunk of land near Idaho Falls. Workers were brought in to develop homesteads that were to become bustling communities.

Now, more than a century later, the INL Cultural Resource Management team has found many items left behind when those homesteaders packed up and fled their work. These items, Cook and Holmer said, range from clothing and household items to small machines and even what was once a bread oven.

“Some people put everything they had into building these homesteads and trying to settle on the land,” Holmer said. “We see everything from children’s toys to lawnmowers.”

Workers — and, in some cases, their families — left anything they did not deem “important enough” to pack for a trek out of what was still, after years of work, an unlivable desert.

“Ultimately, these particular sites, they’re a story of failure, unfortunately,” Holmer said.

She went on to explain why studying failed efforts is so important for anyone in the present — and, more importantly, the future.

“In the very beginning, there was perhaps this idea that there was nothing we couldn’t achieve, in terms of engineering nature, engineering our environment,” Holmer said. “I think there’s a lot to be learned about understanding our environment and how those resources are finite.”

In the century since the efforts to launch some 600 homesteads failed, the area surrounding them has been used for many things — including the nearby U.S. Naval Test Site.

RELATED | How a naval proving ground became a national lab that’s ‘changing the world’s energy future’

One hundred years of human use have left behind a plethora of archeological pieces for study. Cook, Holmer, showcased what they call a “Italian Bread Oven,” a stone structure used for baking, which represents the failed effort by settlers to develop the still-barren land. They also showed EastIdahoNews.com more than a mile of “trash” from the World War II era, which includes — dishes, food and drink packaging, perfume bottles, oil cans and so much more.

RELATED | We dug through trash from World War II in the Idaho desert. Here’s what we found

However, the collection of archeological sites the Cultural Resource Management Team has been tasked with managing goes well beyond those EastIdahoNews.com toured.

Many items and culturally significant sites found on the land are associated with the Shoshone and Bannock Tribes and their people’s long history of making this region their home. For that reason, when items or sites that are believed to be linked to the Sho-Ban people are found, an INL-Sho-Ban liaison takes part in cataloging and managing those items.

EastIdahoNews.com requested comment from that liaison but did not receive a response.

Another historically significant location managed on the INL desert site is the Reno Homestead, once occupied by homesteader J. Frank Reno and his family.

According to INL, the structure that once housed the family of five has been reduced to rubble over the past 100 years. But there are still items kept in their exact location, as is the modus operandi for the Cultural Resource Management Team.

While exploring the land, the EastIdahoNews.com team was given strict instruction to replace any items handled to their exact location.

So, toys, tools, and other trinkets associated with the Reno Homestead can be seen today in the same precise location they have been in for decades.

In addition to the team’s discoveries, there is a written history of the people who have lived on what is now INL land for the past century.

“Sometimes they inform each other, and sometimes we can learn things new — who was out here and where they came from; what was important to them and what they brought with them,” Holmer said.

Asked if there has been any discovery that stands out to them, Holmer and Cook offered similar answers.

“It sounds like a bit of a copout,” Holmer said, “but I think every find is exciting when you can relate that to people, individual people, and you can understand what their life was like. Whether it’s a tin can and we can say, ‘this is what they were eating,’ or it’s a porcelain figurine of a cow, it says something about the life that they tried to have, were having and maybe even what they wanted to have.”

Using what they can learn from their discoveries and relating it to what is known 100 years later offers a contrast between the reality of those people trying to live here, their hopes and dreams, and the harsh reality of what came before.

However, the studies go much further back than 100 years — to the settling of the land by the Sho-Ban Tribes and centuries before.

Holmer told EastIdahoNews.com that the archeology team can confirm the existence of humans — and other life — in the region 14,000 years ago. Cook further suggested that using items already discovered, it could be said that humans lived in this area at least 16,000 years ago.

Cook said that Lake Terreton was then 20 or so feet deep and attracted all manner of life — from small animals that fed on surrounding vegetation to much larger animals that fed on the smaller. What is now dusty, sage-covered slopes were once rolling green hills, offering humans hunting vantages.

Manmade efforts to revive that world failed, but those efforts offered lessons that INL and its Cultural Resource Management team hope will be passed on — bringing meaning to generations to come.

The lesson, according to Holmer, is that humans, though capable of great achievement, must learn that expansion and improvement is best made in cooperation with the environment.