Archaeology in Montana and Yellowstone
Over 400 generations of people have survived and prospered in and around the Greater Yellowstone region since the end of the last ice age. Archaeologists seek to tell the stories of the ancient paleoindians as well as those early Europeans who migrated here. How did they survive and prosper. What can the rare artifacts of the deep past tell us about our human ancestors?
Archaeology in Montana began with Lewis & Clark. They first recorded petroglyphs on Pompey’s Piller, stick lodges along the Yellowstone river and recent buffalo jumps with rotting bison carcasses. The films below explore what we have learned about Montana’s past through the efforts of archaeology.
This is a story of Montana archaeology in the last half of the twentieth century. It follows the career of noted Montana archaeologist Les Davis as he criss crosses Montana searching for archaeological evidence of the earliest Montanans. Along the way we learn about the discovery of human antiquity in the world, first in Europe then North America. We explore Paleo Indian lifeways at the end of the Pleistocene glaciation. And we discuss different theories for the extinction of ice age mammals and the Clovis culture.
Montana's Indiana Jones
The Sheepeater Indians, an offshoot of the Shoshone tribe, lived in small bands in the mountains in and around the Yellowstone Plateau. The film explores references in the literature as well as archaeological evidence of the Sheepeaters. The Sheepeaters lingered as one of the last hunter-gatherer cultures while plains indians like the Blackfeet and Sioux had acquired horses. The Sheepeaters were sought after for their fine tanned sheep hides and exquisite bows made from Rocky Mountain sheep horns.
This is the story of an old Sheepeater woman who told her life story to a dentist in Billings, Montana.
People of the Hearth: Paleoindians of the Northern Rockies
With archaeologist Les Davis, Smith’s film People of the Hearth: Paleoindians of the Northern Rockies won First Place in the 1993 American Association of Museums’ Fourth Annual Muse Awards. This was one of the first in-depth films about archaeology in Montana and it was a precursor to the recent film, 13,000 Years Ago in Montana: Les Davis and the Search for the First Montanans.
When a hotel was slated to go up on an old parking lot just off Main Street in Bozeman, Montana, The Extreme History Project and Montana State University teamed up to excavate the plot of land that once housed Bozeman’s Red Light District in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In July of 1967 in far eastern Lindsay Montana, dryland farmer Joe Walker was running his combine along a Dawson County road when he spied some white, chalky material weathering out of the borrow pit. Upon closer examination, he was stunned by its size and thought that it looked like pieces of a fossilized elephant tusk.
News of the find made its way to Montana State University in Bozeman, and young PhD candidate Les Davis was hired to direct the Lindsay Mammoth recovery project. Over 30 hot days in July and August, Davis and six students painstakingly uncovered the massive mammoth grave.
Dr. Maria Nieves Zedeño gave the keynote address at the 2025 meeting of the Montana Archaeological Society in Livingston, Montana on April 12. Her work with the Blackfoot Confederacy in collaboration with genomic researchers shows that “the genomics of sampled individuals from the Blackfoot Confederacy belong to a previously undescribed ancient lineage that diverged from other genomic lineages in the Americas in Late Pleistocene times.” During her talk, Dr. Zedeño described her work along with co-author Francois Lanoë in northern Montana at the Billy Big Spring site and the fascinating details of discovering evidence of the Blackfoot people in Montana and Canada during Pleistocene glacial times.
