A Conversation with Scott Thomas
Former BLM Burns District Archaeologist
Burns, Oregon
by
Ellen Waterston
Combine Scott and Thomas and what do you get? Scottthomas! You may not have heard it before, but it’s a new word that encapsulates a pretty darn wonderful way of being in the world: committed, passionate, reverent, curious, humble, collaborative, funny, professional, place-based, community-oriented, caring, gleeful. At least that was my impression after meeting with archaeologist Scott Thomas of Burns, Oregon. Drawing on the clichéd format of self-help books, here are the six invaluable tips you’ll need to channel your inner scottthomas. You’ll be glad you did.
Know it when you see it: Thomas grew up in Cottage Grove, Oregon near Eugene, a second-generation Oregonian. His grandparents initiated the western migration. His paternal grandparents met in 1912 while both in-state students at Cornell University in New York. After graduating, they moved to Corvallis, Oregon where Scott’s grandfather had been offered a teaching position in mechanical engineering at Oregon State University, then known as Oregon Agricultural College. His maternal grandparents moved west in the late 1800s to nearby Albany, where his grandfather owned a mechanic shop and his grandmother worked as a beautician. Scott fondly remembers both sets of grandparents as being hardy and self-sufficient—harvesting, splitting and chopping wood, gardening, preserving food— traits that their grandson, Scott, deeply admired and would emulate.
Thomas’s parents settled in Cottage Grove, a good vantage point for Scott’s father who sold feed to farming enterprises up and down the Willamette Valley and throughout southern Oregon. Thomas recalls the summer trips he, his two brothers, and parents would take, loading up the car to drive the nearly 500 miles to northeastern Oregon for their annual vacation. The beauty of the farmland, the lakes, and the rugged Wallowas suited young Scott just fine, but it was the summer the family decided to instead head to Frenchglen in southeastern Oregon that Thomas would never forget. All enjoyed the hotel stay, the pension-style family dining and, according to Thomas, “Back then, Frenchglen still had a bath house and hot springs.” While there, the family drove the daunting south loop of Steens Mountain. Thomas recalls being staggered by the views, the sheer magnitude of the high desert. Something shifted inside that twelve-year-old boy. That is when, as they say, it was written. “I knew in my blood this was a place I wanted to spend more time,” states Thomas.
Believe it and you will see it: One manifestation of scottthomas-ness is to not only notice the positive impact of a place or person, but to also build a future around the invitation those experiences hold. To wit, Thomas strategically designed his education so he could support a family while working in archaeology in the high desert. He pursued undergraduate studies at Oregon State University, starting in chemical engineering then switching to zoology, and ultimately receiving a master’s in anthropology from Portland State University (PSU). During his years as a college undergraduate and graduate student, he attended field schools based at the remote Malheur Field Station in Princeton, Oregon, experiences that further solidified his love of the region and its archaeology.
He never doubted that the perfect opportunity to return to southeastern Oregon would show up, even though he would have to wait for nearly two decades before it did. While biding his time, he and his wife, Suzanne, also an archaeologist, lived in Prineville, Oregon where she worked for the Bureau of Land Management, and where Thomas started the Blue Sky Nursery which he operated for nine years. Closing in on his goals, he next spent five years working on the now-defunct Long Creek Ranger District on the Malheur National Forest doing archaeological surveys of proposed timber sales. “I almost never went to the field…just wrote reports.” Not his idea of fun. But then, in 1995, he received what he calls his “dream job offer”: Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Burns District Archaeologist. This new job, a position he held for the next 23 years, covered 3.5 million acres of high desert from north of Burns to the Nevada border. Of note, his territory included public lands surrounding the Oregon Desert Land Trust’s Trout Creek Ranch property. “BLM archaeologists have done archaeology field inspections all around Trout Creek. There are bound to be artifacts present, such as the ‘crescent’ stone tool found in former lake beds in Oregon to the Channel Islands in southern California. It’s a multi-purpose tool, the first Leatherman,” quips Thomas. With the job of a lifetime in hand, the couple settled in Burns, Suzanne retiring to stay at home with their two children but remaining very involved in Oregon’s archaeology community. “We love it,” says Thomas. “Friendliest place I’ve ever lived in.” Gesturing toward horizons far beyond the city limits he adds, “I am at home here.”
Give the lettuce (and the quail) a chance. Guess who plants their garden lettuce based on the quail migration through town? “Little known fact,” says Thomas, “Burns/Hines holds the record for the California quail count.” Clearly fond of the chatty coveys that move through his property, he is equally fond of his vegetable garden and plants it when the quail are nesting elsewhere to give the lettuce a chance.
Guess who makes biscuit root into cakes, a food staple of ancient desert peoples? Out of genuine curiosity and with deep respect, Thomas digs the biscuit root (thuga gah in Northern Paiute and sápk’tit or lúksh in Sahaptin), scours, dries, salts it, pounds it into flour and then, after adding some kefir, honey and wild onion, fries the cakes. Many of the 100 species of this desert parsley grow in southeastern Oregon, eight of them not far from Burns. Thomas points out that one type of bitter root is named Lewisia after Meriwether Lewis of the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition. “Lucky they had it. Tough winters.” He explains that in 1872 the Northern Paiute were designated to receive nearly two million acres in what was referred to as the Malheur Indian Reservation and included traditional lands steeped in their tribal history and rich in traditional foods. But no sooner was the agreement drafted than pressures on the boundaries by European American settlers began. “And then (in 1878) came the Bannock War. The treaty was never signed.” Many Paiutes lost their lives through forced migrations, dispersal and assimilations to urban conditions, but their descendants persevered. Most who now live in the area are on land bought by the Burns Paiute Tribe, acreage less than 1% of the initial reservation that was promised.
He is visibly moved when describing the tribulations Paiutes have endured over millennia. It’s as though he honors these histories as he shapes the cakes, as though he reads every rock, every plant, spear point, sherd of pottery, every bird or animal tracks as though a diary of the past and a cautionary tale about the future.
Know what you know and don’t know: “Archaeology is different than most professions… the more you learn, the less you know.” It’s that complexity, that inscrutability that seems to fuel Thomas’s commitment. He has written about and presented extensively on significant pottery and tool sites in the high desert dating back 500 years and older, but currently, in high desert archaeological circles, what is getting people excited is the evidence of earlier and earlier human existence in Oregon’s Outback.
In 2009, Thomas was working with and helping support a University of Oregon field school based at Sheep Mountain led by fellow archaeologist, Patrick O’Grady. In a BLM video interview, Thomas recalls driving back and forth from Burns every day to the Sheep Mountain site and spotting, six miles out in the desert from Sheep Mountain, a basalt rim “peeking up over the sagebrush.” There was something about it that intrigued him. On his way home one day he remembers thinking to himself “Gotta have some fun today,” so he detoured past the rimrock outcropping that had caught his eye. “The sagebrush at the site was easily seven-feet tall, a sign of deep sediment, a good place to find buried things.” Casually scouting the area, he found spear points, a stone tool and other artifacts. He knew water had been abundant in that part of the desert millennia before. Assessing the surrounding land and rock formations, he guessed the shelter was likely on the shore of a stream with year-round flow. His intuition that this would have been a good place for people to live in the past was right… record-setting right.
Under the guidance of Patrick O’Grady, field schools from the University of Oregon’s Museum of Cultural and Natural History have been excavating Rimrock Draw Shelter every summer since 2011 in partnership with BLM. Now 13-feet deep into the desert floor, the dig has confirmed evidence of human existence dating back 18,000 years. That’s one of the earliest known records of human presence in North America and up-ends the Clovis First theory (which maintains that the Clovis people migrated across the Bering Land Bridge 13,000 years ago, spreading out from there).
Today, Scott Thomas is widely recognized for having originally identified the Rimrock Draw Rockshelter as the critically important archaeological site it turns out to be. His sense about the site’s hydrology was confirmed with collected evidence of streamside plants such as tule, willow, and serviceberry dating back ten millennia… and even Wapato seed, now only found in rain-soaked western Oregon. “All evidence shows it was wetter here, with lakes close by (the site) up to 10,000 years ago,” says Thomas.
Thomas appreciates how deep Native Tribes’ knowledge and history runs in the region, starting before the Cascades mountains were formed, before Mt. Mazama erupted 7,600 years ago. Oral histories passed down through generations recount terrible events and eruptions. “First Americans were here sooner than we thought,” says Thomas. “Antiquity is changing every year. Not as early as Europe and Asia, but we see earlier and earlier here.” He repeats his favorite mantra, “The more you learn, the less you know.”
Accept change as the only constant: The long view. It seems to come with the territory when you’ve spent a life piecing together natural and cultural history coupled with living in one place long enough to notice subtle changes in nature. Thomas doesn’t miss much. “The dragonflies used to come in August, now they come in June.” “Winters are different. Burns used to be much colder.” “The Harney Basin aquifers are getting drier. People are losing wells.” But as an archaeologist, he knows about prehistoric climate change, and knows that, starting 7,000 years ago, the region that had been studded with large lakes and free-flowing streams became much warmer and drier. “There’s no human fingerprint you can put on that event.”
Never retire: Thomas “retired” in 2018 but that didn’t change his enthusiasm for and commitment to archaeology, characteristic of those with an abiding passion. He is as busy as ever—giving talks to archeological groups, leading site tours, remaining involved with the Oregon Archaeological Society and annual Archaeology Roadshow of PSU, and writing papers for peer review journals. The biggest change? “No more collecting of data.” His main goal now is to write up all he has collected over a long and accomplished career. He is motivated by “a sense of obligation to the public” to make his findings available. Looking out over a landscape that daily reminds him that 500 years is a blink of an eye, he reflects on all he has yet to do in his one lifetime, “Not enough time, not even in retirement.”
Feature photo of Scott Thomas at Rimrock Draw Rockshelter by BLM. Archaeological photos provided by Scott Thomas.
Published November, 2024
More from the series
