November 14, 2003 - Today's Other News Items

Donner Party Research Taps New Technology

Archeologists at the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural History are using new technology and methods to identify intriguing details of a famous and tragic saga of the American West. The Donner Party, consisting of 81 people in 20 wagons, left Illinois in 1846 for California to seek a better life, but were caught by an unseasonably early fall blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Surviving members of the group were rescued in the spring of 1847, but witnesses reported seeing fragments of butchered human bones and other human remains suggesting that the starving travelers had resorted to cannibalism.

The scarcity of artifacts at the Alder Creek camp site in California left many skeptical, but Julie Schablitsky, a research associate of UO's Museum of Natural History and an archaeologist with the Oregon Dept. of Transportation, had a breakthrough in August when she found the remains of a fire hearth.

As she sifted through the charred debris, "suddenly I discovered a bone with two chop marks in it," she said. "If it turns out to be a human bone it will be the first direct link to cannibalism."

Schablitsky then called in fellow MNH research archeologist Guy Tasa, who is also an osteologist (bone specialist), to do further studies. He took the bone, along with additional fragments found at the site, back to the museum and studied them with the help of a Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The Discovery Channel, which is funding the dig, recently spent two days on campus filming at the Materials Science Institute, where the SEM high-magnification images were made. The instrument is one of a number of state-of the-art devices that make up The Center for Advanced Materials Characterization in Oregon (CAMCOR). JoAn Hudson, director of the CAMCOR's microimaging group, explained that in addition to serving the campus community, the instruments are available to outside researchers. The SEM's use was highlighted on the Discovery Channel's Oct. 8 episode of "Unsolved History."

(You can view Guy Tasa's segment from the "Unsolved History" episode.)

Tasa was able to identify the chipped bone fragment as coming from a mammal of roughly human size. That rules out the livestock that the settlers brought with them and smaller game animals, but the fragments were too small to make any positive identification as human. So a definitive answer to the cannibalism question is still elusive.

But Schablitsky plans to go back to the Alder Creek site in the Spring and continue to search for additional evidence. It was at this lesser known site where most of the Donner family members and a few other pioneers spent a horrific winter huddled under tents of quilts, buffalo robes and brush. Eight of the 21 people camping at this location died. A larger group from the party built three crude cabins six miles away at a site now known as Donner Lake. There, 14 of the 60 stranded pioneers died before rescuers arrived.

Schablitsky is a specialist in retrieving genetic material from archaeological artifacts and she hopes to eventually obtain human DNA from the bones recovered at the site and link them with living Donner Party descendants.

"It's important to keep the human element in archaeology," she emphasized. "We have a responsibility not just to science, but to the Donner descendents."

Free lecture series continues

Schablitsky talked about the remarkable Donner Party dig Oct. 10 and detailed how she uses DNA to help answer archeological questions at the museum's current free lecture series "Sandals and Gumshoes: Archaeology Underfoot." Coming lectures include Tom Connolly, director of research at the museum, who will discuss "From High Desert to High Alps: Shoes of the Iceman, Shoes of Ancient Oregon," Oct. 17, and Mel Aikens, director of the museum, who will talk about "Walking and Running in the Desert West: The Tarahumara of Northern Mexico," Oct. 24. The lectures take place from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in Room 175, Knight Law Center (on the corner of 15th Avenue and Agate Street).