Mark Plew

Archaeologist Mark Plew, a professor and chair of the Anthropology Department at Boise State University, most often looks to the past in his work. By studying artifacts that are hundreds or even thousands of years old, he pieces together the lives and customs of past cultures.

But he’s also got a hand in the present. For the last seven years, Plew has been involved with the Wings and Roots program that is helping to develop a consultative relationship between the Shoshone-Paiute tribes and government agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, Idaho Army National Guard and the U.S. Air Force.

The Duck Valley reservation in Southern Idaho and Northern Nevada, home to the Shoshone-Paiute tribes, covers 453 square miles and a number of state and federal agency jurisdictions. Wings and Roots uses consultation to reconcile various government initiatives and laws with Native American needs and customs. The program allows for government-to-government relations between the tribes and agencies.

“The process is intended to provide a forum for the tribe and the agencies whose activities and initiatives impact the Duck Valley Reservation,” Plew said. “It allows for dialogue on a lot of issues dealing with the tribes and policy.”

Plew’s role is to act as a liaison for the tribes, who have concerns over cultural resource issues. In this capacity, he worked closely in 2003 with the Idaho Army National Guard to help create their Integrated Cultural Resources Management Plan. The management plan deals with the impact of Guard training on sites that are of cultural significance to the Shoshone-Paiutes. In a break from tradition, the tribes were brought in at the beginning of discussion, allowing them to have a greater voice in the development of a document that will affect cultural and traditional resources within the training area.

The course of action outlined in the Integrated Cultural Resources Management Plan will guide the way the Idaho Army National Guard deals with cultural issues. That’s not only an important precedent, Plew said, it’s also been an incredibly successful cooperative venture.

Plew has been involved in archaeology for about 30 years and has been at Boise State since 1985. His main area of scholarly interest is in the hunter/gatherer societies of the last couple thousand years. Outside of his work with the Paiute tribes, Plew ‘s interests include the archaeology of western North America, particularly the Great Basin; South American archaeology; Northeastern Brazil; and Guyana. His studies focus on hunter-gatherers, human ecology, ethnobiology, optimality theory, versity/organizational studies, lithic and ceramic analysis.

I’m very interested in highly mobile groups and the ways they have utilized environmental regimes over time,” he said. “I look at how people strategize the use of different resources.”

It’s an exciting time to be involved in this line of work, as new facts emerge constantly that are literally turning longstanding accepted views of prehistory upside down. Recent research has shown, for example, that many societies thought to have been farmers were actually hunters and gatherers who gardened occasionally. Plew said discoveries of roads, wells and other infrastructure has drastically changed what we know about these earliest hunting and gathering peoples.

Plew’s training in these areas, coupled with his experience working with the tribes, led to his involvement as an expert witness in the Spirit Cave Mummy case still being contested in Nevada and at the national level. That case centers on prehistoric human remains discovered in the early 1940s just outside of Fallon, Nev. Now in the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, the mummy has been radiocarbon dated to about 9,000 years.

“It turned out to be one of the earliest human burials in the western United States,” he said. “As a result, the Fallon Paiutes asked for the remains back.”

Believing the mummy to be an ancestor, tribal leaders hoped to gain custody of the mummy and rebury it. To this end, Plew was asked to help the tribe develop archaeological evidence connecting the mummy to modern-day Paiutes.

After investigating specific types of basketry, chip stone tools and other artifacts found with the mummy, Plew testified before the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) board at Harvard Law School on behalf of the tribe. His testimony helped the Fallon Paiutes win the case, although that finding is still being contested.