Archaeologists may have found an encampment of the ill-fated Donner Party, some members of which resorted to eating their dead after being stranded by snowstorms in the Sierra Nevada en route to California in October 1846.
Piece of Donner dish.
CREDIT: NMH |
Two years ago, Julie Schablitsky of the University of Oregon's Museum of Natural and Cultural History and Kelly Dixon of the University of Montana, Missoula, used ground-penetrating radar to zero in on buried artifacts at the rumored Donner family camp in Alder Creek meadow near Truckee, California, one of two camps the party made. This summer they hit pay dirt: "blackened, spotty, darkish soil" covering a 60-centimeter-wide hearth and thousands of small bone fragments that had been scraped and boiled clean. They also found mid-19th century artifacts such as ceramic shards, handmade bottles, lead shot, and pieces of what might have been the teacher's slate belonging to Tamzene Donner, the wife of the party's leader, George Donner.
Although there are many descriptions of the tragedy, no archaeological evidence has been found until now. "A lot of people had rejected the idea that [Alder Creek] was the camp," says archaeologist Donald Hardesty of the University of Nevada, Reno. "We would profit enormously to have physical remains." Schablitsky says that DNA samples from the bones are being tested to see if they are animal or human.
