21-06-2025
Boise history unearthed in archaeologists' own backyard, thanks to Idaho students
On an idyllic green block of downtown Boise, archaeology students were hard at work. The students from the University of Idaho, Boise State University and College of Western Idaho wielded their tools alongside volunteers in front of the State Historic Preservation Office building, carefully unearthing two rectangular hot tub-sized patches of dirt in the well-manicured lawn to uncover artifacts from Boise's buried past.
The work was led by the University of Idaho during the first two weeks of June as an archaeological field school, a program students who want to practice archaeology must complete to gain real-world experience, similar to a residency after medical school.
This dig has been a year in the making. In the summer of 2024, construction workers were digging across the SHPO lawn on Main Street to install fiber-optic cables at the office when they encountered gold rush-era artifacts just below the surface. SHPO officials knew they needed to extend the dig and sought students' help to continue the work, said Dan Everhart, SHPO outreach historian.
'We knew as we uncovered those items that, of course, they extended far beyond our trench, but we didn't have the time or the resources then to continue that investigation further,' Everhart told the Idaho Statesman. 'That's how we ended up coordinating the field school project with the University of Idaho.'
The state archaeologists at the time identified finds like a Union General Service Button from the mid-19th century, shotgun shell caps and discarded animal bones.
'They hit a massive archaeological deposit right there,' said Zoe Rafter, an archaeologist and the public outreach coordinator for Idaho Public Archaeology, a U of I student group, as she pointed at the dig area closest to the building. 'And this being the SHPO office, they sent their archaeologists out there like, 'Oh my gosh, we found so many cool things.''
Mark Warner, a U of I anthropology professor who oversaw the project, said this second SHPO dig was much more intentional, with the added benefit of being able to teach students and test an additional area on the property.
A few yards away from the first dig area at the SHPO site, archaeologists had detected something abnormal below ground with a radar survey. Excavation revealed a row of intentionally placed rocks below the surface that could have been a historic walkway, Warner said.
Like with the work done last summer, many of the artifacts uncovered this summer were part of gold rush history.
Everhart told the Statesman that the SHPO building was originally Idaho's first metal assay office. When 19th century miners dug up metal, they needed their finds to be assayed, a process that purifies, measures and determines the value of the material. In the 1860s, there was no assay office in Idaho, so miners would have to lug their materials to neighboring states.
The federal government allotted funding to construct an assay office in Boise in response, breaking ground in 1870 and opening in 1872. Until 1932, the building performed assays with the chief assayer and his family living on the second floor, Everhart said.
Accordingly, this summer's SHPO dig uncovered both metal assay materials and household artifacts. Archaeologists found hundreds of single-use assay cups known as cupels, each about the size of a golf ball and made of animal bone, ash and silica. Household items found included parts of dishes, chamber pots and dolls. The artifacts will be taken back to Moscow for further analysis, Warner said.
'We had a lot of dinner stuff and a bit more of the domestic things, which I really liked to see come out. I think those were my favorites,' said Arcelia Sciarrotta, an incoming sophomore studying anthropology at the University of Idaho. Alongside other students, she used the dig as her field school experience in pursuit of a career in archaeology.
Making history accessible to students and the public was a major motivation behind the SHPO field school, Warner told the Statesman.
'(We've) been invested for a long time to figure out, how do you share history, how do you highlight the prevalence of history that's everywhere, and how do you share it with Idahoans?' Warner said. 'And this is a great way for us.'
Warner emphasized the contrast between the present excavation and the looming downtown construction on the block directly northwest of the site. While he noted the need for housing and development in Boise, he lamented the history likely forgotten below.
'I'd be willing to bet no one considered what was there 150 years ago,' he said, pointing at the construction. 'There's history below the ground here. There almost certainly was a history below the ground there.'
