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John Hollenhorst Reporting When school kids go on a scientific field trip, you don't ordinarily expect them to make a significant discovery. But that seems to have happened.
It was a discovery important enough to get a professional archaeologist literally dancing, on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake.
Where buffalo roam today, people roamed hundreds of years ago.
In the shade of a temporary dome, grade school kids are working hard to uncover evidence of the ancients.
Minoka Shirai/ Escalante Elementary School: "I like the digging and finding the bones and everything. Then I can learn where it's from and everything."
To no one's surprise, the kids in this summer archaeology program have found remnants of the Fremont culture. They lived a few hundred years ago, and many of their encampments have been found.
But the big surprise was when one of the kids found a stone weapon-point last week. Archaeologist Ron Rood says it's apparently from the much older Archaic period, thousands of years ago.
Ron Rood/ Assistant State Archaeologist: "The Archaic, they... those sites are rare."
The discovery caused a ripple of excitement.
Abram Sorensen/ 8th Grade: "Ron was doing his little dance for us. He does this funny little dance when he finds something."
Ron Rood: "I was very excited, yeah."
This lush vegetation and the wildlife it attracted is probably the reason ancient peoples came here. It's the same reason modern day ranchers put in a pipe. There's a spring here.
Learning about such things, hands-on, is what the summer program is all about. Here the kids found a piece of a butchered animal.
Alannah Erskine/ 5th grader: "We're not exactly sure where it came from or what animal it's from. But we know it's a bone."
Ron Rood: "These kids are all making a great contribution to understanding the archaeology of Utah."
And making discoveries, even on the less exciting days.
Only two other Archaic sites have ever been found on Antelope Island.
