Fremont Indian State Park: The Highway That Revealed a Lost Civilization

You are driving through Clear Creek Canyon, and the highway beneath your tires is the reason one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in Utah history was ever made.

In November of nineteen eighty-three, crews were grading fill for Interstate Seventy through this narrow canyon when they began cutting into a hillside called Five Finger Ridge. Elementary school students had already tipped off archaeologists at Brigham Young University that the ridge held pottery shards and collapsed depressions in the ground. What road engineers uncovered confirmed it: the largest known Fremont Indian village ever found in the American West.

Over the following two years, archaeologists excavated more than one hundred distinct structures from the ridge, including twenty pit houses and forty above-ground habitation rooms. Hundreds of thousands of artifacts came out of the soil, from unfired clay figurines to a distinctive style of moccasin made from dew claws, to pottery types that had never been documented before. The maximum population of the village at its peak was roughly one hundred people, though not all structures were occupied at the same time.

The Fremont were not a single tribe but a broad cultural tradition that flourished across central and northern Utah and neighboring parts of Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho from roughly four hundred to thirteen hundred of the Common Era. They farmed corn, beans, and squash along creek bottoms, stored their harvests in stone granaries, and left behind some of the most distinctive rock art in the Southwest. The Clear Creek site was occupied from approximately six hundred to thirteen hundred of the Common Era. Then, like Fremont communities across the region, it was abandoned. A series of severe droughts beginning in the twelve hundreds collapsed the agricultural way of life, and new groups of hunter-gatherers moving in from the Great Basin appear to have reshaped the human geography of Utah entirely.

The Utah Legislature established Fremont Indian State Park in nineteen eighty-five to protect what the highway had exposed. The park opened in nineteen eighty-seven. Today it protects hundreds of rock art panels, more Fremont petroglyphs and pictographs than anywhere else in the state, alongside the museum that holds the artifacts that a road crew almost bulldozed into history.