Most of us go to Yellowstone National Park for the wildlife, the scenery, the amazing geothermal features, or simply for outdoor adventure. Early Euro-Americans visiting the area were amazed by natural features like geyser basins and hot springs on a scale encountered nowhere else in their travels. Ultimately, this place became the world’s first national park, but for millennia it had been a place of human spiritual and subsistence importance.

When the first Euro-American explorers “discovered” these wonders, Native American hunters and gatherers were camped along the shores of Yellowstone Lake and along the Yellowstone and Madison rivers. Crow, Shoshone, and even Nez Perce used what was to become the park, and they were only the most recent in the 12,000-year prehistory of Native American use of this place. With creation of the park in 1872, consistent with treatment of Native Americans everywhere, they were moved off these ancestral lands onto reservations. Today, 26 Native American tribes claim cultural association with Yellowstone National Park.

This book by University of Montana archaeologist Douglas MacDonald summarizes what is known from the archaeological record of Native Americans' long experience with this place, and it adds up to a picture of extensive use over the millennia. The story begins with arrival of the first Native Americans around 12,000 years ago. MacDonald describes who these people were, where they came from, and how they came to what is the Yellowstone area. This Paleoindian Period lasted about 4,000 years, and was followed by the Early and Middle Archaic Periods that continued to about 3,000 years ago. The Late Archaic Period lasted 1,500 years, giving way to a Late Prehistoric Period that ended with contact by Euro-Americans at the turn of the 19th century.

MacDonald explains in considerable detail the characteristics of these prehistoric periods as revealed by research in the park. For each period, he describes the sites that yielded information about the tools people used, what they hunted and gathered, and where, when, and why they moved through Yellowstone. As he unveils the story he reveals how archaeologists have come to understand it. There are, for instance, asides on radiocarbon dating; how the sources of the most common tool material, obsidian, were identified; how paleoenvironments and paleo-shorelines around Yellowstone Lake were mapped and used to locate sites; and what the archaeological record reveals of the roles of women at Yellowstone Lake in prehistory. He describes in lay terms the modern archaeological methods that have uncovered Yellowstone prehistory.

Tools archaeologists use today are fascinating. For instance, MacDonald points out that animals the hunters were taking during the various prehistoric periods were difficult to determine, there being few animal remains in sites because the corrosive soils of this volcanic area deteriorate bone very rapidly. But while bone is scarce, “another good way to identify the types of animals hunted is protein analysis. While bone may deteriorate over time, some protein residues from blood, fat, and other bodily material sometimes stick to stone tools. Analysis of such protein can tell archaeologists which animals were hunted and butchered by stone tools.” Also, to determine what was gathered, microscopic plant remains and pollen can be analyzed to identify the plants used by residents of a site. MacDonald summarizes what these and other methods have revealed at major sites.

Before Yellowstone ranges across the modern park, describing in some detail what archaeologists have learned about prehistoric activity around Yellowstone Lake, along the major rivers, in the mountains, and around hot springs, thermal areas, and geysers. Archaeology, he notes, has debunked some misconceptions about Native American use of Yellowstone, such as the belief that Native Americans were fearful of geysers and thermal areas and stayed away from them.

It is no wonder that some people believed that native peoples in Yellowstone had this fear. In his 1879 park report, early park superintendent P.W Norris states that Native Americans greatly feared the geysers, thermal areas, and hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. In all likelihood, Superintendent Norris was simply trying to promote the notion that Native Americans did not frequent the park and that European American tourists were safe.

Nez Perce, passing through the park in 1877 as they fled the U.S. Army, encountered a tourist party and in their brief passage killed two of that party and held others hostage, so Norris was trying to be reassuring, but he was wrong. Archaeologists have uncovered extensive evidence that Native American were attracted to thermal features. They came to hunt game attracted by the warmth of these areas. They came seeking “the power of the geysers and thermal waters to contact spirits that inhabited them.” They established seasonal villages in thermal basins.

MacDonald shares fascinating discoveries, such as the fact that tribal members would go high into the mountains and even establish short-term villages to gather whitebark pine nuts. They would knock cones down with long poles, burn them in small fires to loosen the seeds, tap them out of the cones, and shell them, thus acquiring a valuable source of protein. One of MacDonald’s graduate students learned in his research that Blackfeet tribal members often followed the Clark’s nutcracker, a bird of the corvid family, in the fall, knowing that this bird subsists principally on pine nuts, caches them, and knows where to find them. Anecdotes like this offer glimpses into the deep knowledge Native Americans had of the natural history of the Yellowstone area and how they used it.

Before Yellowstone is beautifully produced from front cover to back. It is paperbound on high quality paper with excellent illustrations. When a map was needed to follow the text, there it was. When a major site was described, MacDonald’s photography illustrated it, along with some Park Service photos.

A marvelous figure summarizing the prehistoric periods and illustrating them with projectile points from each period is very helpful in grasping the long sweep of Yellowstone prehistory. Images by illustrator and archaeologist Eric Carlson are scattered through the book, firing the imagination about what life was like for the Old Ones. The abundant illustrations greatly help to leaven information necessary to tell the story. MacDonald even includes a short fictional narrative about what life might have been like in the Elk River Valley 400 years ago.

Archaeologists are scientists, their prose often dense with their adherence to strict conventions of the field. In this book, MacDonald breaks a bit from convention, and it works nicely for the non-specialist reader.

Visitors to Yellowstone National Park now have a resource that will add another dimension to their visit to this remarkable place. Today the Grand Loop Road goes right by Obsidian Cliff, the most important archaeological site in the park. A small roadside display explains the importance of the cliff in the history and prehistory of the park. MacDonald notes that this was the first such display in any national park and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The value of Yellowstone to the 26 tribes who trace a relation to it, and to the rest of us who go there, grows as we know more about it. MacDonald admits throughout that there is much more to be learned about Yellowstone prehistory, and we are grateful to him and his many students for the work they have done so far.