The Donner Party experience is a notorious tale of heroism, desperation and survival, according to a recent Discovery Channel episode of “Unsolved History”.
But for the local archaeologist and the University anthropology professor featured in the television special, the melodramatic focus on cannibalism overshadowed the importance of University technology and research to the identification of recently excavated Donner Party bone fragments.
“In terms of a typical TV show, I thought it was okay,” said assistant adjunct professor Guy Tasa, a research associate at the Museum of Natural History. “But it wasn’t very heavy on science.”
Tasa was just one of a handful of professionals interviewed by the Discovery Channel about whether the bone fragments are evidence of 19th century cannibalism.
In 1846, the Donner Party was stranded in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains when their California-bound wagon train took an uncharted shortcut over the summit. The party of emigrants separated into family units after the first few months to set up campsites and try to brave the cold and imminent starvation. After more than five months of hunger, the desperate survivors described the horror of losing 36 of the original 81 party members, and their final resort to cannibalism. To date, no physical evidence of cannibalism has ever been found.
After viewing the episode last week, Tasa said the Discovery Channel’s sensational focus on cannibalism clearly aimed to attract audience members rather than educate them.
“In a lot of ways, you can’t blame them for that,” he said. “The audience probably wouldn’t want to see all the technical details.”
Considering the first 45 minutes of the episode were entirely on the dramatization of the Donner Party experience, Tasa said he was disappointed to see such a small amount of time spent on explaining the actual results of research on the excavated bone fragments.
“They tried to fit too much into an hourlong show,” he said. “I was left wondering about a lot of things.”
Squeezed into the last quarter of the show was the filming of a five-day archaeological dig in August that took place at the Alder Street campsite, one of many the Donner Party visited. With the help of instruments such as ground-penetrating radar, which were unavailable to earlier researchers, the crew found verifiable evidence of the party’s campsite and eventually uncovered burnt and hacked bone fragments.
Oregon Department of Transportation archaeologist Julie Schablitsky identified the largest bone fragment found at the Alder Street site as coming from a large mammal, but not necessarily a human. After the bone fragment was found, Tasa used the University’s field emission scanning electron microscope to identify it as bone from either deer, bears or humans.
Because the episode made little time for analysis of the fragment, Schablitsky said she and her colleagues were left with more questions than answers after viewing the crammed information.
“(The special) was more entertainment than education,” she said with a frown.
She added that due to extremely dramatic music and re-creations that surrounded the portrayal of cannibalism, she and Tasa are considering working with television stations that are more educational.
Anthropology major Victoria Reed — a student enrolled in Tasa’s fall term osteology lab that focuses on the study and identification of bone fragments — said she was entertained by the episode but hardly impressed.
“It was interesting, but over-dramatized, as most things on the Discovery Channel are,” the senior said in an e-mail.
Reed said she was happy to see that her professor didn’t “cave in” at the end of the special by making inaccurate assumptions about the excavated evidence.
“(Tasa) confirmed that the non-diagnostic bone fragments were from a large mammal but wouldn’t say absolutely that the fragments were human,” she recounted. “I think the (Discovery Channel) producers were probably a little disappointed by that.”