A UW student unearthed a stone spear tip — forged thousands of years ago — near the UW greenhouse, which suggests there may be more historical intrigue lurking beneath the soil of the UW campus than archaeologists had originally suspected.

The discovery was made by a UW freshman volunteer on Oct. 22, although the findings weren’t released to the public until Monday.

Ellen Van Wyk was planning on simply digging up and moving rocks in order to plant a garden of grapes. She was not, however, planning on unearthing a piece of Washington’s ancient past.

Initially, when Van Wyk found the stone projectile point, she thought it was just another rock.

Then she and her friend took another look.

“I was really surprised. I obviously didn’t know how important it was at first,” Van Wyk said. “Then again, I haven’t had much experience with finding arrowheads.”

Not knowing what to do with the three-inch spear tip, Van Wyk marked the spot she found it and told Doug Ewing, the UW’s greenhouse manager, about her find.

“In the past, we’ve found mostly beer bottles and litter [in these plots of land near the greenhouse],” Ewing said, “but nothing that was more than a few decades old.”

Ewing — who had given Van Wyk and other students permission to use the small plot of land to create an organic farm — proceeded by contacting the Burke Museum.

Laura Phillips, manager of the archaeology collections at the Burke Museum, then went down to the area of discovery to further investigate.

Phillips said that she and her staff were forced to wait more than three weeks to further investigate, as the consistently rainy weather throughout November would have made it difficult to dig through and distinguish between the colors of the soil.

After digging three test pits, though, Phillips and her team found two more American Indian stone tools: the tip of an arrow point and a flake, or fragment, made of quartzite.

Since Van Wyk made her discovery, Phillips said she and her team have dated the tip to be around 7,000 years old.

The tip — unique for its notched point and convex base — was dated using a process of extrapolation and cross-comparison. Indeed, archaeologists have already extracted tips of this unique style from scientifically and exactly dated sites.

Therefore, they compared the recently found tip with the same tips unearthed at the already-dated sites.

Archaeological research — including historical research and oral history — supports the idea that American Indians have lived on land that is now the UW campus for thousands of years, Phillips said.

“We have some old maps that show Native American trails through campus,” said Peter Lape, an associate professor of anthropology and the curator of archaeology at the Burke Museum. “We’ll have to see if this point was found near where these trails were.”

Lape postulated that the tip might indicate the site was a place where people made tools, a place where an animal was perhaps killed and butchered, or even a village. Without further investigation to contextualize the discoveries, nothing is certain.

For now, Lape is spearheading a campaign that would allow archaeology and Native students as well as others from American Indian populations across Washington to explore the site further as a hands-on research and cultural-studies project.

Whether or not the state will allow this has yet to be determined, Lape said. Typically, the state hires outside experts to further investigate newly found archaeological sites, which are kept track of through a computer map database.

In using outside experts, Lape said, the state prevents local small businesses that specialize in archaeology from having to compete with the cheap labor of students and volunteers.

“I really hope we can use students because I think it would be a great opportunity for archaeology students and Native Americans to work together,” Lape said.

A dialogue is currently underway to reach a final decision.

Coincidentally, on the site where the tip was discovered — now protected from disturbance by the state law — there were tentative plans to build a new biology building.

Until further archaeological investigation, these plans are on hold.

As for Van Wyk, her exciting find has not swayed her into studying archaeology. For now, she plans on majoring in either biology or art.

“The whole process has been really interesting, but I don’t think so,” she said when asked about possibly taking up archaeology as her field of study.

Reach reporter Brian Byrnes news@dailyuw.com.