On April 22, 2021, 19 acres burned on a sloping face south of Double Knob, a modest peak nestled just south of the Buncombe-Henderson County line. A day later, mountainside still aflame, Scott Ashcraft arrived to document the damage from what would become known as the Seniard Creek Fire.
Ashcraft had been a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist in the Pisgah National Forest for nearly three decades. Assignments like this were routine. But Seniard would prove unusually consequential for Ashcraft: In the five years since the fire, it has become both a site of great scientific promise and a symbol of what Ashcraft describes as a culture of mismanagement, destruction and retaliation.
Over three days, Ashcraft documented enough artifacts, many at an ancient quarry and all dating to the millennia before Europeans came into contact with Native Americans, to come to a tantalizing conclusion.
For decades, the Forest Service has relied on a probability model that suggests most such artifacts will be found in relatively flat areas. This rule of thumb has left steeper slopes, which make up the vast majority of North Carolina’s national forests, largely uninterrogated in any formal sense.
Yet archaeologists’ work in these mountains has often led them past intriguing sites on hillsides — things that, by the model’s lights, weren’t supposed to be there. By 2021, Ashcraft had begun documenting these occurrences whenever he could, developing a theory that the Forest Service’s guidelines had,...
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