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The Bishop Road Site (48CA1612) was recorded by personnel of the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist in May and June of 1982. The site was found during a cultural resource inventory of a proposed route of a Energy Transportation Systems, Inc. coal slurry pipeline. The site is located along the alluvial terraces of Piney Creek and two adjacent unnamed drainages. Surface artifact density for this site area was quite low. However, the presence of cultural materials in cutbanks and higher artifact density in eroded areas, suggests that the bulk of cultural material is located in buried context.

A fairly wide range of lithic sources are represented, including cherts, fine-grained quartzites, non-volcanic glass and obsidian. Bone fragments were also fairly abundant. Seven fire hearths were noted, varying in depth from sod level to three meters below the present surface. Temporally diagnostic artifacts recovered during initial inventory included projectile points characteristic of the Late Archaic and Late Prehistoric Periods, and a trade bead indicating a Protohistoric component. Other points may also represent Early and Middle Archaic components. The range of lithic materials found at this site and the presence of hearth features indicate that this was probably a repeatedly revisited camp or village area.

The data available at this site can provide significant scientific information about aboriginal settlement patterns, hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies, and aboriginal population movements. The range of possibly stratified components could contribute to a refinement of regional cultural chronologies. In addition, the non-local lithic materials present at this site can contribute to the evaluation of aboriginal lithic technology.

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