By David Malakoff
Small tubular bead made from the lower limb of a hare.
Photo: Todd Surovell / University of Wyoming
“I think I’ve got something,” Ann Stephens called out as she brushed dirt from a small gray object peeking from the hard-packed soil she was excavating. Soon, Stephens was surrounded by a pack of curious onlookers, all participants in a University of Wyoming (UW) field camp held this summer on a windy, dusty grassland beside La Prele Creek near Douglas, Wyoming. “Maybe a bison bone?” guessed one. “Looks like a river cobble,” offered another. The anticipation was palpable as Stephens, a UW graduate student, meticulously revealed a crescent-shaped stone. Then, clarity. “It’s a biface,” exclaimed Madeline Mackie, an archaeologist at Michigan State University and a co-leader of the dig. Long ago, she explained, someone had taken a piece of quartzite and chipped flakes off both sides to create a sharp serrated edge. But the tool, likely used for scraping or cutting, was broken; Mackie estimated nearly half was missing. Still, it was an “excellent find,” she said, adding: “Now let’s find the other half!”
The biface was just one of the notable artifacts discovered during this summer’s dig along La Prele Creek, where archaeologists have discovered an extraordinarily rare combination of features. Not far from the skeleton of a young Columbian mammoth, they’ve found stone spear points and tools associated with the Clovis culture that flourished in North America from roughly 12,700 to 13,200 years ago. They’ve unearthed bone sewing needles and a decorative bone bead that are among the oldest such artifacts ever found on the continent. And they’ve assembled evidence that people established at least four campsites around the carcass of the mammoth and likely built temporary structures as they worked to butcher the huge elephant-like mammal.
Those discoveries have put the La Prele Mammoth site in an exclusive club, said archaeologist Gary Haynes, an emeritus professor at the University of Nevada. There are only about two dozen Clovis-era sites in North America that hold evidence of early Americans killing or butchering a mammoth or a related species of Proboscidean mammal, a group that includes extinct mastodons, other extinct species, and living elephants. But Haynes said associated campsites have been found at only two of those sites: Murray Springs in Arizona and El Fin del Mundo in Mexico, so La Prele “is far more than just another Clovis-mammoth association.” Archaeologist Michael Waters of Texas A&M University said the site offers “a unique glimpse of what a Clovis campsite and mammoth processing area really looked like.” The site has also added new data to a long-running debate over whether Clovis people primarily hunted mammoths and other Proboscideans, or also relied on smaller prey. And the discovery of one puzzling artifact has raised an intriguing challenge to conventional thinking about when early Americans began making a new style of stone point known as Folsom.
This is an excerpt of A Mammoth Undertaking in American Archaeology, Fall 2024 | Vol. 28 No. 3. Subscribe to read the full text.
FURTHER RESEARCH
Human-elephant interactions: from past to present, Konidaris, G. E., Barkai, R., Tourloukis, V., Harvati, K., Tübingen University Press (2021)
Spatial analysis of a Clovis hearth centered activity area at the La Prele Mammoth site, Madeline Mackie et al, edited by Leland Bement and Kristen Carlson from Diversity in Open Air Site Structure Across the Pleistocene/Holocene Boundary, University Press of Colorado (2022)
Use of hare bone for the manufacture of a Clovis bead, Todd Surovell, et al. Scientific Reports, (2024)
Confirming a Cultural Association at the La Prele Mammoth Site, Converse County, Wyoming, Madeline Mackie, et al. (May 2020)
