Anzick Site 01 A Google Earth Image modified to indicate the town of Wilsall, Montana as well as the Ansick site

The Anzick site (24PA506) in Park County, Montana, United States, is the only known Clovis burial site in the New World. The term "Clovis" is used by archaeologists to define one of the New World's earliest hunter-gatherer cultures and is named after the site near Clovis, New Mexico, where human artifacts were found associated with the procurement and processing of mammoth and other large and small fauna.[1][2]

Discovery

The Anzick Site (registered as 24PA506) at about the elevation of the bottom of the hillside below the arrow, is the only known Clovis burial site in North America

In 1961, while hunting marmots at a sandstone outcrop on the Anzick family property, about one mile south of Wilsall, Montana, Bill Roy Bray found a stone projectile point and bones that were covered with red ocher.[3] In the same area, in May 1968, Ben Hargis and Calvin Sarver of Wilsall, Montana were removing talus from the same outcrop and inadvertently found the red ocher-covered partial remains of a one- to two-year-old child (Anzick-1) associated with stone (8 fluted projectile points, scrapers, heat treated bi-faces), bone and antler artifacts, totaling 90,[3] that were radiocarbon dated at about 12,000 years Before Present. Nineteen additional artifacts were found in the area.[4] Two antler rods associated with the burial also radiocarbon dated to the same time.[5] The stone use came from 6 different quarries.[6] In another location in the same area, not associated with the Clovis child, the men found a partial skull fragment of a 6- to 8-year-old male child (Anzick-2) that radiocarbon dated to around 8600 years Before Present.[7] Dr. Larry Lahren, a North American archaeologist from Livingston, Montana was the first researcher to examine and record the site (24PA506), artifacts and human remains at the request of Ben Hargis not long after the discovery in 1968.[8] The artifacts, not including the human remains, are at the Montana Historical Society and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.[9]

The first systematic excavation of the site was performed under the direction of Dr. Dee C. Taylor of the University of Montana in 1968. Dr. Taylor published his findings in 1969. He reported that none of the artifacts and skeletal remains had been left in-situ by Hargis and Sarver, and that soil and objects from multiple stratigraphic layers had been mixed and back-filled by the ranch owner before archaeological examination was undertaken. According to Dr. Taylor, the 90 artifacts recovered by Hargis and Sarver included items from multiple eras, leaving carbon dating as the only means of establishing the site as a Clovis-era burial.[10]

Human remains

Main article: Anzick-1

For thirty years, the skeletal remains were in the private possession of a former investigator. Since 1998, they have been in the possession of one of the landowners. Because of the manner in which the site was discovered, its importance was initially dismissed[2] but subsequently confirmed.[4][8][10][11][12] The remains are known as Anzick-1.

References

  1. ^ H.M.Wormington, "Ancient Man in North America", Denver Museum of Natural History, Popular Series No. 4, 1949
  2. ^ a b From Kostenski to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic-Paleo-Indian Adaptations. Edited by Olga Soffer and N.D. Praslov. Plenum Press, 1993.
  3. ^ a b Owsley, Douglas; Hunt, David; Macintyre, Ian; Logan, Amelia (May 2001). "Clovis and Early Archaic Crania from the Anzick Site (24PA506), Park County, Montana". Plains Anthropologist. Maney Publishing. 46 (176): 116–7. doi:10.1080/2052546.2001.11932062. JSTOR 25669710. S2CID 159572593.
  4. ^ a b Juliet Morrow and Stuart Fiedel, "New Radiocarbon Dates for the Clovis Component of the Anzick Site, Park County, Montana" in Paleoindian Archaeology- A Hemispheric Perspective. University Press of Florida, 2006.
  5. ^ Becerra-Valdivia, Lorena, et al., "Reassessing the Chronology of the Archaeological Site of Anzick", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 115, no. 27, pp. 7000–03, 2018
  6. ^ Morrow, Juliet E., "Anzick: A Clovis Burial in Montana", Central States Archaeological Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 27–32, 2006
  7. ^ Douglas Owsley and David Hunt, "Clovis and Early Archaic Crania from the Anzick Site (24PA506), Park County, Montana", Plains Anthropologist, 46 (176), pp. 115-124, 2001
  8. ^ a b Larry Lahren, "Homeland: An Archaeologist’s View of Yellowstone Country’s Past", Cayuse Press, Box 1218, Livingston, Montana, 2006
  9. ^ WILKE, PHILIP J., et al., "Clovis Technology at the Anzick Site, Montana", Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 242–72, 1991
  10. ^ a b D.C. Taylor, "The Wilsall Excavations: An Exercise in Frustration", Proceedings of the Montana Academy of Sciences, 29, pp. 147-150, 1969
  11. ^ Larry Lahren. "The Anzick or Wilsall Site: A Clovis Complex Burial in the Shields River Valley of Southwestern Montana", Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology, Norman, Oklahoma, 1971
  12. ^ Larry Lahren and Robson Bonnichsen, "Bone Foreshafts from a Clovis Burial In Southwestern, Montana", Science 186, pp. 147-150, 1974

Further reading

Categories