Kansas Campsite May Break Dates

[Madame Butterfly 0]

Posted on Mon, Jun. 13, 2005

 

 

 

 

 

Kansas dig may have found early campsite

 

Associated Press

 

 

GOODLAND, Kan. - Archaeologists have returned to a dig near the Colorado-Kansas border for a third summer, but this year's dig has taken on new importance. Radiocarbon dating results finished in February showed that mammoth and prehistoric camel bones found at a rural site near Kanorado, about a mile from the Colorado border, dated back to 12,200 years ago.

 

That would mean people who once camped at the site may have arrived in the Great Plains 700 years before historians previously thought.

 

The bones appear to have tool marks made by humans, who probably broke them to extract marrow for food or to make tools, said Steve Holen, curator of archaeology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

 

Finding tools near where the bones were found would disprove the widely held belief that humans arrived in North America about 11,500 years ago.

 

"The best thing we could find is a very patterned artifact - one that it's obvious humans made it," Holen told the Lawrence Journal-World. "It would change the way we think about early humans in North America."

 

More than 100 archaeologists from the Denver Museum, the University of Kansas, the Kansas Archaeological Association and the Kansas Archaeology Training Program of the Kansas State Historical Society are working at the site.

 

The dig is being funded partly by the Odyssey Archaeological Research Fund, an endowed program trying to find the earliest evidence of humans on the Great Plains.

 

Kim Kilmartin, a Baker University sophomore from Topeka, is spending her summer at the site after completing an internship in a processing lab at the Kansas State Historical Society.

 

"It's actually a lot more fun than it looks," she said. "In the lab, you actually know what you're looking for. Finding it in the field is very cool, even if it's the smallest stone flake or bone fragment."

 

Evidence of campsites for early plains people have already been found, the researchers said. Pieces of tools and a bead from the Clovis era - from about 10,800 years ago to 11,500 years ago - have been uncovered.

 

Rolfe Mandel, an archaeological geologist with the Kansas Geological Survey, said this was the first site uncovered from the period in Kansas or Nebraska, and one of only a handful from the Midwest.

 

"We knew they were here," he said of Clovis-period people. "We didn't know anything about how they may have spent their time while they weren't traveling across the landscape. That's been very elusive."

 

In prehistoric times, the Kanorado site likely had marshlike water that drew large animals, which attracted humans, Mandel said. People of the era were highly mobile, though, so they likely didn't stay for long.

 

But workers at the site would be thrilled to find evidence to push back the dates humans arrived in the Great Plains.

 

If such an artifact was found, the researchers say, it would raise questions about whether the earliest inhabitants of North America came across the Bering Strait from Asia. Instead, they may have arrived by boat in South America and journeyed northward.

 

Holen said that would raise doubts about the long-held scientific doctrine that humans have been in North America for about 11,500 years.

 

"There is a strong contingent that still believes that," he said. "We're going to do what we can to disprove that."