The Anzick site (24PA506) in Park County,

Montana Montana () is a state in the Mountain West division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbi ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, is the only known

Clovis Clovis may refer to: People * Clovis (given name), the early medieval (Frankish) form of the name Louis ** Clovis I (c. 466 – 511), the first king of the Franks to unite all the Frankish tribes under one ruler ** Clovis II (c. 634 – c. 657), ...

burial Burial, also known as interment or inhumation, is a method of final disposition whereby a dead body is placed into the ground, sometimes with objects. This is usually accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing the deceased and objec ...

site in the New World. The term "Clovis" is used by archaeologists to define one of the New World's earliest

hunter-gatherer A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

cultures and is named after the site near

, New Mexico, where human artifacts were found associated with the procurement and processing of mammoth and other large and small fauna.H.M.Wormington, "Ancient Man in North America", Denver Museum of Natural History, Popular Series No. 4, 1949From Kostenski to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic-Paleo-Indian Adaptations. Edited by Olga Soffer and N.D. Praslov. Plenum Press, 1993.

Discovery

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. 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 Antlers are extensions of an animal's skull found in members of the Cervidae (deer) family. Antlers are a single structure composed of bone, cartilage, fibrous tissue, skin, nerves, and blood vessels. They are generally found only on male ...

artifacts, totaling 90, that were radiocarbon dated at about 12,000 years Before Present. Nineteen additional artifacts were found in the area.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. Two antler rods associated with the burial also radiocarbon dated to the same time. The stone use came from 6 different quarries. 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. Dr. Larry Lahren, a North American

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

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.Larry Lahren, "Homeland: An Archaeologist’s View of Yellowstone Country’s Past", Cayuse Press, Box 1218, Livingston, Montana, 2006 The artifacts, not including the human remains, are at the Montana Historical Society and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Human remains

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 but subsequently confirmed.Larry Lahren and Robson Bonnichsen, "Bone Foreshafts from a Clovis Burial In Southwestern, Montana", Science 186, pp. 147-150, 1974 The remains are known as Anzick-1.

Discovery

Human remains

References

Further reading