Tule Springs Archaeological Site is an

archeological site An archaeological site is a place (or group of physical sites) in which evidence of past activity is preserved (either prehistoric or historic or contemporary), and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology and ...

listed on the National Register of Historic Places that is located in the

Las Vegas Valley The Las Vegas Valley is a major metropolitan area in the Southern Nevada, southern part of the U.S. state of Nevada, and the second largest in the Southwestern United States. The state's largest urban agglomeration, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Stat ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...

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 ...

. It is one of a few sites in the United States where humans were once thought to have lived alongside, and potentially hunted, extinct Ice Age

megafauna In terrestrial zoology, the megafauna (from Greek μέγας ''megas'' "large" and New Latin ''fauna'' "animal life") comprises the large or giant animals of an area, habitat, or geological period, extinct and/or extant. The most common threshold ...

, although this view is not supported by the available scientific data and is no longer generally accepted. The archeological site is marked as Nevada Historical Marker 86 and is located within the

Floyd Lamb Park at Tule Springs Floyd Lamb Park at Tule Springs is a park in Las Vegas, Nevada. The park is centered on Tule Springs, a series of small lakes that formed an oasis in this part of the Mojave Desert. One of the larger urban retreats in the Las Vegas Valley, Tule S ...

which is operated by the City of Las Vegas.

History

In 1933, the Tule Springs Expedition, led by Fenley Hunter, was the first major effort to explore the archaeological importance of the area surrounding

Tule Springs Tule Springs is one of the larger urban retreats in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Las Vegas Valley. It is a significant desert ecosystem consisting of a series of small lakes that formed an oasis in this area of the Mojave Desert. Both the springs ...

. Hunter and his team identified an unworked obsidian flake in apparent association with extinct Pleistocene faunal remains at Tule Springs The Nevada State Museum explored the springs area in 1962 and 1963 confirming that the area was home to

Ice Age An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and gree ...

species as well as early

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

n Paleo-Indian peoples. Richard Shutler directed the project, and

Vance Haynes Caleb Vance Haynes Jr. (born February 29, 1928), known as Vance Haynes or C. Vance Haynes Jr., is an archaeologist, geologist and author who specializes in the archaeology of the American Southwest. Haynes "revolutionized the fields of geoarchaeo ...

studied the sedimentary layers, using

radiocarbon dating Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was dev ...

to determine their ages. Animals discovered include

ground sloth Ground sloths are a diverse group of extinct sloths in the mammalian superorder Xenarthra. The term is used to refer to all extinct sloths because of the large size of the earliest forms discovered, compared to existing tree sloths. The Caribbe ...

mammoth A mammoth is any species of the extinct elephantid genus ''Mammuthus'', one of the many genera that make up the order of trunked mammals called proboscideans. The various species of mammoth were commonly equipped with long, curved tusks and, ...

s, prehistoric horses,

American camel ''Camelops''Being occasionally called ''Western Camel'' or ''Yesterday's Camel''. is an extinct genus of camels that lived in North and Central America, ranging from Alaska to Guatemala, from the middle Pliocene to the end of the Pleistocene. It ...

s and the first giant condors found in Nevada. The springs site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 20, 1979.

Notes

External links

Floyd Lamb State Park websiteTule Springs (''Archaeological Site'') Historical Marker Database profile
{{Registered Historic Places Paleo-Indian archaeological sites in the United States Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Nevada History of Las Vegas Native American history of Nevada National Register of Historic Places in Las Vegas