new acquisition PRE-CLOVIS SITE DONATED TO THE CONSERVANCY

Pre-Clovis Site Donated to the Conservancy

Fourteen-thousand-year-old site demonstrates clear association between prehistoric peoples and Pleistocene elephants.

It was an unusually hot, dry summer in 1977 in the Sequim region of Washington’s northern Olympic Peninsula. Emanuel Manis decided to take advantage of these conditions and excavate a dry pond in the marshy field that was his front yard. Little did he know that some 14,000 years earlier, water from a melting glacier formed a pond in this very spot that attracted ancient animals and the PaleoIndians who hunted them.

After a few hours of digging, Manis brought up what looked to be parts of old logs, one about six inches in diameter and four feet long, the other a curved piece over six feet long and seven inches in diameter. Washing them off, he called excitedly to his wife, Clare, who realized that the objects were mastodon tusks. Clare insisted that they call a fossil expert. Richard Daugherty, an archaeologist, and Carl Gustafson, a zoologist, both with Washington State University, came to the Manises’ farm. Thus began a project that would continue for the next eight years. More than 50,000 people from all over the world have visited the site. Clare Manis Hatler is donating the two-acre site to the Conservancy in the name of her late husband.

Although mammoths and mastodons are known to have roamed North America during the last Ice Age until roughly 12,000 years ago when they became extinct, it is rare to find complete skeletons due to the rapid decay of bones. However, the Manises’ marshland provided excellent preservation of the ancient skeleton.

While excavating the pond, researchers uncovered a molar identified as that of a mastodon, and a fragment of rib that appeared to have a remnant of an ancient bone spear point embedded in it. Further examination showed it

WASHINGTON

Emanuel Manis is perched over the two mastodon tusks he dug up in his front yard in the summer of 1977.

was a spear point, making this the oldest archaeological site on the Olympic Peninsula by at least 4,000 years, and the first direct evidence of humans hunting mastodons in North America.

The sediments surrounding the bones appeared to have been deposited soon after the glaciers retreated, dating the site’s occupation to between 11,000 and 14,000 years ago. Analysis of pollen and seeds collected from the deposits and radiocarbon dating of vegetal material preserved in the alluvium confirmed these dates.

Bison remains with evidence of butchering were found scattered among the mastodon bones in the same geologic deposits. Other artifacts recovered from the pond include several pieces of worked bone and tusk, a cobble spall tool, and a stone projectile point that dates to a later

period, between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago. Charcoal and bones found on high ground about 25 yards from the pond suggest that prehistoric peoples made use of the area on several occasions between 7,000 and 14,000 years ago.

As the great significance of the site became clear, the Manises built a fence, arranged parking and other details to accommodate the thousands of visitors who eventually flocked there. The Manises also allowed the researchers to build a laboratory and storage shed onto their barn so that work could continue at the site. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day from 1978 to 1985, the site was opened to the public. Local school groups were allowed to visit

A field school of university students works at the site in 1978. The students exposed bones by washing away the dirt that covered them. A large bone from the Manis mastodon. The bones on the mastodon’s right side had numerous cuts and scratches, indicating that it was butchered.

the site each September after it was officially closed.

“We enjoyed every minute of it,” said Clare of the tours that she and Emanuel gave to the thousands of people that visited the site over the years.

Three years after the initial mastodon discovery, the remains of another extinct elephant with signs of human butchering were uncovered about 60 feet southwest of the main site in deposits older than those in which the first mastodon was found. It is highly likely that more remains are buried at the site. The site was covered over in 1985 and now looks much as it did before Emanuel’s discovery. —Tamara Stewart