Did The Clovis People Have Neighbors? The investigation of the Cooper’s Ferry site suggests that two peoples with different material cultures were living in North America some 13,000 years ago. By Marcia Hill Gossard
T
hree years ago, Loren Davis was standing with a historic photo in his hand looking at the south side of a canyon along the Salmon River in western Idaho. He was trying to match up the slow growing hackberry trees in the photo with the ones growing on the hill. Davis wanted to be sure he was in the same place where archaeologist B. Robert Butler, more than 40 years earlier, had uncovered Western Stemmed projectile points at the Cooper’s Ferry site. Davis had already examined Butler’s field notes to compare the stratigraphic layers Davis had uncovered in the western side of Cooper’s Ferry, which he calls Area A, with those of Area B, where Butler dug. A and B are just 60 feet apart, and when Davis first excavated Area A in 1997, he also discovered Western Stemmed points. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal fragments associated with the points indicated they were between 13,220 and
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winter • 2015-16
