Frontiers in Colorado Paleoindian Archaeology: From the Dent Site to the Rocky Mountains

3. New Interpretations of the Dent Mammoth Site: A Synthesis of Recent Multidisciplinary Evidence

87 Robert H. Brunswig C h a p t e r t h r e e New Interpretations of the Dent Mammoth Site A Synthesis of Recent Multidisciplinary Evidence The Dent Mammoth Site (5WL269) was discovered in the spring of 1932 when flood runoff eroded mammoth bone from a draw draining low sandstone cliffs west of the South Platte River floodplain near Milliken, Colorado (Figure 3.1). A passing railroad foreman, Frank Garner, noted the eroding bones and informed the local Dent depot operator, Michael Ryan, of the find. Ryan’s son later reported the discovery to his Regis College geology professor, Father Conrad Bilgery. In November 1932, Bilgery and several Regis students traveled to Dent and conducted a brief excavation. During the excavation a large, basally fluted projectile point, of a type later named Clovis (after Clovis, New Mexico), was recovered among the bones. In late 1932, after winter closed down Bilgery’s excavations, he notified Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) paleontology curator, Jesse D. Figgins, of the discovery. At the Robert H. Brunswig 88 same time, he also “most generously extended to the Colorado Museum of Natural History the privilege of removing the remainder of the fossils” (Figgins 1933:4). The next year, starting on June 13, 1933, a Museum of Natural History field crew excavated at Dent until the work was suspended and the site backfilled in late July. The 1933 excavation was directed by a museum staff member, Frederick Howarter, whose crew consisted mainly of amateur volunteers, including two museum trustees, along with Father Bilgery and several Regis College students. Under Howarter’s supervision, the quality of recovery and documentation techniques appreciably improved from the earlier Regis work, although it fell well short of modern standards. The museum’s excavation was hampered by Regis College’s earlier, less professional excavation that resulted in destruction of much of the bone bed’s depositional integrity. In an unpublished letter to Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History, Figgins wrote: You will recall that Father Bilgery discovered a fine blade there [Dent] in 1932 and Howarter [the museum’s excavation supervisor] uncovered a second when removing the remainder of the skeletons. We will get two skeletons out of the Dent deposit but Regis had removed the major share of the material with College students under Father Bilgery. They made a frightful job of it, and while their entire collection was turned over to us, most of it is useless. There were fourteen pairs of lower jaws in the Dent deposits, from babies to old 3.1. Geographic location of the Dent site. New Interpretations of the Dent Mammoth Site 89 examples, but they were mostly wrecked skulls—completely so, and only two skeletons came from the Howarter collecting. Despite the museum’s 1933 professional excavation, little substantial data from the early Dent research were documented, or at least survived. Lack of good field documentation is likely a result of two main factors: (1) the earliercited “amateur” excavation by Bilgery and his students, and (2) wholly inadequate site documentation by the subsequent 1933 “professional” excavations. Even accounting for lower standards of field excavation of the day, the lack of all forms of data—including site maps, adequate photographic documentation, and field notes—has severely hampered and confused our understanding of Dent to the present day. Extensive site reconstruction efforts by this author have resulted in a “paper trail” of around thirty-five years of Dent research and correspondence. That research supports a conclusion that original documentation of the early excavations was restricted to only broad descriptions by Bilgery and Figgins and a brief film of the 1933 excavations. The latter visual record of the Dent excavations is a five-minute 16-mm film taken of the July 7, 1933, excavations. The only still photographs of the excavations were made from film negatives. Although very brief, the film does show the location of a recovered Dent Clovis point in association with mammoth bone. On the other hand, it was not sufficiently wideangled to show the overall bone bed perspective, consisting only of bone bed excavation close-ups. Once the 1933 excavations were completed, Dent remained untouched until 1973, when graduate students and faculty from the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder undertook a limited backhoe test of previously unexcavated eastern site margins (Haynes 1974:135–136; Spikard 1972). Several...