Mastodon Dig Wrapping Up With Pile of Bones, Flint, Charcoal, and Four Teeth

Ohio History Connection Archaeology Blog's "Diorama showing mastodon being butchered by Clovis hunters". The Ohio History Connection, formerly the Ohio Historical Society, has a museum at its headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.

On Saturday, October 18, volunteers at the Cedar Creek Mastodon Site dig in Morrow County found a fourth mastodon tooth, which leaves only four more left to be found.  It was a tooth found by a farmer after drainage pipe was laid in his soybean field that prompted the excavation which began in August.  In addition to the teeth, volunteers have found parts of bones from legs, ribs, ankles, and tusks.

In his October 21 e-mail to volunteers, Ashland University’s Dr. Nigel Brush said, “Last Saturday, the volunteers who braved the cold made excellent progress on the excavation and also completed the excavation and removal of the fourth mastodon tooth from the site.  There are four teeth in the mandible and four in the maxillary. We have two front and two back teeth, but have not yet determined whether they are from the mandible or maxillary (or both).”

Brush said that there are only four units left to excavate, with one, Unit 15, almost done.  In his Oct. 14 e-mail Brush had  said that volunteers in Unit 15 are “still excavating a pile of rocks, bones, and flint flakes in the western 1/3 … Portions of two rib bones are visible in this unit.”

Goal:  Finish for Season by Nov. 8, More Work Next Year

The goal is to finish by November 8, weather permitting—but just for the winter.

In an article in the Sunday (Oct. 19) Columbus Dispatch newspaper 

Brush  said that the dig could go on for “as long as two years.”

By October 11, the volunteers  had finally reached  down to the layer containing most of the mastodon bones. 

The article explains the possible significance of finding the bones on piles of rock and gravel:  The Paleo-Indians may have butchered and cleaned the mastodon on those rocks.

Brush’s  Oct. 1 report to volunteers says  that “We are finally coming down on the layer containing the mastodon bones, although the long bones and ribs are broken into pieces…The bones are scattered about and lying on top of a gravel/cobble layer.  A few flint flakes are also being recovered from this layer.”

The flint flakes could be parts of weapons or tools  used by prehistoric Paleo-Indians to kill or butcher the mastodon.  The Dispatch article says that some of the pieces have been sent for testing for the presence of mastodon blood.

Charcoal found at the site could mean the Ice Age hunters cooked and maybe smoked some of the meat at the site.

Who Were First People in North America?

In his Oct. 12 column in the Columbus Dispatch , John Switzer talks about the controversy over who the first people who occupied North and South America were.   I first learned about the controversy while talking to a student at the Morrow County dig.   I had always thought that the first people were Paleo-Indians who arrived about 13,000 years ago.  They were called Clovis people, based on the fluted style of their projectiles, some of which have been found in Ohio, Switzer said, and some embedded in mastodon bones.   Now some archaeologists believe the Clovis people were preceded by 3,000 years by a different group of Paleo-Indians.

It still amazes me that people did not arrive in the Americas until 16,000 years ago, I guess blocked by the Ice Age!

In his October 2 report, Dr. Brush also asked for volunteers during the week to help with the lab work at Ashland University, saying that, “In addition to our Saturday excavations….there is a significant amount of work to do back in the lab at Ashland University in order to clean, sort, catalogue, and store the materials we are recovering from the site. “

I missed the past three digs (Sept. 27, Oct. 4, and Oct. 11), but hope to make the Oct. 25 dig, and the remaining digs, and maybe work at least one day at the University lab.

Making Ice Age Weapons on a 3-D Printer!

In an interesting post on the Ohio History Connection blog, Brad Lepper  shows a replica of the fluted spear style that marks the Clovis people, made by a laser scan. 

 He says they can “create near perfect 3D digital models of the objects.  These digital models can be reproduced in plastic using a 3D printer allowing us to generate as many copies as we want from a digital ‘mold’ that will never wear out. These reproductions can be used as hands-on educational resources or sales items for the museum shop.”

Lepper also has a great “Diorama showing a mastodon being butchered by Clovis hunters”,  that gives probably a fairly realistic idea of how it was done.  It shows Paleo-Indians hanging the meat on a  rack, which I would  think could have been for smoking the meat as well as for cooking it. 

Did Ice Age Hunters Hunt More Rabbits Than Mastodons?

Lepper also has a link to a 2008 column he wrote for the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch newspaper  in which he discusses a finding that of eight Clovis knives examined, half had the blood or rabbits.  The other four knives, Lepper reports,“ were stained with the blood of a variety of relatively large mammals, including both cervid (caribou, deer or elk) and bison blood on one [knife], bison blood on another, bear blood on a third, and white-tailed deer blood on the fourth.

As further proof that the Clovis hunters were not the macho big-game hunters usually depicted, Lepper cites a Cree Indian from northern Ontario telling an anthropologist that he lived on rabbit all one winter.

As an amateur who has only the experience of living with a group of Cree Indians in far northern Saskatchewan decades ago, I can say that they just about only hunted moose.  They supplemented their diet  by catching fish in large nets year-round and with beaver meat, from the animals they trapped for fur.  But I never saw them with a dead rabbit.

We, on the other as rank amateurs depended on snaring rabbits.  The trapper who was the main hunter for the group agreed we could stay in one of his cabins as long as we only trapped animals like squirrels and rabbits, which he did not trap for fur.  We lived off squirrels and rabbits and fish, beaver, and moose provided by this hunter/trapper.   He taught us to smoke our fish in a tee-pee style rack.

Giant Rabbits?

The story of living off rabbit reminds me of a man from a company trying to convince the Crees and other Canadians to allow a pulp mill near Saksatchewan’s La Ronge.  He told us that even if there were no moose because the woods was clear cut, the Crees could live on the rabbits, which would be much bigger because they’d have more shrubs to browse on!  Also, rabbit populations rise and fall in a cycle, which would make them a less dependable—not to mention smaller—source of food.

I’ll grant Lepper one point though, as shown by his diorama, women may have done most of the butchering work, not to mention cooking!

Handling Smithsonian Museum Pieces by Computer

Lepper’s description of the spearpoint replicas reminds me of the scans of a mastodon skeleton made by the University of Michigan’s  Museum of Paleontology, which I wrote about on September 24.  

And Lepper gives a link to the Smithsonian’s “X3D Beta” work with a whale skeleton, a wooly mammoth skeleton, and other museum specimens that are fun (as well as educational) to maneuver!

The difference is that the Smithsonian and Michigan Museums are putting their collection online for examination in 3-D from all angles, as though handling the artifacts, while the Ohio History Connection museum is giving people copies to handle or keep.