about 110 stone and bone artifacts that accompanied a child burial. The funeral offerings were consecrated—like those on the ridges of my youth—with sacred red ochre, an ancient burial practice that goes back nearly 100,000 years in the Old World. These grave offerings constitute the largest and most spectacular collection of Clovis tools ever found (the Clovis culture dates from about 13,100 to 12,800 years ago and was once believed to represent the earliest Americans who presumably dashed down the ice-free corridor from Alaska along the Rocky Mountain Front into Montana.) The one-and-a-half-year-old child is the oldest skeleton ever found in the Americas and the only known Clovis burial.
Partly because construction workers had discovered the burial and because rural Montana was far from the scholarly centers of Pre-Columbian archaeology, professionals largely ignored this stunning find and the significance of the site was dismissed or discredited in the scientific and popular literature for decades. At this time, archaeology reentered my life. With two professional friends, I helped organize a re-excavation.
Notebooks, 1999
I first heard about the Clovis Skeleton on a cold November day in 1998. The Livingston, Montana Natural History Exhibit Hall was sponsoring a tour through Paradise Valley where I live, just north of Yellowstone National Park, and a gruff, bearded, 55-year-old archaeologist, outfitter, and guide named Larry Lahren conducted it. Our group explored ancient bison-kill sites along limestone cliff faces and examined red-ocher pictographs that marked the entrance to a canyon just south of town. In passing, Lahren happened to mention a site he had studied north of Livingston, on veterinarian Mel Anzick’s ranch—a place that held special significance for him. Intrigued, I invited Lahren to join me at the Murray Hotel Lounge for a drink.
Lahren has a reputation that matches his imposing physical presence; he’s built like a football player, thick and hard, with a bit of a middle-age belly that belies the strength and quickness he once used to sweep three drunken cowboys off a Livingston bar. My friend the poet Jim Harrison had warned me, half joking, that it was OK to have two beers with Lahren, but that I should leave before he finished the third. We were on number two when Lahren started getting fired up about the importance of the Anzick site.
“It produced the only Clovis skeleton—period!” Lahren exclaimed. “But nobody in the archaeology establishment wants to hear it. But I know it’s true.”
Given the archaeological importance of Clovis artifacts, it seemed amazing that the only Clovis burial assemblage in the world had been found just a few miles away, and yet remained uncelebrated and almost unknown outside the professional literature. As Lahren continued his remarkable tale, however, I realized that when it comes to the Anzick site, missed opportunities abound.
One morning in June 1968, two local construction workers drove a front-loader and a dump truck out to the base of the elephant-head bluff. Mel Anzick had given the men permission to dig up fill for the local high school, and after Ben Hargis filled a dump truck, Calvin Sarver drove the first load into town.
Hargis continued working. He began punching into the scree at the base of the cliff with the bucket of the front-loader, and as he backed away with a full load, something fell down into the bucket, catching his eye. Bright red powder cascaded down the cliff from the place the object had fallen. Sarver returned to find Hargis excited: He’d found a very old and impressive-looking flaked tool.
That evening after work, Sarver and Hargis returned with their wives to explore the cliffside. They began digging with their hands, and almost immediately a huge chert blade, stained red, fell out. It was flaked on both sides, the sort of tool called a biface. Then another, and another—one made of yellow chalcedony, the next of red jasper. Stacks of big bifaces and spearheads spilled down the slope. Mixed in with the artifacts were fragments of a small human skeleton covered with red ocher; all the stone implements and bone tools were stained with it too. “We were up to our armpits in that red stuff,” Sarver recalled recently. Faye Hargis remembers that they took the tools home and tried to scrub them clean—a task that left the kitchen sink stained red for a week.
Lahren, then a graduate student in archaeology at Montana State University, in Bozeman, heard about the find and asked to see the points, expecting to see weapons from a buffalo kill site, the sort that are common in these parts. He got his first look at the collection in Sarver’s kitchen. There was some small talk, Lahren said, and then Sarver and Hargis went out and returned carrying ten five-gallon buckets full of artifacts into the house.
“I was speechless,” Lahren told me. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.” He realized the two men might have found important evidence that could help solve the mystery of the identity of the first Americans.
Lahren told Dee Taylor, a professor from the University of Montana, about the discovery, and after identifying the points as Clovis, Taylor presided over a two-week dig in the summer of 1968. But the enterprise was troubled from the start. “It is almost enough to make strong men weep,” he wrote later. The amateur diggers had “succeeded in taking almost everything that was there ‘in situ.’”
Taylor’s dismissal of the Anzick site established the attitude that remained prevalent for the next two decades. Artifacts from the Anzick site appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1979, but the site was only mentioned briefly in the accompanying story about early Americans.
As Lahren and I sat that evening in the Murray Lounge, as I listened to this strange archaeological saga, I realized how passionate Lahren still was about the Anzick site, and I found myself catching his fever—a new outbreak of the enthusiasm I’ve had for archaeology since I was a boy. I envied the people who lived in that valley 13,000 years ago. I couldn’t help thinking that the supreme American adventure had been the first one. When the humans first reached our shores, America was the greatest unexplored frontier on earth. Lahren seemed to feel the same way I did, and he clearly had unfinished business out in the Shields Valley.
And so I wasn’t really surprised about what happened next. The bar was getting noisier, but we sat silently for a few minutes, and then Lahren said, “I’d love to get back in there with a crew and dig this the right way.”
Those were the magic words. I immediately thought of Papworth. Once when he was running low on cash, Mark sold me his beloved 12-gauge Ithaca LeFever shotgun.
But then we lost touch. Three decades had passed since we last spoke when out of the blue I received a letter from my old professor. He’d read my book, Grizzly Years, in which I described taking vengeance on a particularly nasty rural phone booth. “I bet that was my shotgun you used to shoot that phone booth,” the letter said. Enclosed was a business card: “Mark Papworth, Ph.D., Chief Deputy Coroner, Thurston County, Special Deputy-Homicide, Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. Member of the Faculty, Evergreen State College.”
I wrote back, “Dear Dr. P.: I shot that sucker six times with great satisfaction using your shotgun.” Our friendship resumed. In the last decade of his life, Papworth and I were family, sharing his home in Arizona in winter and mine in grizzly country when the snows melted.
I knew that Papworth would be tempted by Lahren’s scheme, and indeed he was. He agreed to join the team, saying, “It will be a last great adventure for this old man.” For the rest of the winter and into spring, the three of us talked and schemed and brainstormed. In May, we visited Mel and Helen Anzick at their home near Livingston and asked for permission to resume the work that had come to a halt in the 1970s. To our delight, they said yes.
Perhaps the Anzick site was going to get its due. If not, we would at least have a hell of a lot of fun.
July 1999, 8 a.m. a warm, sunny morning, and our 11-person crew—the 1999 Anzick Excavation Team—is crowded around the sandstone outcrop, sipping morning coffee from paper cups. The ground rules include “no poking around” (because this is a consecrated burial site) and no serious beer drinking until 5 p.m. We’ve planned two short digs for this summer, squeezed in between Lahren’s paying job for a mining company as a contract archaeologist and Papworth’s family obligations. Standing at the base of the bluff, we see that a giant bite has been taken out of the slope by previous digging. We will clear this area back to the cliff and down to the bedrock, revealing the