The Anzick Site (24PA506), located adjacent to Flathead Creek, a tributary of the Shields River in Wilsall, Park County, Montana, United States, is the only known Clovis burial site in the New World. The term "Clovis" is used by archaeologists to define one of the New World's earliest hunter-gatherer cultures and is named after the site near Clovis, New Mexico, where human artifacts were found associated with the procurement and processing of mammoth and other large and small fauna.H.M.Wormington, "Ancient Man in North America", Denver Museum of Natural History, Popular Series No. 4, 1949From Kostenski to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic-Paleo-Indian Adaptations. Edited by Olga Soffer and N.D. Praslov. Plenum Press, 1993.
Discovery
In 1961, while hunting marmots at a sandstone outcrop on the Anzick family property, about one mile south of Wilsall, Montana, Bill Roy Bray found a stone projectile point and bones that were covered with red ocher. In the same area, in May 1968, Ben Hargis and Calvin Sarver of Wilsall, Montana were removing talus from the same outcrop and inadvertently found the red ocher-covered partial remains of a one- to two-year-old child (Anzick-1) associated with stone (8 Clovis points, scrapers, heat treated bi-faces), bone and antler artifacts (one identifiable as elk), totaling 90.Macintyre, Ian G., and M. Amelia Logan, "Microprobe Analysis of Ocher On Bone from The Anzick Burial Site", Plains Anthropologist 46.176, pp. 122–124, 2001 Four of the Clovis points had been reworked. Artifacts were radiocarbon dated at about 12,000 years Before Present, calibrated using the INTCAL13 standard. Nineteen additional artifacts were found in the area.Juliet Morrow and Stuart Fiedel, "New Radiocarbon Dates for the Clovis Component of the Anzick Site, Park County, Montana" in Paleoindian Archaeology- A Hemispheric Perspective. University Press of Florida, 2006. Two antler rods associated with the burial also radiocarbon dated to the same time.Becerra-Valdivia, Lorena, et al., "Reassessing the Chronology of the Archaeological Site of Anzick", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 115, no. 27, pp. 7000–03, 2018 The stone used came from 6 different quarries.Morrow, Juliet E., "Anzick: A Clovis Burial in Montana", Central States Archaeological Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 27–32, 2006 In another location in the same area, not associated with the Clovis child, the men found a partial skull fragment of a 6- to 8-year-old male child (Anzick-2) that radiocarbon dated to around 8600 years Before Present.Douglas Owsley and David Hunt, "Clovis and Early Archaic Crania from the Anzick Site (24PA506), Park County, Montana", Plains Anthropologist, 46 (176), pp. 115–124, 2001 Dr. Larry Lahren, an archaeologist from Livingston, Montana was the first researcher to examine and record the site (24PA506), artifacts and human remains at the request of Ben Hargis not long after the discovery in 1968.Larry Lahren, "Homeland: An Archaeologist’s View of Yellowstone Country’s Past", Cayuse Press, Box 1218, Livingston, Montana, 2006 The artifacts, not including the human remains, are held by the Montana Historical Society and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Wilke, Philip J., et al., "Clovis Technology at the Anzick Site, Montana", Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 242–72, 1991
The first systematic excavation of the site was performed under the direction of Dee C. Taylor of the University of Montana in 1968. Taylor published his findings in 1969. He reported that none of the artifacts and skeletal remains had been left in-situ by Hargis and Sarver, and that soil and objects from multiple stratigraphic layers had been mixed and back-filled by the ranch owner before archaeological examination was undertaken. According to Taylor, the 90 artifacts recovered by Hargis and Sarver included items from multiple eras, leaving carbon dating as the only means of establishing the site as a Clovis-era burial.
Human remains
For thirty years, the skeletal remains were in the private possession of a former investigator. In 1998, they were one of the landowners. The remains are known as Anzick-1. In 2014, the child was re-buried at an undisclosed location in the Shields Valley.
Because of the manner in which the site was discovered, its importance was initially dismissed but subsequently confirmed.D.C. Taylor, "The Wilsall Excavations: An Exercise in Frustration", Proceedings of the Montana Academy of Sciences, 29, pp. 147–150, 1969Larry Lahren. "The Anzick or Wilsall Site: A Clovis Complex Burial in the Shields River Valley of Southwestern Montana", Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology, Norman, Oklahoma, 1971Larry Lahren and Robson Bonnichsen, "Bone Foreshafts from a Clovis Burial In Southwestern, Montana", Science 186, pp. 147–150, 1974 Genetic studies estimate that approximately 80% of all present-day Native American populations on the two American continents are direct descendants of the Clovis boy’s family, and the remaining 20% are more closely related with the Clovis family than any other people on Earth.
References
Further reading Canby, T. Y., "Far-flung Search for the First Americans", National Geographic Magazine 156(3), pp. 330–363, 1979 Fiedel, Stuart J., "The Anzick genome proves Clovis is first, after all", Quaternary International 444, pp. 4–9, 2017 Fiedel, Stuart J., "Origins of the first Americans: Before and after the Anzick genome", Reviews in Anthropology 46.4, pp. 164–179, 2017 Fogelman, G. L., "The Anzick Site Paleo Cache", Indian Artifact Magazine 9.3, pp. 8-ll, 1990 Jones, Scott, and Robson Bonnichsen, "The Anzick Clovis Burial", Current Research in the Pleistocene 11, pp. 42–44, 1994 Jones, J. Scott, "The Anzick site: analysis of a Clovis burial assemblage", Oregon State Masters Thesis, 1996 Lahren, L. A., "The Ongoing Odyssey of the Anzick Clovis Burial in Park County Montana (24PA506): Part 1", Archaeology in Montana 42, pp. 55–59, 2001 Jennifer Raff and Deborah a. Bolnick, "Genetic Roots of the First Americans", Nature 506, pp. 162–163. 2014 Rasmussen, Morten, et al., "The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana", Nature 506.7487, pp. 225–229, 2014 White, Samuel Stockton V., "The Anzick Site: Cultural Balance and the Treatment of Ancient Human Remains (Toward a Collaborative Standard)", Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, Missoula, MT: University of Montana ScholarWorks, Graduate School, M.A. Thesis, 2015 White, Samuel Stockton V., "The Anzick Artifacts: A High- Technology Forager Tool Assemblage", Ph.D. Dissertation, Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers, 2019 "Investigating The First Peoples, The Clovis Child Burial" - Montana Curriculum Guide - 2014