What is the Hartley Mammoth? Gary Hartley was walking along the broken sandstone cliffs in the vicinity of Abiquiu Lake in 2013, looking for rocks, arrowheads, old bones, or whatever might turn up. The rugged topography consists of a deep canyon bordered by cliffs composed of Triassic sandstone and mudstone. Today’s landscape is the product of many millennia of faulting, catastrophic landslides, and continual erosion. The result of these processes is a chaotic mix of sandstone boulders and blocks of bedrock sprinkled liberally along a steep, stepped cliff. Lower benches of varying size and shape are separated from one another by shallow drainages that flow only after heavy localized rains.
As Gary was walking along one of these benches, some odd pieces of white material caught his eye. He though that they were pieces of bone, but they didn’t look like the occasional bones of cows or horses that he had seen. Instead, they included some very large chunks, and lots of smaller pieces the size of a finger joint. Nearby, he spotted some pieces of flaked stone. Looking more closely, he found a small, stubby, rather nondescript-looking obsidian point. Recognizing that he was on a parcel of land owned by his neighbor, Dr. Timothy Rowe, he took his findings to Tim’s house. In a rather fortuitous twist, Tim is a vertebrate paleontologist and Professor of Geosciences at the University of Texas, Austin. Tim immediately recognized that the bone fragments appeared to be those of a large mammal, possibly a proboscidean (elephant). Returning to the site of the discovery, Gary and Tim followed a trail of small scraps of bone up the channel of a small wash, and found two places where the bone was concentrated. One of these locations turned out to be the eroded end of a tusk, confirming the identification of the bone as that of an elephant. Some preliminary controlled exploration revealed a second tusk and the lower portion of the skull; both tusks were still in their normal, in-life arrangement. Some 2 meters upstream of the tusk, a group of three ribs turned up where another area of concentrated bone fragments was found eroding out of the little wash.
Gary Hartley (left) and Tim Rowe (right) at the Hartley Mammoth site.
Three mammoth rib segments as exposed shortly after discovery of the site.
Recognizing the potential significance of the find, Tim set about trying to find an archaeologist to take a look at what he and Gary had uncovered. He contacted Dr. Bruce Huckell, an archaeologist with the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. When he sent digital photos of the bones and the obsidian point, Huckell was able to identify the point as a heavily reworked Clovis point. Clovis points, widely recognized as the hallmark of one of the earliest technological traditions to reach the New World, have been found intimately associated with the bones of mammoths and their close relatives, the mastodon and the gomphothere, at about 15 sites in North America. The presence of the point so close to the bones of this mammoth suggested the possibility that it may have been the victim of Clovis hunters some 13,000 years ago. So, it seemed logical to investigate the site and see whether we could determine if the point and the mammoth remains represented a kill/butchery site, or whether the two were only in close proximity but were in fact of different ages. To understand the geological context of the study, Rowe and Huckell turned to two geoscientists from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico: geomorphologist Dr. Grant Meyer, and soils geomorphologist Dr. Les McFadden. The four of us created a proposal with the goal of investigating the Hartley Mammoth (as we have christened it), as well as trying to obtain a more detailed understanding of how Clovis people utilized the mammoths and other elephants they killed and butchered at sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, and South Dakota. We are indebted to the National Science Foundation for their support of the research.
Hartley Mammoth 