DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, picture a Roberts County wheat field, 1933. A local farmer is out there plowing, just working his land, when his plow starts turning up something that doesn't belong.
Big bones. Chalky, pale bones. And even a farmer knows the difference between a cow bone and something that has no business being in a Texas wheat field.
Word gets around, the way it does in a small county. Area residents come out to have a look. Among them is J.A.
Mead — county judge, amateur archeologist, the kind of man who keeps one eye on the law and the other on history. And what they find stops everybody cold. Alongside those enormous bones, there is a man-made stone artifact.
A Clovis fluted spear point. The same kind of point that had just been discovered in 1932 at the Blackwater Draw site near Clovis, New Mexico. That's when the scale of this thing starts to dawn on people.
Because those bones? Mammoth elephants. Now here's where it gets interesting.
By 1934, Dr. E.H. Sellards of the University of Texas has heard about this place and gotten himself involved.
He secures funding through the Works Progress Administration, and in 1937, he leads a full, extended excavation of what they're calling the Miami site — or, as it was known initially, the C.R. Cowan site, named for the landowner. And C.R.
Cowan, for his part, had just one request: refill it when you're done. That's it. That's all he asked.
What they found beneath that wheat field was a playa lake — filled with blue clay sitting up to about two feet below ground level. That clay had formed from vegetation that once filled the pond. And in that clay, they found the remains of three to five adult mammoths.
And at least one baby mammoth. Let that settle in for a moment. But it's not just the bones.
Among them, archeologists found man-made hunting tools. One spear point was recovered less than three inches from a mammoth's atlas vertebra. Three inches.
Two other spear points were found, along with a hide scraping tool. The artifacts and the bones together, right there in the same ancient clay, tell a story the earth had been keeping for around twelve thousand years: early man, hunting mammoth at a watering hole, with skill and intention. The evidence out of that Roberts County field has fed the debate ever since about what caused the extinction of late Pleistocene era animals approximately twelve thousand years ago.
It shows that man and mammoth existed at the same time in North America. And it shows that early man was not some stumbling newcomer — he was an efficient, experienced hunter. The Miami site remains one of the most significant early man sites in all of North America.
Found by a farmer with a plow, confirmed by a county judge with a curious mind, and excavated from a field that had been growing wheat right on top of it all along.
What the marker says
In 1933, a local farmer plowing a wheat field began uncovering large, chalky bones. Knowing them to be too large to be cow or buffalo bones, several area residents, including county judge and amateur archeologist J.A. Mead, investigated the site and made a significant discovery; a man-made stone artifact was found alongside the bones of what were mammoth elephants. The investigators identified the artifact as a Clovis fluted spear point, similar to items discovered in 1932 at the Blackwater draw site near Clovis, New Mexico. In 1934, Dr. E. H. Sellards of the University of Texas became involved. Securing funding through the Works Progress Administration, he led an extended excavation of the Miami site beginning in 1937. Landowner C.R. Cowan asked only that the site be refilled following the dig. Known initially as the C.R. Cowan site, the Miami site was found to be a playa lake filled with blue clay up to about two feet below ground level. The clay had formed from vegetation that once the pond. The remains of three to five adult mammoths, as well as the bones of at least one baby mammoth, were found at this site. Among the bones were man-made hunting tools, such as a spear point found less three inches from a mammoth’s atlas vertebra. Archeologists found two other spear points and hide scraping tool. The artifacts alongside the bones indicate that the animals were killed at a watering hole. The evidence is significant, showing the contemporary existence of man and mammoth in North America. It also demonstrates that early man was an efficient, experienced hunter, information that has been used in the debate over the causes of extinction of late Pleistocene era animals approximately 12,000 years ago. The site remains one of the most significant early man sites in North America. (2003)