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Bone hunter
Chance discovery leads anthropology's Matt Hill on long adventure
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It was just by chance that Matt Hill discovered artifacts from an expedition
to an obscure site in western Nebraska.
At the time of his discovery, Hill was conducting research for his doctorate
at the Nebraska State Museum at the University of Nebraska. That world-class
museum is home to some of the best collections of prehistoric artifacts
from what is now the Great Plains of the United States.
Hill was unaware however of an expedition that the Nebraska State Museum
had undertaken to the Clary Ranch site near Ogallala in western Nebraska.
That is until he opened up a box and made his discovery.
Inside Hill found artifacts of exceptionally well-preserved bison bonebed
and associated stone tools. The available evidence suggested that the
site was a secondary processing area located near a mass kill, and is
8,500-9,000 years old.
All told, 41 prehistoric bison skeletons were recovered in the initial
expeditions by the Nebraska State Museum. But interest faded and the artifacts
were packed away until Hill ran across them.
"I quickly incorporated this site into my doctoral research,"
he said.
Most of Hill's research has centered on the behavior of late Ice Age Paleoindian
hunter-gatherers on the northwestern Great Plains and in the western Great
Lakes and Upper Mississippi River Valley.
Now 25 years later after the last major dig at the Clary Ranch, the assistant
professor of anthropology and 15 anthropology and geology undergraduate
and graduate students spent 30 days excavating the site in May and June.
"Because of the records of the past expeditions, we knew exactly
where we were going do dig," said Hill, who had mapped the area over
the two previous summers. "There had been no one here in 20 years
when I first started looking at this project."
Hill and the students conducted the fieldwork to resolve several questions
about the site's formational history, as well as reconstruct the local,
basic and regional paleoecology.
"The ultimate research goal is to track organizational responses
of Paleoindian hunter-gathers to changes in food resource availability,
distribution and predictability at the end of the last Ice Age,"
Hill said.
Hill has developed an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Iowa
State, Johns Hopkins, Boston University, the University of Wyoming, Colorado
State, the University of Iowa and the supervisor of the original Nebraska
State Museum to study a variety of issues from the data collected this
past summer.
"This site is important for my long-term research project,"
Hill said. "But I can't do it all."
Artifacts collected will be documented at the site before being sent back
to Ames for further analysis, a process Hill says could take up to a year.
"We're really trying to collect everything we can," he said.
"Even if I don't use the data or any other member of our interdisciplinary
research team utilizes it, maybe people will be able to find a use 10
or 15 years from now.
"Then we'll really have done our job out here."
Hill anticipates he will return to the Clary Ranch site for another year
or two to work on the current site. He could have also made a discovery
this summer as to where the location of the mass kill of the prehistoric
bison before they were moved to the current excavation site.
Around LAS
September 8-21, 2003
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