Friday, November 08, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Land Minds

New exhibit recalls archaeological dig at Tule Springs 40 years ago

Forty years ago, archaeologists, paleontologists and geologists from around the Southwest converged on Las Vegas, a seemingly unlikely place to find evidence of early mankind in North America.

But though it's hard to tell by looking at it today, the Las Vegas Valley once was an oasis of lakes and rivers, the land teeming with now-extinct mammals and man.

Scientists thought that man may have been in the area 28,000 years b.p. (before present), and came with their bulldozers and scrapers to find evidence supporting that theory.

A new exhibit, "The Big Dig: The Tule Springs Expedition 1962-1963," opening Saturday at the Nevada State Museum & Historical Society, gives a close-up view of that era with an array of photographs of the "Big Dig" and some artifacts, including the teeth, jawbone and tusk of a Columbian mammoth, and ancient human tools.

The exhibit opens with "Re-Visit the Big Dig," a program starting at 2 p.m. featuring several members of the original expedition team including project director Richard Shutler, Jr., geologist C. Vance Haynes and archaeologists Robert Orlins and Margaret Lyneis. Others scheduled to attend include Nevada anthropologists Richard H. Brooks and Donald R. Tuohy, senior field assistants on the project.

Don White and Mark Rosenzweig of the Tule Springs Preservation Committee also will attend the event.

Although the scientists came away with many artifacts, carbon dating of the time was unable to conclusively prove they dated to 28,000 b.p. The best the UCLA radiocarbon lab could come up with was 11,000 to 13,000 years b.p.

"But they got a lot of information from the dig," says Thomas R. Dyer, the museum's exhibits manager. "It was still a marvelous feat. It was the first time archaeologists had used bulldozers and scrapers to do archaeology."

The bulldozers dug 7,000 feet of trenches in an effort to uncover artifacts, and moved 1,000 tons of earth.

The dig "attracted a lot of attention nationally," Dyer says. "There were a lot of prominent archaeologists and geologists involved."

The team, living in tents, spent September 1962 through January 1963 at the Tule Springs site, often facing 117-degree heat in late summer and extreme cold at night by the end of the dig.

The 125 color photographs in the exhibit were taken by National Geographic photographer Bill Belknap.

Most of the artifacts were sent to the state museum in Carson City, while the mammoth bones were sent to the University of California-Berkeley.

Some of the bones were found on a nearby ranch owned by William Gilcrease, land that is now the site of the Gilcrease Bird Sanctuary.

The 1962-'63 project was the fourth in the area. The first expedition, in January 1933, was headed by M.R. Harrington of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. Harrington came to the Tule Springs site first discovered in early 1933 by Fenley Hunter of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Hunter had come upon an ash bed in a canyon wall that held the bones of Pleistocene era animals and what appeared to be man-made tools.

Harrington came back with a team from the Southwest Museum in May 1955 for the second Tule Springs expedition, and the third expedition by the Southwest Museum arrived in spring 1956.

But the 1962-'63 expedition was the largest of the four.

Even today, more artifacts are being found.

"I hear stories of people finding mammoth bones in their back yard," Dyer says. "The dig is a really important story and it's really important to preserve these things because of the growth of the Valley. In and of itself it's interesting, but it can make people aware of the importance of preservation."