The Anzick Site (24PA506) in Park County, Montana, is the only known Clovis burial site in the New World.
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Clovis Culture
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.
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 biface and small human infant bones that were covered with red ochre. 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 partial remains of a 1-2 year old child associated with some 115 red-ochre covered, stone, bone and antler artifacts that are dated at about 13,000 cal BP. In another location in the same area, not associated with the Clovis child, the men found a partial skull fragment of a 6-8 year old male child that dated 2400 years later. Dr. Larry Lahren, a North American 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 discovery in 1968.
Human Remains
For thirty years, the skeletal remains were in the private possession of a former investigator. For the past sixteen years, they have been in the possession of one of the landowners. Because of the manner in which the site was discovered, its importance was initially dismissed but subsequently confirmed. The remains are known as Anzick-1.