Kansas anthropology researchers waiting for test results from site

Researchers are waiting to hear if evidence found at a Pottawatomie County site this summer can be tied to the early populations of the Americas.

Rolfe Mandel, a University of Kansas anthropology professor, told the Topeka Capital-Journal that if sediments at the site are determined to be more than 13,500 years old, it would open the door for the earliest evidence of the Clovis people inhabiting the Central Great Plains. They wandered across America following animal herds, such as mammoth, bison and American camel.

“They were constantly on the move, taking advantage of resources,” said Mandel, who is also a senior scientist with the Kansas Geological Survey. “Given that they were small groups, they didn’t leave a lot behind.”

Mandel leads the excavation of the Coffey site, a bank on the north end of Tuttle Creek and the Big Blue River, that’s a part of the university’s Odyssey Project. Mandel said he’s waiting for the results of a dating technique, called optically stimulated luminescence, to reveal the age of deposits that contained the artifacts found at the site.

Items found at the site in July include a tool called a hafted drill.

“If we want to know about the history of the arrival of people in the Great Plains, this is the sort of work that’s going to unravel that,” Mandel said.

He said another thing the Odyssey project team will have to consider is the position the artifacts were found in. Items in vertical positions are less likely to be associated with the age of the sediments they were buried in, because it’s possible they could have fallen down a crack, Mandel said.