University of Alberta Museums Search

The Dent site was exposed in 1932 on the Kersey Terrace. The site is located in a tributary gully of the South Platte River in northern Colorado. It has yielded abundant bones and teeth from the remains of at least 13 individual Columbian mammoths, which were recovered from a layer of silt and fine sand deposited in a localized mudflow on an alluvial fan (Sellards 1952; Saunders 1980, 1992; Haynes 1991; Haynes et al. 1998). Faunal material may have been redeposited, but the lack of weathering or wear on bone surfaces suggests that these remains were not transported far. Radiocarbon dates from bones and bone collagen range from 10,980 ± 90 to 11,200 ± 500 yr B.P. Associated Clovis stone tools suggest that these animals were butchered by human hunters. The age profile of the animals led Saunders (1980, 1992) to suggest that Dent mammoths represented a single family group that was killed and butchered simultaneously, but Haynes (1987) argued that the age profile suggests a drought-killed assemblage of unrelated individuals