Some 13,000 years ago, just as the last Ice Age was receding, ancient humans were returning to a camp in the Great Lakes region to process hunted animals and sharpen up their hunting weapons.
In present day, a local amateur archaeologist named Thomas Talbot discovered the ancient campsites when he kept finding Clovis tools and rock scrapings in a field near Mendon in southwestern Michigan. Brendan Nash, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, and a team then started an excavation at what they call the Belson site, which lies near a river, for the following five years.
They described some of the tools they found on the surface in a 2021 study published in PaleoAmerica and in a study published in 2024 in PLOS ONE, the team dug and found two distinctive layers that were each only used once, likely in consecutive years. This kind of discovery is rare for Clovis technology, which usually has remains of many more visits and activities all jumbled together.
“We are very much dealing with the cigarette butts and broken beer bottles of the ancient world,” Nash says.
