It’s noontime Sunday and — just out of the shower in my blue bathrobe on a beautiful, cool, sunny August day, windows down, soft, refreshing breeze filtering through — I sit down at the kitchen table to pick the topic for this week.
With a few viable options from which to choose, I’ve established a file in Microsoft Word when the phone to my immediate left breaks the tranquility. I rise, take a step to the antique dough-box where the cradled phone stands and read the caller-ID. It’s Mike Gramly. Perfect timing. Wonder what’s on his mind?
One thing you can always count on with Gramly — a devoted paleontologist focused these days on ancient North American mastodons not far from our doorstep — is cutting-edge archaeological information; that and infectious, contagious intellectual enthusiasm trained straight down upon whatever his latest endeavor may be.
I answer the phone. He’s waiting for an annual event to begin and has a few minutes to catch up. Along the Lake Erie shoreline in the Upstate New York town of Wanakah, he’s awaiting an end-of-summer get-together, picnic and lectures hosted annually by the Archaeological Society of Ohio’s Beau Fleuve Chapter. A regular at this social event, this year he was prepared to deliver a presentation and hawk his new book on the “Archaeological Recovery of the Bowser Road Mastodon Orange County, New York.” There, on a Bowser Road, Middletown, N.Y., farm, he and friend Dennis Vesper conducted separate, coordinated archaeological digs in 2014 and 2015. Their recovery mission focused on a cropland bog an hour or so north and west of New York City, off Interstate 84.
The key to any such archaeological excavation comes after the careful extraction and collection of bone, teeth, ivory and human-made artifacts, which is in and of itself a crucial and tedious process as well. Even more important, however, is the post-dig analysis — identification and interpretation of what’s been collected, cleaned and stored for preservation, research and hypothesis. It’s an exciting, interactive, interpretive progression that can literally take years, if not decades.
A case in point is the so-called Hiscock Site located just below Lake Ontario west of Rochester, N.Y., one of 21 known North American mastodon-recovery spots listed in Gramly’s new book. There, at an ancient sulfur spring, the remains of up to 100 ancient mastodons have over three decades been excavated by archaeologists and stored away for future inspection in Buffalo Museum lockers.
After studying the bones and artifacts gathered at Bowser Road, Gramly made some exciting new hypotheses related to broken atlatls (slingshot-like spears thrown from a handle that increase speed and penetration), and he wanted to test these new theories through comparison with the Hiscock data and that from the other 20 contemporaneous North American mastodon collections. What he discovered during 21 days in Buffalo was, among many other interesting findings, notched atlatls fashioned from rugged mastodon ribs. His educated guess was that these weapons were key, never before identified, components of all Clovis mastodon-hunters’ toolkits. Better still, he was confident he’d be able to link the evidence found among the willy-nilly rubble of ancient North American mastodon-kills to an interesting kill-site ritual.
His suspicion was indeed confirmed at the Hiscock Site and has since been re-confirmed at two more sites — Ohio’s Cedar Creek and Tennessee’s Coats-Hines — where evidence of broken atlatls again showed up. Now he’s determined to get his hands on the remaining 17 collections of North American mastodon remains, fully confident that pieces of atlatls fashioned from mastodon ribs will turn up as previously unidentified artifacts among bones and teeth and tusks and occasional fluted points.
What Gramly believes he has uncovered is a ritualistic hunting practice or “rite of manhood” associated with North American mastodon kills some 13,000 and more years ago. He believes teenaged hunters became men by killing their first mastodon. It is also his opinion that during the butchering process, these aspiring hunters ceremonially broke their atlatls in two and left them with the scraps as deep-meaning, symbolic “we will meet again” donations. The weapons were left behind where hunters had gathered fresh new rib bones to be worked into new killing tools.
“So far (since publishing his book), I’m 2-for-2,” he said of confirmatory evidence found among data gathered from the Cedar Creek and Coats-Hines sites. “I expect the other collections will also corroborate my hypothesis. I can tell you, my friend, that everywhere I look, I’m finding the hand of man.”
Gramly was also excited to report that finally — four years after his two-week September 2013 “Sugarloaf Site” archaeological excavation along the Deerfield/Whately line — his report has gone to the University of Utah Press. This 65-page review of all “Sugarloaf Site” excavations will make up one chapter in Volume 2 of “In the Eastern Fluted Point Tradition” that’ll is scheduled to hit the street this month or next. He promises to purchase several copies to be sold at book-signings, including one here in the Happy Valley.
Deep-history enthusiasts will be anxious to sink their teeth into this fascinating study of a site Gramly calls without hesitation “one of North America’s most important Paleo-Indian sites.”
It’s right here on our lap. Cutting edge. Gramly can only fantasize about how many similar, undiscovered sites exist right under our noses here in the Connecticut Valley.
The story of one such site at the foot of Mount Sugarloaf is about to hit the light of day.
Recorder Sports Editor Gary Sanderson is a senior-active member of the outdoor-writers associations of America and New England. Send your questions, stories about our area to him at: gsanderson@recorder.com.