Murray Springs Clovis Site
A Brief Overview
A few miles north of the international border with Mexico, in the upper San Pedro Valley, Murray Springs, Arizona was once a hunting camp by nomads of the Clovis culture, a population of Paleoamerican humans from the late Pleistocene era. About a half-mile west of Murray Springs proper, this area is now an archaeological site of immense importance to anthropologists’ understanding of prehistoric human populations in the western hemisphere.
Initially discovered in 1966 by archeologists C. Vance Haynes and Peter Mehringer of the University of Arizona, Murray Springs was excavated from 1967 to 1971 through funding from the National Science Foundation and National Geographic Society. Since their initial discovery while mapping the nearby Lehner Mammoth-Kill Site, one of nearly a dozen important locations linked to the Clovis culture within a 50-mile radius, Haynes and Mehringer have published extensively on discoveries linked to Murray Springs.
Active approximately 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, Murray Springs appears to have served as a camp for humans hunting megafauna (bison and mammoth) and horses. The hunters appear to have taken advantage of a nearby arroyo in their hunting, likely a popular watering spot for local animals. Humans appear to have used this area intermittently throughout history. One potsherd from the area…
