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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 dates to approximately CE 1300 to 1450. However, beneath this stratum, archaeologists have discovered tools (including projectile points) made of stone and bone, as well as the debris from the creation of these artifacts, that can be positively dated to the late Pleistocene era. Additionally, five processing and burial sites have also been discovered in this area, including the bones of not only animals that were hunted, but those of camels, dogs, and rodents, as well.
Though relatively little of the Clovis culture itself is extant, Murray Springs provides an exceptional number of samples related to the day-to-day lives of its prehistoric human population. Some have gone so far as to claim that a catastrophic extraterrestrial impact triggered a mass extinction event among megafauna and humans in the late Pleistocene era, and that samples discovered at Murray Springs may substantiate this hypothesis. However, further research suggests that while there appears…
