Kersey–Kuner terrace investigations at the Dent and Bernhardt sites, Colorado

Abstract

The Dent site provided the first association of fluted points with mammoth bones in the New World. However, the stratigraphic integrity of the site has remained in doubt since the original excavations in 1932 and 1933. Core sampling at the Dent Clovis site indicates that the site, on Kersey terrace gravel, extends under railroad tracks adjacent to the original area of excavation. Four hundred meters south the Kuner strath terrace has been exposed by a roadcut at the Bernhardt site. An Archaic hearth dated 4030 ± 60 B.P. is near the top of a 1-m-thick eolian sand overlying 1 m of fine-grained alluvium dated 5740 ± 60 B.P., which in turn overlies sand and gravel of the Kuner strath terrace with an AMS radiocarbon age of 10,105 ± 90 B.P. The South Platte River appears to have been quasistable at the Kuner level during the Younger Dryas when Paleoindians from Clovis to Cody hunted megafauna on the Kersey terrace. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.