Military personnel were able to discover a prehistoric campsite in the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The campsite could have been occupied by early Americans 8,200 years ago.
Archaeological Marvel Found in US Air Force Base
The discovery was made by members of the 49th CES (Civil Engineer Squadron) along with a team of geologists. This was close to a road cut on the Holloman Air Force Base, roughly 260 kilometers southeast of Albuquerque. The area was discovered buried six feet below the surface.
The air force base is just adjacent to the White Sands National Park, which is famous for preserving North America's oldest known human footprints and its gypsum sand dunes of ivory color. The dunes of the White Sand National Park formed at least a thousand years after the archaeological site at the air base and may have aided with the preservation of the prehistoric artifacts.
Cultural resource manager Matthew Cuba from the 49th CES explains that the white sand dunes' formation inadvertently led to the site's burial. Windblown silt ended up protecting the delicate remains.
Paleo-Archaic Campsite
Excavations of the area, officially called LA202921 and dubbed Gomolak Overlook, helped unearth different artifacts that show that the area could have served as a seasonal encampment for early Paleo-Archaic individuals. Archaic peoples were part of the lineage of the first humans who went into the Americas and one of the New World's early cultures to domesticate and grow plants.
Cuba explains that the site serves as a crucial moment in unraveling the history of the area and its inhabitants.
Cuba and his colleagues were able to find evidence that the area's early settlers lit fires and burned mesquite, which is a spiny shrub belonging to the pea family that is native to semi-arid areas in Mexico and Southwest US. Cuba explains that they found around 70 items on the site, including rare early ground stone examples and flake stones. These discoveries offer crucial clues about past activities of humans.
They were also able to uncover different hearths, or community campsites, that contained mesquite charcoal remnants, which is a remarkable find of its own.
The campsite is among 400 archaeological discoveries found within the Holloman Air Force Base's boundaries. It is hoped that further research would shed more light on the early humans who used to roam around the continent.
The vast region of the Tularosa Basin, which spans 16,800 square kilometers across southwestern New Mexico, houses some of the Americas' oldest archaeological sites. In the past decade, excavations have yielded 11,000-year-old footprint fossils of humans tracking a massive sloth and 10,000-year-old footprints of a toddler and a woman. Evidence regarding how Ice Age children frolicked within puddles of mud was also found.
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