A Geoarchaeological Review of the Guest Mammoth Kill Site (8MR130) in the Silver River, Florida

Summary

The first field school on an underwater prehistoric site in the United States was conducted on the Guest Mammoth site in the Silver River, near Ocala, Florida in the 1970s. This site was touted as a Columbian mammoth kill site, the first found east of the Mississippi River. The excavators presented evidence of this in the form of a single fluted point, six direct percussion flakes, and several pressure flakes found associated with the remains of an adult and a juvenile mammoth. In addition, three of the mammoth bones exhibited potential butchering evidence. However, the sole publication on this site is a five page article published in the Florida Anthropologist in 1983. Poor reporting and contextual issues caused the Guest Mammoth site to fall into archaeological purgatory. Following the trend of re-investigating sites of this nature, the Guest Mammoth site was re-evaluated in the summer of 2014 by archaeologists from Texas A&M University and the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. This paper will evaluate the known contextual, geologic, and artifactual evidence concerning the site while integrating the information gathered from recent field assessments of the site to determine the Guest Mammoth’s place in the North American archaeological record.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Geoarchaeology of Submerged, Intertidal, And Wetland Places: Advances In Method And Theory of Prehistoric Archaeology Underwater 2015 -- Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage