The Inglewood Mammoth (Maryland) and Others Like It

Summary

The Inglewood mammoth site near Largo, Maryland, radiocarbon dated in 1982 to 20,000 rcybp, shares some features with other mammoths in North America and Mexico. It had no lithics associated with the bones, and some of the elements had been fragmented. Over 25 years ago I interpreted the bone-breakage as recently done by heavy equipment, but another researcher now interprets it as done by humans in antiquity. I provide a first look at the site’s bone maps, sediment profiles, and other essential information, and compare the data from Inglewood with several similar sites having broken proboscidean bones and (usually) no lithics. These finds have been variously considered as kill, butchery, and bone-quarrying locales. Taphonomic logic (and occasionally illogic) in the interpretations of these sites is an important part of ongoing debates about the peopling of the Americas.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage