THE BOWSER ROAD MASTODON SITE, ORANGE COUNTY, NEW YORK: FRESHLY BUTCHERED REMAINS AND CURATED REMAINS

Measurements of strontium and visual inspection reveal two populations of proboscidean bone and ivory at the Bowser Road Mastodon site -- a lakeside, Clovis-age butchering site, north of Middletown, Orange County, New York. Most of the bones and ivory present there belong to an aged male mastodon who died from an unknown cause. Its skeleton was processed anciently with a (stone) axe. A lesser quantity of proboscidean bones and tusk ivory, on the other hand, shows prolonged curation and tool use. These remains have significantly different amounts of strontium than do the mastodon that was butchered on the spot. By analogy to Old World mammoth assemblages, it is possible to argue that the Clovis-age inhabitants of the Bowser Road site introduced proboscidean remains that had been procured several years earlier and carefully preserved.