Ventana Cave ( ood, Nakaijegel) is an archaeological site in southern

Arizona Arizona ( ; nv, Hoozdo Hahoodzo ; ood, Alĭ ṣonak ) is a state in the Southwestern United States. It is the 6th largest and the 14th most populous of the 50 states. Its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona is part of the Fou ...

. It is located on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation. The cave was excavated under the direction of

Emil Haury Emil Walter "Doc" Haury (May 2, 1904 in Newton, Kansas – December 5, 1992 in Tucson, Arizona) was an influential archaeologist who specialized in the archaeology of the American Southwest. He is most famous for his work at Snaketown, a Hohokam ...

by teams led by Julian Hayden in 1942, and in 1941 by a team led by Wilfrid C Bailey, one of Emil Haury's graduate students. The deepest artifacts from Ventana Cave were recovered from a layer of volcanic debris that also contained

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...

horse, Burden's

pronghorn The pronghorn (, ) (''Antilocapra americana'') is a species of artiodactyl (even-toed, hoofed) mammal indigenous to interior western and central North America. Though not an antelope, it is known colloquially in North America as the American a ...

tapir Tapirs ( ) are large, herbivorous mammals belonging to the family Tapiridae. They are similar in shape to a pig, with a short, prehensile nose trunk. Tapirs inhabit jungle and forest regions of South and Central America, with one species inh ...

sloth Sloths are a group of Neotropical xenarthran mammals constituting the suborder Folivora, including the extant arboreal tree sloths and extinct terrestrial ground sloths. Noted for their slowness of movement, tree sloths spend most of their l ...

, and other extinct and modern species. A projectile point from the volcanic debris layer was compared to the

Folsom Tradition The Folsom Complex is a Paleo-Indian archaeological culture that occupied much of central North America from c. 8500 BCE to c. 4000 BCE. The term was first used in 1927 by Jesse Dade Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. ...

and later to the

Clovis culture The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleoamerican culture, named for distinct stone and bone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna, particularly two mammoths, at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1936 a ...

, but the assemblage was peculiar enough to warrant a separate name – the Ventana Complex.

Radiocarbon date Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was dev ...

s from the volcanic debris layer indicated an age of about 11,300 BP.Emil Haury at Ventana Cave
Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona Bruce Huckell and C. Vance Haynes restudied the Ventana Cave stratigraphy and artifact assemblage in 1992-1994. New

radiocarbon date Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon. The method was dev ...

s and reanalysis of the artifacts indicates that the volcanic debris layer was laid down between 10,500-8,800 BP. Huckel and Haynes hypothesized that vertical turbation ( postdepositional disturbance) is responsible for Haury's original interpretation that these extinct fauna were killed with stone tools. "This turbation may have led to the incorporation of bones of extinct fauna from an underlying conglomerate deposit rich in horse remains, creating the impression of their association with artifacts". Huckel and Haynes believe the Ventana Complex is post-Clovis, and not closely related.Bruce B. Huckell and C. Vance Haynes, Jr., 2003, ''The Ventana Complex: New Dates and New Ideas on Its Place in Early Holocene Western Prehistory'', American Antiquity, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 353-37
Abstract
Ventana Cave was declared a

National Historic Landmark A National Historic Landmark (NHL) is a building, district, object, site, or structure that is officially recognized by the United States government for its outstanding historical significance. Only some 2,500 (~3%) of over 90,000 places listed ...

in 1964.

References

External links

Guy E. Gibbon, Kenneth M. Ames, 1998, ''Archaeology of prehistoric native America: an encyclopedia.'' Taylor & Francis, 1998. {{Authority control Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Arizona Caves of Arizona National Historic Landmarks in Arizona Cenozoic paleontological sites of North America Landforms of Pima County, Arizona History of Pima County, Arizona Paleontology in Arizona National Register of Historic Places in Pima County, Arizona Fossil parks in the United States Tohono O'odham Nation

References

Further reading

External links