Burnet Cave - Archaeological Finds

Archaeological Finds

Excavation began in Burnet Cave, NM under returning student E. B. Howard who was working under Alden Mason's Southwestern Expeditions sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. The first southwestern trip was in 1929 and Bill Burnet showed them this cave on one of the first trips west. The early field seasons at Burnet Cave were 1930, 1931, and 1932, and they went back again in 1936 and 1937 (Howard 1936:22, 1943b). Additional survey work in the Guadalupe Mountains was done in 1934 as well but no new early sites were found (Howard 1935).

The first Clovis point found in the modern era was excavated in situ at Burnet Cave, NM five feet, seven inches below ground surface on the edge of a hearth with burnt bison and musk-ox bones in August 1931(UPenn Museum catalog # 31-47-36) (Boldurian and Cotter 1999:73). This find predates the Dent Site, Clovis, and all others pretending to be the first in situ Clovis find in the Americas. Until about 1950 Burnet Cave was considered to be among the handful of truly reliable intact Clovis sites but about that time it seems to have fallen out of favor because it was a cave, with an unusual Clovis faunule, that lacked the dramatic visions of the Mammoth-killing big game hunters myth then coming into vogue.

Burnet Cave was the first multi-component Paleoindian site excavated. The Clovis layer was four feet below the lowest layer containing Basketmaker material. The fine dirt was run through a ¼” screen at the front of the cave, something quite unusual for archaeological fieldwork at this time (Boldurian and Cotter 1999:7). The poet Loren Eiseley was a member of Howard's crew and wrote scathingly about his experiences in the Guadalupe Mountains.