Hudson reads the untold stories of elk skeleton found in northern Wisconsin
Jean Hudson with a portion of the Silver Beach Elk.
By Laura L. Hunt
Seeing the well-preserved antlers, skull and partial skeleton of a very large elk that was found in northern Wisconsin was impressive enough. But what really intrigued Jean Hudson was what was found nearby – a Clovis point, a type of spearhead used by hunters from about 10,000 years ago.
Very few have been found this far north, and this spearhead may be the one that doomed the animal all those millennia ago, says Hudson, an associate professor of anthropology. Or the two specimens could be completely unrelated, she says.
If the two are linked, it would mean that the elk remains are especially rare. More physical evidence of animals such as mastodons, wooly mammoths and giant bison exists than that of elk, says Hudson.
But decoding the secrets of an animal skeleton requires asking the same questions you would at a crime scene investigation: What were the time, cause and circumstances of death? It also involves sometimes getting it wrong, leading to new questions.
A swimmer discovered the antlers of what appears to be a prehistoric elk at the bottom of Middle Eau Claire Lake in Barnes, Wis., last summer. Matt McKay of the Department of Natural Resources in Hayward, who is assigned to the maintenance of the Clam Lake elk herd, estimated the elk would have been between 1,000 and 1,100 pounds when it was alive.
“It’s a very respectable size. It fell just outside the category considered to be record size by hunters,” says Hudson. “So it’s almost a trophy size.”
By chance, Hudson was the first archaeologist to visit the site, but her expertise matched the find perfectly. She has worked with cervidae (deer) nearly all of her academic career.
A year after the elk’s discovery, Hudson has helped dig up the remains, brought them back to the lab at UWM and analyzed the details, trying to unravel the story of how this animal’s carcass ended up in its watery grave.
Its teeth indicate that the elk was not quite in his prime – around 8 years old. She has also found what appears to be a butchering mark on one of the jaws, where meat would have been scraped away from the bone.
At the same time, Hudson describes the Clovis point as a “cultural find.” It is the kind of tool that would only have been made by a skilled hand, she says, and it gives clues to what early Native American life entailed and may also tell archaeologists something about glacial/postglacial environmental change.
After two rounds of radiocarbon dating, however, the age of the skeleton has not told the story Hudson expected.
Find out more about the process of archaeological puzzle-working when Hudson gives a public lecture on campus about the discovery tonight. The talk, part of the lecture series of the Wisconsin Archaeological Society, begins at 8 p.m. in Sabin Hall, room G90.
To keep the people in Barnes linked to the latest findings about the bones, Hudson has kept a blog which can be found at: http://www.silverbeachelk.blogspot.com/.###
