[Music] When did humans first travel, hunt and live in the Great Plains?

This is a question at the heart of a special program excavating sites in Western Kansas searching for evidence of the earliest human inhabitants of North America.

[Music] In June 2026 we traveled to Kanorado, Kansas to catch up with the work of a friend of Cottonwood Connections, Dr.

Rolfe Mandel, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas and director of the Odyssey Project connected with the Kansas Geological Survey.

So as director of Odyssey, this is a, it's a private endowment that was established in 2003 at the University of Kansas.

The intent of this endowment was to support research to look for the earliest evidence of people in North America and more specifically with Odyssey to focus on the Great Plains, which is where we're at.

Every summer I launch either surveys or excavations where students from KU provides an opportunity for them to get experience with excavation.

Along with a visit to the Kanorado Dig Site, Don sat down with Dr.

Mandel at his home in Topeka to learn more about the work of the Odyssey Project.

And thank you for hosting us today.

Glad to have you here.

So you worked out there again with the Odyssey Group and the University of Kansas.

Correct.

The Odyssey Archaeological Research Fund was established at the University of Kansas by Joe and Ruth Kramer.

Joe Kramer was a geologist, actually was in petroleum geology, made his fortune in the oil business.

But he had this incredible interest in archaeology.

He really built a library in his home, which we actually inherited at the Kansas Geological Survey.

And so Joe knew that I'd been working throughout the Central Great Plains looking at buried paleo-Indian age landscapes.

And he was convinced that there was pre-clovis probably below it.

He created six of these endowments around the United States with each director of each program focusing on a region.

So my primary area is the mid-continent.

The Central Great Plains and the margins of the Central Great Plains.

You go all the way to the Rockies, all the way down into southwest Texas, as far north as the Yukon Territory of Canada, and as far east as the Mississippi River Valley.

So it's a pretty big chunk of land.

And I can go even outside those areas if I prefer to do that, although really the main focus is that mid-continental record.

You know, it's fortuitous that we found Kanorado, and that's only because they straightened the stream channel of Beaver Creek to accommodate I-70 being constructed across an area.

And lo and behold, you know, all these mammoth and camel remains were eroding out of the exposure, which the landowner brought to the attention of the Denver Museum of Natural History.

They sent a paleontologist.

But he also noted that he just saw some stones laying around that he thought were artifacts and he was right, they were.

Steve Holin, who did his PhD at the University of Kansas, became the curator of archaeology at what became the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

And he went back and was looking at the notes and saw a mention of this locality, the Kanorado locality.

That was in 2002.

And he went out to the site.

Jack Hofman, who was a professor at the University of Kansas, archaeologist.

Jack went out, looked at it, and they walked around.

And sure enough, they started seeing artifacts just laying on the floor of the channel.

And that's when they got me out there.

And that was actually the first project for Odyssey, because Odyssey came into being in 2003.

So that was our first excavation.

Yeah, so here, we've been investigating these for 25 years.

Yeah.

Yep.

And there's still a treasure chest of information on the people inhabited the central plains 13,000 years ago.

Yeah.

So as I said, we began all that in 2003.

We came back multiple years after that, and have come back periodically over the last 10 years.

And so the archaeologists are just getting down into that dark soil, which represents that buried early paleo-Indian landscape.

And as they're excavating down into it, they're starting to find chipped stuff.

In other words, what people often refer to as flint, which is chert.

Mostly small fragments, a few bone fragments.

My name is Ted Goebel.

I'm a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

And I study archaeology of early humans in the Americas.

I have run field projects everywhere from Siberia and Alaska down to Patagonia in Argentina.

And this is my first opportunity to actually work here on a paleo site in Kansas.

So I'm pretty excited about that.

And I'm Beth Potter.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher with Rolfe Mandel at the Geological Survey.

And I've done field work kind of all over North America.

Kanorado is a stratified Clovis and Folsom Midland site.

So that's kind of the first peoples that are really well-documented across the Americas.

And it consists of three different sites across a really large locality.

And where we are right now was a Folsom Midland-aged campsite.

This is where we're getting the most artifacts out of really any of the three sites at this locality have been from just about here.

So they are named after what are called type sites.

So Clovis is named after the Clovis site in Clovis, New Mexico.

And that's where the Clovis Point was identified.

So the Clovis Point is sort of how we definitively identify a Clovis site.

And those are just based on this one site in New Mexico.

And Folsom similarly is named after the Folsom points, named after the Folsom site.

Yeah.

Those sites were excavated a long time ago before World War II in the 1930s, 40s.

The Clovis site at Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, into the 50s and 60s.

So it's been a long time since those paleo-Indian cultures were defined based on those early excavations.

And since then, a lot of archaeological sites across the country have yielded more of those kinds of spear points that are very, very much diagnostic of that early culture or set of cultures.

In a dated context, deeply buried in Kansas, they have not been found.

They've been found in the states all around Kansas, but not necessarily in Kansas.

And we have them as surface-isolated finds.

We have Clovis points from Kansas, but in buried context?

Yeah.

No.

So having these sites in this region identified in this nice stratified context is really especially exciting.

The site was initially identified based on extinct megafauna bones, so really large animals.

Bones are rooting out of the cut bank.

And then we started excavating the archaeology around it about 20 years ago, a bit over 20 years ago at this point.

And that's one of the reasons we're here, because when the work was done at the site decades ago, they found lots of stone flakes and bones of animals that are now extinct, as well as some scraping implements and things of that sort, but no spear points that we could honestly say are representative Clovis or Folsom.

We do have Folsom.

We do have Folsom.

There's a point tip that is Folsom, and then there's a point base that is Midland.

Midland is named after the Midland site in Midland, Texas.

And it's the same age, essentially, as Folsom.

And so we do have diagnostic Folsom-Midland points from this site, specifically.

But not Clovis.

But no Clovis, yeah.

So we're still looking.

And that's why we're essentially back here, right?

Yeah.

The early excavations were right here where we're standing.

They produced some scraping implements, some-- A lot of scraping tools.

And bones, but none of the Clovis points.

Our excavation is adjacent to the one that was conducted 20 years ago.

And we're hopeful that by just expanding the surface area of the site, we'll be able to find hard evidence of that Clovis culture here.

I'm curious, what is the environmental analysis of the natural conditions when those people were utilizing those sites?

OK.

Well, if you were to go back to the time when Clovis people were there-- so we have Clovis age deposits, cultural deposits.

How old are those?

They're consistently around 13,000 years old.

All the dates we have from the Clovis age component cluster right about 13,000 years ago.

Based on what we've learned from-- particularly the fossil record there.

And the fossil record that we're looking at, phytolysts, which are basically silica remains of plants.

It's like the skeletons of plants.

That's why plants have structure.

Stems, leaves that can stand up vertically.

We take those phytolysts out of the sediments at different levels.

For example, from the Clovis age component.

And what it tells us is that it was much cooler.

There were a lot more trees.

It was probably pretty much an open pine and maybe spruce parkland with grass in between the trees.

And so at that time, not only was it cooler, but it was also wetter.

Soon after going out of the time of Clovis 13,000 years ago, just a few hundred years later as we go into the time when Folsom people were there, it's already shifting to a much drier and warmer environment.

And you're seeing an expansion of shortgrass prairie.

So there's a ton of climate change that was happening at that time.

And so you had folks who were adapting to really rapidly changing climates.

And it's also a story of migration of people migrating to the Americas and spreading all across the Americas.

And so they're dealing with also these changing landscape, changing environments.

To my mind, especially these first peoples in the America sites, tell us a lot about how people adapt to change.

And what's interesting, of course, is we see a dramatic change in the mammals that were hunted because the Clovis folks were going after particularly mammoth.

We have lots of fragmentary mammoth remains.

There is some evidence of American camel in the Clovis age component.

And then it shifts to bison.

By the time we get into fulsome a few hundred years later, of course, we know Folsom people were really bison hunters.

That's what they liked.

Of course, the bison are responding to that change in grasses because bison like short grasses.

When we walk on an archaeological site as an archaeologist, we're first needing to set up a grid over the site.

And we do that by using the total station EDM up there, electronic distance measurer.

That helps us some actually define the grid across the site area as well as to measure in any artifacts or bones or features that we might find in the excavation itself.

So the site is set up on a grid.

And what we essentially do is define one meter squares.

And each one of these one meter squares, you can see in the excavation here.

I can count one, two, three, four, five, six, and then a half that we're essentially excavating right now.

So that's six and a half square meters.

And then the other thing we do is we use the EDM to measure elevation.

So not just the horizontal coordinates, but also the vertical coordinates.

So we know from GPS technology where we are on the earth, down to basically a centimeter.

So by using the EDM here then, we can identify the elevations of these materials and the levels that we're working in the same way that we do horizontally.

And we are trying to excavate in what we call levels that are five centimeters thick so that we can capture in the screen down there along the old creek bed everything that has been found in these vertical slices as we go down through the sediments here.

And we progressively get older as we go lower into the ground.

Once the dirt or the sediment is excavated from the square, it's of course placed in a bucket and then we carry it down to a wet screening area.

And there we essentially dump the sediment into the wet screen, which is a very fine mesh like you would find on window screen to keep bugs out of your house.

And then we spray water over the top of it, mix it up good, all the dirt turned into mud, we essentially wash all of the mud away and it leaves behind the materials that won't flow through the screen.

And those are things like small rocks, if you will.

But also there will be very small artifacts, small little pieces of flakes that were removed from the edges of tools in some situations from re-sharpening.

We find small bits of bone, tooth enamel, things of that sort that represent the different kinds of animals that people were potentially hunting and killing and bringing to this campsite back 12,000, 13,000 years ago.

So we're wet screening here so that we can find all these very small things.

On other excavations you might find that the archaeologists are dry screening and that's in situations where the materials are much larger and easier to find and the sediment is not so difficult to essentially push through a screen.

And then the other thing we do is we take these one meter squares and we further subdivide them into 50 centimeter squares.

And right here you can see one that's in the process of being excavated.

The student who's excavating here is trying to bring that quad down to the same level as this square right here so that we can maintain the same arbitrary levels as we progressively go down through the excavation from one square to the next.

This is just our way to control where we are in the site and in the sediments and for us to know when we find something in the screen, not in situ in the excavation, what the provenience of the finds are.

Yeah and we're primarily digging with trowels so we've got that that are quite useful for scraping into this soil very very carefully and making progress in a very controlled manner.

So the region I cover is primarily the mid-continent of North America.

I can go outside those boundaries but that's the main focus of the endowment because as I said Kramer created six of them and each director focuses on a different region of North America.

The money that is generated from the interest from the endowment is what is used to support the research and so we don't touch the principle of the endowment.

So long after I'm retired there'll be a new director that'll continue that.

And that's very important to get that continuity.

Right.

So generations or something.

Right.

So that isn't lost and it has to be picked up again.

And so every spring I'll come up with a plan for what we're going to do in the summer.

Part of it's going to be going back to Kanorado.

Part of it I know we're going to be going back to the Big Bend region of Southwest Texas working on two sites there.

So we can not only focus on sites but we can also actually do surveying to look at different, let's say different stream valleys and see if we can find something there.

Yeah or find the potential.

Or find the potential.

For tissue research.

Right.

Yeah and it takes with archaeology a comparison of a lot of sites.

The full story of that's even possible.

Every site is a piece to the puzzle.

It takes a lot of work and a lot of money to get that.

Yes.

Ongoing information is showing that people were in North America a lot longer than was first thought.

Right.

Well you know the discovery of footprints at White Sands in New Mexico that are dated to around 21,000 years ago.

That actually kind of fits with the dates we have at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon.

You know we keep pushing back the time of human occupation in the Americas.

And that Clovis was not first.

There's pretty strong evidence at a number of sites now that indicate that people were here before Clovis.

So people do often ask me you know what are what's my greatest hope is you know between now and the time I retire.

You know I'd really like at least some of these sites to be firmly established as pre-Clovis.

Because that was the wish of Joe Kramer who created the endowment.

That would be wonderful during my time.

I'm thinking too.

Another addition of that would be the preservation of the sites.

You know and when we excavate now we do tend to leave large portions of the sites.

Because archaeology is a destructive process.

We leave something there.

We don't totally destroy the site.

So the next generation of archaeologists or georecheologists who come out and study the site can provide new information that we could not provide because we didn't have the methods.

You know we're not even we don't even know what we're looking for with pre-Clovis.

You know we're not even sure what a pre-Clovis site looks like.

Unless you find something datable in good context with the archaeological record.

It's very difficult to make a claim about pre-Clovis.

So as I say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[Music] The archaeological program at the University of Kansas which is in the department anthropology is considerably built around the Odyssey program.

In terms of you look at the faculty that we brought in who have a strong interest in the people of the Americas.

From the archaeology perspective we have a lot of active projects.

And we have a funding source the Odyssey Archaeological Research Program that Rolfe directs.

It funds a lot of archaeological research and so as a North American archaeologist KU is a fantastic opportunity for field research in like first Americans.

By creating a program that has a that is programmatic you know strong focus on the people in Americas.

We've become one of just a few universities that offer that program.

There's only a can't give a number of, a handful of universities in the U.S.

that have a similar endowed fund for this sort of research.

So we have really good resources for doing archaeology of first Americans.

That has brought quite a few particularly graduate students.

Both master students, PhD students to the University of Kansas to do their work.

And that's also part of the mission of Odyssey.

It's not just to go out and explore but also to train the next generation.

And that was one of the intentions of the Kramer's particularly creating the one at the University of Kansas because we have such a strong focus on the application of geoscientific methods in theory to searching for that record.

From a historical perspective the anthropology department at the University of Kansas has been very much at the forefront of plains anthropology and plains archaeology for at least 50 years.

And over that time the anthropologists in the department have very much studied the archaeology, the prehistory, developed the cultural sequences, led to some of the most significant discoveries that have been made by archaeologists here on the plains.

So there's that very long-standing tradition there and we're just building on that today.

They were hopeful that we would bring lots of students in to learn how to do that and that we had done.

I've had over 30 graduate students during my time and many of them, the majority of them have been supported by Odyssey.

So it's like getting a fellowship.

They can go out and learn and their research is supported by the Odyssey.

To build on the evidence.

And to build on the evidence.

So that has been a real force in the program at the University of Kansas and that's going to continue.

The anthropology program is definitely one to be proud of.

Given the interdisciplinary aspect of it, the very much Kansas baseline that drives a lot of the work that we do as well as the international stature that we have in terms of the reputation of the scientists in the department as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the work we do and the international nature of the work we do.

So we have anthropologists working across the Americas as well as in Eurasia and even Africa as well as here at home in Kansas.

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