Clovis Point Found in Hearth High in Montana’s Beartooths

Thirteen thousand years ago, conventional science says the high country of the Beartooth Mountains should have been locked under a massive sheet of ice, far too hostile for anyone to live there. An archaeologist camping at 9,500 feet this summer found evidence that may say otherwise.

A Self-Taught Eye for the Ground

Scott Dersam, 39, earned his Ph.D. in archaeology in 2022 after an earlier career running a sandwich shop in Bozeman, Montana. He and his wife now run a nonprofit called the Alpine Ecosystems Research Institute, funded mostly through institutional support, donations, and small grants, studying why humans have used mountain environments throughout history. High-elevation archaeology remains a relatively understudied corner of the field, largely because most archaeological work in the United States happens where construction projects trigger federal review requirements, which mostly means low-elevation private land rather than remote public wilderness.

A Flood Changes Everything

Dersam’s interest in the Beartooths traces back to Vern Waples, a game warden who rode the Beartooth and Pryor mountains on horseback from the 1950s through the 1970s, collecting more than 2,000 artifacts along with detailed topographic maps of where he found them. After Waples died in 2006, his family donated the collection to the Custer Gallatin National Forest, and researchers later realized it represented the largest and most dense high-elevation lithic collection known anywhere in North America. Dersam began retracing Waples’s routes using predictive models, with limited early success. Then, in June 2022, a rain-on-snow flood event tore through the Beartooths, scouring away snowpack and churning up sediment that had sat undisturbed for thousands of years. When Dersam returned that August, sites that previously held a few scattered flakes suddenly held thousands.

From Isolated Points to Full Sites

Archaeologists had occasionally found individual Clovis points in high-elevation settings before, but these isolated finds were generally dismissed as evidence of later peoples reusing old artifacts rather than proof that Clovis people themselves used the mountains. Clovis people lived across North America roughly 13,000 years ago and are generally considered the first culture to leave a widespread, consistent archaeological signature, closely associated with hunting mammoths and other megafauna typically linked to lower-elevation plains. After the 2022 flood, Dersam found two clearly identifiable Clovis points alongside several related artifacts at a single location, not an isolated piece but what he describes as a full site. He has since identified six high-elevation Clovis sites over four years, five of them in the Beartooths, at a time when Montana had only one other confirmed Clovis site anywhere in the state.

A Point Found Inside the Fire Itself

This summer brought what Dersam calls his most significant find yet. While excavating a small pit, his team uncovered dark carbon staining in the soil consistent with an ancient hearth rather than a wildfire, and within it, a Clovis point base. Every previous high-elevation Clovis point had turned up scattered on the surface. This one had remained buried and undisturbed inside what appears to be the exact fire where someone discarded it after a hunt, sealed beneath layers of soil ever since. Dersam and his team, including graduate students from the University of Montana, University of Wyoming, and Montana State University, documented the discovery on video, audibly reacting in real time as the find came into view. Soil testing at these sites also indicated some material had been exposed to sunlight between roughly 17,000 and 22,000 years ago, within the period when the Pinedale Glacier is generally understood to have covered most of the region, raising questions about whether the local glaciation was less complete than currently modeled.

Working Alongside, Not Over, Indigenous Communities

Clovis-era archaeology in Montana carries a difficult history. In the late 1960s, construction workers near Wilsall uncovered a burial site containing the remains of a one- to two-year-old child, now known as Anzick-1 or the Clovis Child, along with roughly 100 artifacts. The site was damaged during that discovery, the artifacts were cleaned in ways that destroyed scientific data, and the child’s remains were removed. Radiocarbon dating later placed the burial at roughly 12,600 years old, making it the oldest known human burial site in the Americas. In 2014, nearly fifty years later, Crow tribal member Shane Doyle worked with archaeologists and tribal communities to ceremonially rebury the child at the original site. The Beartooth sites Dersam has found sit less than 100 miles from Anzick as the crow flies, and Dersam says he has worked to consult with regional tribes throughout his research, with several tribal historic preservation officers and elders voicing support for the project at a recent Forest Service meeting.

What Comes Next

Dersam emphasizes that his fieldwork deliberately disturbs as little as possible. Rather than large-scale excavation, he mostly conducts what he calls off-site archaeology, documenting artifact locations and testing material already at risk of being picked up by passersby, while leaving the vast majority of finds exactly where they lie. He now plans to present his findings at the upcoming Paleoamerican Odyssey conference, but stresses that confirming any of this depends on further lab testing, radiocarbon dating, and eventual peer review before the results can be formally published, a process he expects will take months. If his interpretation holds up, it would suggest humans used Greater Yellowstone’s high country far earlier and more extensively than researchers have assumed, challenging decades of thinking about where the earliest Americans could, and couldn’t, survive.

Sources

This report draws on original reporting by Nick Mott for Mountain Journal and Montana Free Press.