The Point

Seventeen year old LeeAnn Hartner was working on her cousins potato farm here, out by the Big Holes, forty years ago. She spotted something unusual on the combine belt and snagged it. It lived in a box with her family until she finally took it down to an archeological road show in Utah a few summers ago.

She walked up to a table and said “I think I’ve got something real neat” and when she set it on the table Bonnie Pitblado, the museum’s director and an archaeologist specializing in North America’s oldest Native cultures, screamed out “LeeAnn, it’s Clovis”!

It was a prehistoric Clovis spear point that had been shaped by a member of the Clovis people, the first humans to occupy North America. It’s really cool to think that they lived here in the valley 13,000 years ago.

Ms. Pitblado brought a team up here and they started hunting for more artifacts at the spot where LeeAnn found it. I’ve been researching this and I still don’t know if they ever found anything more. I think I’ll go dig around in the back yard :-)

Here’s the Valley Citizen article from our friend Mike Polhamus back in 2005.