Cerutti Mastodon Site: Hominins in Southern California
Tom Deméré, Curator of Paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum, will review the evidence for prehistoric human activity at the Cerutti Mastodon Site in southern San Diego County. The Cerutti Mastodon site was discovered and excavated along State Route 54 in San Diego over a five-month period during the winter of 1992-93 and yielded the partial remains of a single American mastodon in association with evidence indicating that hominins broke the bones 130,000 years ago. The evidence for human agency is diverse and includes bone impact features; stone impact and usewear features; bone, tusk, and stone distribution patterns; differential bone breakage; and bone, molar, and stone refits. Significantly, most CM bones and stones were enclosed within crusts of pedogenic carbonate that establish a “chain of evidence” showing that breakage and positioning of objects at the site occurred many thousands of years ago. No knapped stones or butchery-marked bones were recovered at the CM Site, which Deméré proposes was a bone-processing site occupied for a very short period of time for a very limited set of activities. Deméré argues that alternative hypotheses (e.g., debris flow, plunge pool, alluvial fan, trampling, carnivore scavenging, and damage by heavy equipment) do not account for the multiple lines of evidence at the CM Site. Info: San Diego County Archaeological Society, 858-538-0935.