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mont Street, archaeologists began to unearth animal remains at Tule Springs. hi 1933 Femley Hunter of the Ameri­can Museum of Natural History found a bit of charcoal associated with bones of extinct camel, horse and bison. Later that year Mark Harrington and Ruth Simpson of the Southwest Museum found more charcoal and bones from panels, horses, mammoths and giant sloths sticking out of the desert’s sur­face. Harrington and Simpson were hop­ing to find evidence that early humans had roamed the area 30,000 years ago, but the charcoal could not be related to people. When Simpson returned to the site in 1956, she found a scraper that was radiocarbon-dated^ older than 23,800 ? years. But scientists could not establish that the scraper had been left by hu­mans that long ago. A 30-person team from New York, Nevada and California digging more than four months from October 1962 until February 1963 were able to prove that people used the site, said Margaret Lyneis, University of Nevada, Las V|egas archaeology professor emeritus, w|ho was a UCLA graduate student in 1962. 1 “There is no question there were people out there, roughly 11,000 years ago,” Lyneis said. [Geologist C. Vance Haynes led the “big dig,” as it was known. Lyneis was the last scientist hired and the only wfoman scientist at the site 40 years ago. The scientists are expected to swap stories and pose theories during their reunion next week. They are also hop­ing that further research at the site by ? today’s experts armed with better de­tection methods might discover more clues to human existence in the valley’s sind and gravel washed down from the stirrounding mountains. {During the 1962-63 dig, Mark Levine discovered a scraper shaped by human hinds that has been dated at 9,000 ? years old. The team also found flakes from toolmakers, burnt camel bones ? and teeth and mammoth jaws. Haynes believed that if bulldozers ? dug deep trenches, the experts could read the layers of rock and gravel like the pages of a thick history book. “A bulldozer driver leaned down to nie one day and said, “Why are you lqoking for the remains of people in all these dry lake beds?’ ” Lyneis said. | The answer to that question lies with Haynes; Willard Libby, who discovered . Carbon-14 dating and won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1960; and Rich­ard Shetler of the Nevada State Mu­seum, who had arranged “the Big Dig.” Libby, who was developing the Car-bon- 14 dating technique in the 1960s, picked Tule Springs to test it because it held such promise of finding evidence of ancient human activity. But the artifacts did not fit with the soils and rock where they were found, Tom Dyer, exhibit director for the state museum in Lorenzi Park, said. “The valley filled rough and tumble ” Dyer said, explaining that the action of water flowing across the Las Vegas Val­ley and the friction from stones could have polished some of the archaeolog­ists’ finds, making them look hand­made. Because scientists date objects by testing the rock and other matter around them, man-made objects cannot Forty years ago scientists from around the country poked and prodded the rugged desert terrain around what is now Floyd Lamb State Park to try to determine if humans lived in this area as much as 20,000 years ago. in top photo, anthropologist Richard Brooks, left, who taught at UNLV, geologist Chester Longwell and Carl Hubbs, right, a lake and fish expert, look over a staked-out pit during the 1962-63 "Big Dig" at Tule Springs. Richard Shutter, above, of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, examines an obsidian flake that might have given important clues to human activ­ity. The Big Dig was led by geologist C. Vance Haynes, left, in the photo at left. Mark Harrington, center, also participated in the project, and Ruth Simpson, right, discovered a scraper believed to be more than 28,000 years old. # l l | • what Commemorative exhibit of The Big Dig: The Tule Springs Expedition 1962*1963. • WHEN Nov. ^through October 2003. Public program with scientists Richard Shutter, Vance Haynes, Robert Orlins and Margaret Lyneis, 2 p.m. to 3:30p.m. on Nov. 9. • WHERE Nevada State Museum and H istorical Society in Lorenzi Park, off Washington Avenue and Rancho Drive. be dated with accuracy if they are jumbled among the valley’s fill, he said. It doesn’t mean anything to find an arrowhead or a piece of flint, unless the surroundings spell out the context. Dyer said. v; In this case, the area’s jumbled rocks stopped the story in its tracks. “People hold out their hopes, but if people were here 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, there should be flakes mid some big chunky artifacts,” Lyneis said. “I’m not a conservative. I believe there were people here then. But how to prove it?” A black flake of obsidian, possibly from a human-shaped tool, and 20,006-year-old bones found together in the sediments at Tule Springs during the 1962 dig were never conclusively linked, retired archaeologist Mark Ro-senzweig said. There was no way to date the flake because archaeologists did not find any carbon-based material in the nearby compacted soils. “The significance of the site is actu­ally the science that was done there, not what they found,” said Rosenzweig, a member of the Nevada-Archaeo Soci­ety and the Tule Springs Preservation Committee. Scientists such as Libby and Haynes were major players in excavating sites. Together with geologists and paleontol­ogists, the expedition leaders hoped to find early man’s evidence. “They brought it together in a con­scious, coordinated effort, probably for the first time;” Rosenzweig said. Archaeology by nature is a matter of luck. Tule Springs was remote and hard to reach back in the 1930s, Rosenzweig noted. Harrington, even with a skilled eye, was lucky to stumble onto the orig­inal site, he said. Now the site is easily accessible, as the presence of ATVs and remote-con­trolled airplanes illustrated during a re­cent visit. But finding anything signifi­cant has become more difficult because the site has already been worked so much. „ “A lot of it is accidental discovery, he said. The volunteers and experts coming together to ask that Tule Springs be preserved see the place as a great op­portunity for educating children and al­lowing research to continue, perhaps at a center operated by the university in the near future. n “The past is the key to the future, said Helen Mortenson, an amateur ar­chaeologist and Archaeo-Nevada past president. Mary Manning is a Sun reporter. She reached a t (702) 259-4065 or by e-mail at manning@lasvegassun.com