The Fox site (5WL8848): A Clovis occupation on the Kersey Terrace, northern Colorado

Abstract

The Fox site (5WL8848) is a collection of Clovis artifacts from the Kersey Terrace in northern Colorado. In the early 1970s, land-leveling for the construction of a large turkey farm near the town of Kersey revealed chipped stone tools in eolian sand dune sediments at the southern margin of the Kersey Terrace of the South Platte River. Max Fox and other employees of the turkey farm collected three complete Clovis projectile points, several fragmentary points, bifaces, and flake tools at the site. Fox forwarded information about the site to professional archaeologists in the early 1990s, but it was largely ignored after a brief geoarchaeological investigation. The Fox site contains a moderate frequency of chipped stone tools relative to other known Clovis assemblages in Colorado’s South Platte River basin, and it is located within a concentration of Paleoindian kill-butchery sites on the Kersey Terrace. Despite several contextual issues the Fox site is a significant contribution to the Clovis record of Colorado.