Some, like the Paisley Caves in Oregon, are established through coprolite analysis and ancient DNA.

Some, like Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho, are established through the stratigraphic association of stone artifacts with sediment layers that have been dated by AMS radiocarbon methods.

Manis occupies a specific and somewhat unique niche in this landscape: it is not primarily a site of human occupation.

There is no hearth, no occupation surface, no scatter of tools that defines a place where people lived and worked.

It is a site of a single, specific event — an encounter between a human or humans and a mastodon — that was recorded by the extraordinary accident of a weapon tip being embedded in bone and preserved for nearly fourteen millennia.