(lighthearted music) - One reason this site that's so special, it's the only Paleoindian, red ochre mine that we know of.

There are probably others, and there may still be others, but it's the only one we know of at this point in time.

- Here at Sunrise, we have a very special situation where we have this red ochre mine, a prehistoric red ochre mine, but it's not just before contact with Europeans or Americans, it was really old.

This is a really old place.

Our dates are going back to at least 13 and a half thousand years on the mine itself.

And it's a unique opportunity, it's a unique site.

- And we explained to the landowner, John Voight, what we were doing and how important the site was and how important the artifacts were.

Out of his own mouth, he says, "Well, you know, they don't really belong to me, they belong to humanity."

- Having somebody like John Voight here who has gotten interested, he's very interested in what we're doing and he wants to support it, and he shows that by what he does and a lot not just allows us to be here, he encourages us and helps build what we do.

- Over the years in working with Doc Frison and George Zeimens and other archeologists, it has become clearer and clearer to me, this is extremely important and needs to be protected.

It brought a whole new dimension and relevance to the importance of this site.

It's a one-of-a-kind site in the world, and especially North America.

(lighthearted music) - Red ochre is basically just iron oxide, and it's one of the most common minerals on Earth.

Iron is, after silica, iron is there.

So iron is in everything in every place.

But red ochre is a certain kind of iron.

It's iron that has enough clay and things in it to sort of be like a pigment.

It can be used as a preservative.

You can use it for a sunscreen.

You can use it to paint your body for ritual purposes.

There's just a whole lot of things that you can do with it.

And people did in the past, - And prehistoric people didn't have very many pigments they could use but red ochre was one of them.

And for some reason, red ochre has been valuable to prehistoric people for hundreds of thousands of years.

- Worldwide, we see the use of red ochre in early societies, as used as a symbolic material.

And almost anywhere in the world, you can get red iron oxide someplace nearby.

So to have a place where they were actually mining it and putting that kind of effort into it, probably does signify that this source had its special significance.

It looks like it was visited over and over and over again.

It looks like we're looking at ritual activity and we have to make that case based on kinds of artifacts, context of artifacts, and all that sort of stuff.

So we're finding these points and other artifacts that really look like they're being put there as offerings.

We're connecting those dots and saying it looks like we're seeing a ritual aspect of society in the past, which is really exciting.

'Cause it's very hard to get into people's minds in the past.

(lighthearted music) - You know, it was just logical that they were camping on the valley floor below the site.

So we decided we'd do some testing, but we were hoping that maybe if we could get below what had been disturbed by the historic mining, we might find some evidence for a cap ground.

So we started digging, and sure enough, we encountered the prehistoric terrace with intact prehistoric deposits.

- And they were actually just sort of camping out on that and making their tools and using things and probably going up to the mine.

- The first thing we found in doing those tests is we found a source of tool stone, the kind of material that these people needed to make their stone tools out of.

And about 60% of the artifacts up in the ochre mine were made out of that material.

So that was a really, really important point.

And it was definitely a prehistoric quarry with tools and implements and other things in it.

So that, as it turned out, that find was almost as significant as the red ochre mine.

So we ended up dating the deposits rather than artifacts.

And it turns out they were OSL dates and radiocarbon dates were the same.

They were old.

They were older than Clovis, 14,000 and 15,001, 16,000-year-old date.

That's pretty mind-boggling.

And those are the oldest dates on the Western Eye of Plains that associated with artifacts.

You know, originally, the way I was taught in school and brought up was Clovis were the first people here, the earliest Americans on this continent, and Clovis sites dated around somewhere between the late 12,000 year, early 13,000 years ago.

And the dates are all pretty uniform across the...

There are a lot of Clovis sites and they all date about the same.

But now we've got dates older than Clovis.

(lighthearted music) We were finally able to get Bruce Bradley involved in our research up here.

And Bruce Bradley, of course, is one of the best lithic experts on Clovis Points, and he did an analysis of the points, and he says, "It is a whole different manufacturing technique.

These points were manufactured differently."

- We've got different types, Clovis, Folsom, Plainview, Goshen, Midland, there's a number of points-styles that are very similar, but there are different enough that we can actually categorize them.

And it was very confusing because these things look like Clovis, but they're not made like Clovis.

And so what I've done is, I've done that detailed analysis to figure out what's the same and what's different and come to the conclusion that it's both the form and the technology in combination is different enough to give it a new type that will be contested.

It is a science as well as a humanity.

And so the science part of it, it's very appropriate for us to use a scientific method.

And so we come up with hypotheses.

We expect when we come up with a new concept, a new idea, like a new point type, we would expect and want challenge.

- So we're hoping that we'll be able to find a campsite and find some points in that campsite and get a good date on this projectile point type.

- We're desperately trying to find association between a sunrise point and a date.

It could be 15,000, it could be 10,000, it could be 12.

But if I have to guess, and I do get to guess, I put 'em somewhere at the end of Clovis, beginning of Goshen.

(lighthearted music) (tools clacking and rattling) We're very, very fortunate that we have this archeological site in the middle of a historic site because there's people that grew up in Sunrise, they care about this place and they're passing that care onto their children and their grandchildren.

And that's what's gonna stay, sustain this.

It's not grants, it's not funding, it's commitment to this place as a important piece of history, whether it's 10,000, 20,000 years ago or 1950, that's what's gonna sustain this place.

And that's where I feel very comfortable that there is a long future here, both for the historic site and for the potential of research.

- So now the charge, my goal is can I continue to do what I intended to do here originally?

And that is monetized iron.

Can I work, can I mesh my gears with preserving an archeological site?

It's clear to me now, this YMCA is going to operate as a place for study and preservation of the artifacts for the archeological site, which is right across the street.

Not 100 yards from the YMCA.

We want to protect and preserve this site.

We want to study it and we want to share it.

We wanna share the last 200 years too, as well as the first 13,000 years.

- This is a different kind of site.

It's a chance to learn something new about these prehistoric people, you know?

And there, again, one of the problems we have is with researching prehistoric people in North America especially, is that most of our data is based on stones and bones.

You know, we keep forgetting once in a while that these people were human beings.

(lighthearted music)