Last October, an Orange County homeowner found something odd in their backyard. Dr. Cory Harris, an anthropology and sociology professor at SUNY Orange, says the homeowner brought their discovery to the campus in Middletown — and he knew right away what it was.
"These things were absolutely mastodon teeth, which are, if you spend about 30 seconds with mastodon teeth, they're easy to identify," says Harris. "And pretty quickly, two more teeth were identified in the ground just under the surface. And those teeth wouldn't wiggle when you tried. So, it was pretty clear they were embedded in a jaw."
Similar to woolly mammoths, mastodons are relatives of the modern-day elephant that went extinct between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago. Harris says multiple mastodon skeletons have been found in New York, but Orange County has been especially fruitful for scientists: roughly one-third of the state’s mastodons have been found here.
Technically, Harris says, the practice of digging up animal bones is paleontology, not archeology. But he says the methods used in both are similar, and he saw an opportunity for his students. For six weeks starting in May, Harris and a team of 12 students went back to the property to continue digging.
Compared to a lot of other excavations, Harris says the process was relatively simple.
"We knew that we had a jaw with mastodon teeth there, which is smoking gun, absolute evidence of a mastodon. So, the first step is just to look near that jaw, and so excavation units were put adjacent to where the jaw was found," Harris explains. "And in every excavation unit we opened, we found more elements of the mastodon. So we didn't really have to do any kind of more sophisticated testing than that. It was simply just expanding the area where we were in.”
In addition to the teeth, Harris says students uncovered multiple vertebrae, jaw fragments and ribs — all of which he believes belonged to the same Ice Age mastodon.
Harris says it’s rare to find a fossil this intact. Sadie Hankins, a freshman studying archeology, recalls what Harris told her after she and another classmate found ribs.
"[Dr Harris] specifically said to me and Carson, like, 'You're so spoiled, because this is literally like never gonna happen to you again.' We found something in almost every single unit. I feel like that like doesn't happen a lot," says Hankins. "It was consistently exciting every day. Like, I've never wanted to wake up at 9 a.m. before, but I wanted to be there every day. I was so excited."
Hankins says students took turns participating in different parts of the dig. Some would probe the soil, while others dug or screened the bones and fragments.
This wasn’t Kira Moore’s first time being around an archaeological site — she works for the state Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. But it was one of the most memorable.
“My experiences prior was always kind of like a hawk, circling them, watching them do this. So, being able to be hands-on and have the opportunity to go and pursue and have that on my resume and say, 'I've actually done this' [is cool]," says Moore. "Not only this Mastodon being an amazing find, and really awe-inspiring, but to me, it was really the people that I got to meet and have the opportunity with. Because I really believe that I've made some lifelong friends in this class."
The larger bones were sent to the New York State Museum for examination and curation, while SUNY Orange has retained some of the smaller ones. Harris says he hopes to continue the summer program next year, to discover more of the history right below our feet.
“I'm 99.9999 percent positive there is more mastodon out there," says Harris.