The Ancient Spear Points Found in a Washington Orchard in 1987 Were Too Big to Throw

🔔 Subscribe for new documentaries on North American history, told from the original records, the archaeology, and the Nations' own accounts. On May 27, 1987, orchard foreman Mark Mickles and worker Moises Aguirre Calzada were laying a new irrigation line in an apple orchard off Grant Road in East Wenatchee, Washington, when a shovel struck stone about twenty inches down. They had found a Clovis cache, a bundle of fluted spear points, stone tools and beveled bone rods laid together in the ground about 13,000 years ago. As The Seattle Times science writer Hill Williams wrote in April 1988, it "could turn out to be the oldest evidence of humans in the state." Excavations by Peter Mehringer of Washington State University in 1988 and Michael Gramly of the Buffalo Museum of Science in 1990 brought out some of the largest Clovis points ever found, up to about ten inches long, roughly twice the size of the points found at kill sites, with little sign of use. Volcanic ash from Glacier Peak, crusted on their undersides, showed that they had been set down on a giant Ice Age flood bar after the eruption. So were they hunting gear cached for a season that never came, or something else? This documentary gives the practical answer a fair hearing, sets down the giants, Solutrean and comet stories, and follows the ash, the bone rods and the Clovis-first debate. The cache lies in the homeland of the Wenatchi people, who are today one of the twelve tribes of the Colville Confederated Tribes. In October 1990, Colville tribal members stood peacefully in the orchard to protest the second dig. Their elders had read the arrangement of the points as the sign of a ceremonial place, decades before the microscope work and the 2026 study pointed the same way. The sentence a Colville tribal member wrote in 2014 about why the cache matters is in the video. If you are drawn to the first Americans, Ice Age archaeology, the Ice Age floods and the real history of the Columbia Plateau — this documentary reads the original record, the science and the Colville Tribes' own words, and invents nothing to fill the gaps. 📚 SOURCES (all public, check them yourself) Paula Becker, HistoryLink.org Essay 7966, on the May 27, 1987 discovery, 2006 Hill Williams, The Seattle Times, April 12, 1988; October 4, 1990; October 24, 1990; November 23, 1990 Peter J. Mehringer Jr., "Clovis cache found: Weapons of ancient Americans," National Geographic, October 1988 Peter J. Mehringer Jr. and Franklin F. Foit Jr., "Volcanic ash dating of the Clovis cache at East Wenatchee, Washington," National Geographic Research, 1990 Richard Michael Gramly, The Richey Clovis Cache: Earliest Americans Along the Columbia River, Persimmon Press, 1993 R. Lee Lyman, Michael J. O'Brien and Virgil Hayes, bone rods study, Journal of Archaeological Science, 1998 Ruth Kirk and Richard D. Daugherty, Archaeology in Washington, University of Washington Press, 2007 Richard B. Waitt, "Megafloods and Clovis cache at Wenatchee, Washington," Quaternary Research, 2016 Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford Jr. and David L. Carlson, "The age of Clovis," Science Advances, 2020 Morten Rasmussen et al., the Anzick genome, Nature, 2014 Bruce B. Huckell, Bruce A. Bradley and Peter J. Mehringer Jr. (eds.), Flaked Stone Artifacts from the East Wenatchee Clovis Cache, Texas A&M University Press, 2026 Wendell George, "Native Americans show respect for gravesites," The Wenatchee World, March 2014 Richard D. Scheuerman, The Wenatchi Indians: Guardians of the Valley, 1982 💬 Were the giant blades of East Wenatchee a hunter's cache that was never collected, or an offering that was never meant to be? We read every comment.