In August of 1913, workmen digging a ditch on the Hill-Stead estate of A.A. Pope uncovered the remains of an American mastodon (Mammut americanum) toward the base of a peat bog, along what is now Mountain Road in Farmington, Connecticut (Figure 1). was out in the field in late April.

The remains were excavated by a crew of experienced fossil preparators from the Yale Peabody Museum, and the mastodon was taken to the Peabody for conservation and study. Shortly thereafter it ended up in storage back in Farmington where it rested for decades. In the late 1970s, the American Indian Archaeological Institute (AIAI; now the Institute for American Indian Studies [IAIS]) took an interest in displaying a representative specimen of Pleistocene fauna from Connecticut (Davis 1977). Over the course of a year, the AIAI received the mastodon on loan, worked with the Yale Peabody to conserve and assemble it, and eventually placed it on exhibit (Turner 1977). The mastodon was eventually disassembled and transferred to the State of Connecticut, where it was placed in storage at the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History. Since its exhumation, the mastodon has variously been referred to as "Old Longtooth," the Hill-Stead Mastodon, the Farmington Mastodon, and the Pope Mastodon. We refer to it throughout as the Farmington/Pope Mastodon. Here, we report for the first time the results of an accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) assay on a portion of this mastodon in an attempt to directly estimate its age.

The mastodon was encountered by an excavation crew in late August of 1913. The find was reported to their superintendent, A. B. Cook, who recognized the potential significance of the remains. Cook brought it to the attention of his employer, Ms. Theodate Pope, who then directed her attorney C.T. Brooks to notify C. Schuchert at the Yale Peabody Museum. Schuchert visited the site of the find at some point shortly after discovery, and observed "a number of large bones of one of the fore limbs and the back part of the skull, which had unfortunately been greatly damaged before the [workmen] became aware that they were removing bone and not a prostrate tree" (Schuchert and Lull 1914: 323).

The UConn field school was held on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. Four students and two instructors excavated a trench through a supposed root cellar (72-278) and investigated portions of the Sandy Hill site.

Schuchert directed a team of preparators, led by Hugh Gibb, from the Peabody Museum to excavate the remains, assisted by the original workmen from the Pope estate Figure 2).

The preparators excavated most of the remains by early September. Later that November, the excavation was expanded to create a reservoir, and a tusk of the mastodon was encountered roughly 6 meters northeast of the original finds (Schuchert and Lull 1914: 323).

The mastodon remains are reported to have been found "in a shallow trough directly on bowlder-clay," an early-twentieth-century term synonymous with glacial till. Six to eighteen inches of identical clay, without cobbles, encapsulated the mastodon remains above the till. Above this, another 30 inches of fine clay are reported, though with increased amounts of vegetation. Capping the stratigraphic sequence was approximately 18 inches of water-logged turf or peat.

A plan view of the excavations (Schuchert and Lull 1914: Fig 1) was produced after the fact by Lull using descriptions, sketches, and photographs made during the excavations (Figure 3). Most of these photographs are presumed to remain either in the collections of the Hill-Stead or Yale Peabody museums; however, at least one of these photographs was released by the Bain News Service (1913) and is available through the Library of Congress (Figure 4).

During exhumation, major skeletal elements of the mastodon were wrapped in plaster of Paris to stabilize them for transport to the Yale Peabody Museum for conservation, presumably with the intent of exhibiting them (Cook 1978; Schuchert and Lull 1914). By November, 1913, it seems that Theodate Pope wished to have the mastodon returned to Farmington so that it could eventually be displayed locally. This desire was never realized, and the mastodon remained stored in crates at Hill-Stead until her death in 1946.

After this, the crates are believed to have been kept at Avon Old Farms School until June 1971 when they were transferred to the Connecticut Geological and Natural History Survey by Sid Quarrier (who had recently been closely involved with work at Dinosaur State Park).

That year, an effort was made by the Yale Peabody Museum to restore and repair the remains (McDonald 1971).

In 1977 the American Indian Archaeological Institute (now IAIS) sought out the mastodon remains with the intent of displaying them at their museum. At that time, the remains were in storage at the Peabody (Davis 1977). Several months later the AIAI reported having received the entirety of the mastodon skeleton save the left femur and one vertebra (Davis and Turner 1977). Volunteers from the AIAI and from the Peabody Museum worked to catalog the skeleton (assigning Peabody catalog numbers), take measurements, conserve degraded portions, and to prepare a scale model. The mastodon was on exhibit at the AIAI until 1989 when the remains were returned to the State of Connecticut, this time in care of the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History at UConn.

Despite Connecticut's relatively rich Pleistocene faunal record (e.g., Lucas 1993; Schuchert and Lull 1914, though see Faux and Joyce 2008) only one other mastodon from the state has been radiocarbon dated (Boulanger 2014; Boulanger et al. 2015). Thus, questions about the timing and ultimate causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the state and in the broader region cannot yet be answered. With this in mind, the Friends of the Office of State Archaeology (FOSA) utilized the "Douglas Jordan Testing, Dating and Conservation Fund" to obtain an accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) date on a fragment of tusk ivory from the Farmington/Pope mastodon. This fragment was selected for analysis because it was not part of the restoration/conservation effort performed at the AIAI during the 1970s, and therefore was unlikely to have been contaminated by adhesives or preservatives. Some drops of glue were present on the tusk fragment, but these do not appear to have penetrated the surface in any appreciable amount. As a precaution against contamination, however, the tusk fragment was carefully abraded to remove its outer surface and potential glue deposits.

Radiocarbon analysis of the tusk fragment was performed on extracted collagen following standard procedures at Beta Analytic. A pretreatment was performed to remove any remaining solvents that may have been applied to the ivory. The results indicate that the mastodon is 12,430 ± 40 radiocarbon years old. Using OxCal 4.2 and the IntCal13 curve, this date calibrates to 14,900-14,200 calBP,

A lingering question in New England archaeology concerns the potential for the region's earliest inhabitants, Paleoindians, to have hunted now-extinct fauna such as mastodons, mammoths (Mammuthus), stag-moose (Cervalces scotti) and others. The radiocarbon date reported here indicates that the Farmington/Pope mastodon died roughly two-thousand years before the earliest radiocarbon date as-yet returned for a Paleoindian site in the broader region: 12,840-12720 calBP, at Shawnee-Minisink (36MR43) in Pennsyl-vania (Gingerich 2007; see also Miller and Gingerich 2013). We note that biases in preservation and sampling make it unlikely that this is the absolute first habitation in the region. That is, earlier sites may exist but have not yet been discovered, or they have potentially been either obscured or destroyed by changes of the landscape.

In the case of the Farmington/Pope mastodon, it might be argued that despite being significantly older than the currently known earliest Paleoindian site, that the mastodon itself may have been prey of as-yet undetected Paleoindians. Regarding this possibility, it is important to point out that the mastodon was excavated by a group of professional museum workers, at times under the watchful eyes of interested laypersons (e.g., Figure 2). We know of no first-hand accounts of the excavation of the mastodon; however, Charles Schuchert and Richard Lull - under whom Gibb and the other Yale preparators worked - published a brief account and description of the mastodon remains in 1914. Of the excavation, Schuchert states that "[s]o careful were these 'bone diggers' that all the clay immediately around the skeleton was dug out with their hands, as they felt their way through the sticky clay down to and around the bones" (Schuchert and Lull 1914: 323). At the time of discovery and writing, Schuchert was the head of the Sheffield Scientific School, chair of the geology department, and head administrator at the Yale Peabody. Lull was an Assistant Professor of vertebrate paleontology at Yale, as well as a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody. Given their positions at Yale and the fact that both men were supervisors of the preparators who excavated the mastodon, we assume that their description of the techniques used to excavate the mastodon is accurate and informed by direct discussions with the excavators.

We find it compelling that the Farmington/Pope mastodon was excavated by hand - literally by hand if Schuchert and Lull's account is accurate - and that no artifacts were encountered during excavation. We also point out that the possibility of human agency was well in the minds of Schuchert and Lull, and presumably their subordinates who excavated the bones, given that they devote an entire section of their publication to evaluating "[i]f the prehistoric Indians knew and helped to exterminate these animals" (1914: 328). We also note that the mastodon skeleton was handled extensively by a group of professional and avocational archaeologists (as well as several additional preparators from Yale) during the conservation/exhibition at the AIAI (IAIS), and no evidence of butchery or cutting on the skeleton was noted at that time. This of course is not equivalent to a dedicated study by a vertebrate paleontologist or taphonomist; however, we find it curious that no evidence of human agency in the death of the mastodon has been found or observed despite at least two different independent groups of people having handled the remains.

The absence of any evidence suggesting that the death of the Farmington/Pope mastodon was directly related to human behavior does not diminish the mastodon's significance to the prehistory of Connecticut and of New England. Precious little data exist for archaeologists and paleobiologists to study how, when, and ultimately why large animals such as mastodons went extinct across North America towards the end of the Pleistocene. Obtaining precise chronological data, as well as potentially isotopic and genetic data on faunal remains such as the Farmington/Pope mastodon has the potential to provide answers to these questions.

Funding for the radiocarbon date was provided through the "Douglas Jordan Testing, Dating and Conservation Fund" from the Friends of the State Archaeologist (FOSA), and we are grateful for their support of this project. We thank Nick Bellantoni for his encouragement and for his helpful efforts. We also thank Laurie Lamarre, Lisa Piastuch, Lucianne Lavin and Roger Moeller for answering our inquiries and for providing information useful for the completion of this project.

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Miller, Shane D. and Joseph A. M. Gingerich 2013 Regional variation in the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene radiocarbon record of eastern North America. Quaternary Research 73: 175-188.

Mills, Lewis S. 1913 Discovery of mastodon bones on the farm of Ms. Theodate Riddle. Hartford, Connecticut State Library, State Archives, PG 180, Mills Photograph Collection, box 1, folder 17, item 4. Retrieved June 19, 2015, from Connecticut History Online: (http://connecticuthistoryillustrated.org/islandora/object/30002%3A1339).
Webmaster Note: The above web address has been changed from its original location on Connecticut History Online (http://www.cthistoryonline.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/cho/id/18938 ). It does not appear to be on what was its new residence on the Connecticut History Illustrated web site, either.

Schuchert, Charles and Richard S. Lull 1914 Mammut americanum in Connecticut. American Journal of Science 37(220): 321-330.

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Turner, Sharron H. 1977 Mastodon debut. Artifacts 6(1): 7