Lewisville Lake

While building the dam that holds this lake, members of the Corps of Engineers stumbled onto an archaeological site. In 1956, two researchers, Wilson W. Crook Junior and R.K. Harris, announced carbon dating results from artifacts found there, including a Paleo-Indian Clovis projectile point. Their numbers suggested humans had lived on that spot around thirty-six thousand years ago. That would have rewritten the story of who reached the Americas, and when. Archaeologists argued about it for decades. Then the rising water covered the site, and nobody could get back to it until 1978, when levels finally dropped far enough. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian spent the next two years going through it carefully. He decided the original dates came from a rare kind of cross-contamination, and that twelve thousand years was closer to the truth. Even at that corrected age, the site remains one of the earliest places humans are known to have lived in the southwestern United States and Mexico.