Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
The Tekoa water project has turned up almost every street in town. Last week, it added a mammoth tooth.
In the late morning of Aug. 6, a crew from Granite Excavation was installing a storm-drain catch basin at the corner of Henkle and Broadway when pipe layer Don Zufelt saw something in the dirt.
They stopped digging and summoned Dr. Ula Moody, archaeologist who was monitoring a different crew.
Moody said the tooth was in loess soil about 3.5 feet below the road grade. Loess is the wind-blown soil which makes the Palouse so rich for grain.
“I wasn’t certain what it was at first,” said Chris Koenig, Engineering Inspector for Century West. “It was large. It doesn’t look like what you would consider a tooth.”
“It’s a mammoth tooth, no doubt,” Moody stated.
The tooth, believed to be a second molar, includes small roots.
“That’s pretty unusual,” said Moody. “We were all very excited.”
The tooth measures six inches long, four inches high and three and a half inches wide.
Moody, who teaches anthropology at North Idaho College, said the tooth is typical of grazers, like an elephant.
Moody acts as the Cultural Resource Monitor for the Tekoa water line project.
The tooth will go to the Tekoa museum. Without cultural material, which is defined as something modified by man, such as a stone tool, an item is deemed geologic, not archaeological.
If it was an archaeological find, Moody said it would be sent to the state for evaluation.
The tooth was found in an older loess bed of approximately 14,000 years old, Moody said.
“It was beneath city material and any historical or prehistoric items found in this area,” said the professor.
She is now refurbishing the tooth because pieces broke between the enamel as it was removed. It is now in six pieces.
“It was badly water-logged and brittle,” Moody said.
She has replaced the water with water-soluble glue and will put it back together.
Once it’s restored, Moody said it will be given to the Tekoa museum, which is in the back of the town’s library.
It was quite a discovery, said Koenig.
“Old car parts is usually what you find,” he said. “No prehistoric animals.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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