Holcombe Beach

More than 10,000 years ago, people began living on the land we now call Michigan. They arrived after the last glaciers retreated. Caribou, mastodons, mammoths and other animals roamed the plains and marshes in a cool, wet climate. Anishinaabek (Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi) refer to these people and those who came after them as “the Ancestors.” The early Ancestors were mobile, adept groups of hunters, fishers and harvesters. Some of them camped on a sandy ridge near here, now called “Holcombe Beach.” Those Ancestors used stone knives, projectile points, scrapers and gravers, mostly made from regional Bayport chert. Archaeologists working in the early 1960s found pieces of the distinctive fluted spearpoints and other tools left behind by the Ancestors. A single bone found at the site indicated barren-ground caribou were part of the hunters’ diet. Archaeologists divide human history into general time periods that are based on major environmental, technological and cultural changes. They call the earliest period (more than 10,000 years before the present) Paleo-Indian. In 1960 avocational archaeologist Jerry DeVisscher discovered Paleo-Indian artifacts at sites in this area, and soon Edward Wahla joined him. In 1961 University of Michigan archaeologists began excavating one of the sites. It was on an ancient beach ridge located on the Holcombe Sod Farm. Later, research determined that the lake associated with the beach ridge was gone well before people left the tools and bone that identify the site as one of the oldest in Michigan. In 1971, due to its contributions to knowledge of the region’s first people and of environmental change, the Holcombe Site was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.