Dr. Holen joined the Museum in 2001 after completing his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Kansas. Dr. Holen has more than 30 years of experience in Great Plains archaeology and extensive experience with public education in a museum setting.
His research has focused on the Clovis people—the earliest well-known North American human culture at 13,000 years old. He has studied Clovis use and long-distance movement of stone tools in the central Great Plains of North America. He has also excavated several pre-Clovis mammoth sites that date between 16,000 and 20,000 years old. These sites are significant because they reveal evidence that humans were in North America long before the Clovis people. This is one of the most hotly debated topics in North American archaeology.
Dr. Holen’s research interests include: 1) The early peopling of the Americas 2) Paleo-Indian lithic procurement 3) Geoarchaeology 4) Megafaunal extinctions 5) Public archaeology.
Current Projects
Recent Publications
Holen, S. R., 2007. The age and taphonomy of mammoths at Lovewell Reservoir, Jewell County, Kansas, USA (PDF | 790KB). Quaternary International (in press)
Muniz, M. P., S. R. Holen, and D. W. May, 2007. Results of Recent Survey Along the Arikaree River Drainage, Eastern Colorado. Southwestern Lore 73(1):1-37.
Basham, M. P. and S. R. Holen, 2006. Easterday II Cache: A flake core cache from Weld County, Colorado. Southwestern Lore 72(2):1-14.
Holen, S. R., 2006. Taphonomy of two last glacial maximum mammoth sites in the central Great Plains of North America: a preliminary report (PDF | 979KB). Quaternary International 142-143:30-43.
Holen, S. R. and M. P. Muniz, 2005. A Flattop Chalcedony Clovis Biface Cache from Northeast Colorado (PDF | 194KB). Current Research in the Pleistocene 22:49-50.