Vance Haynes

"[1] He is known for unearthing and studying artifacts of Paleo-Indians including ones from Sandia Cave in the 1960s, work which helped to establish the timeline of human migration through North America.

Haynes coined the term "black mat" for a layer of 10,000-year-old swamp soil seen in many North American archaeological studies.

[2] He was interested in rocketry and guided missiles, and was posted to special weapons units, including a stint at Sandia Base adjoining Albuquerque.

[1] After his military stint, Haynes returned to the Colorado School of Mines, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in geology and archaeology in 1956.

[2] Fred Wendorf invited Haynes to join the High Plains Paleoecology Project (HPPP), an association which led to his first work at the Clovis archaeological dig, Blackwater Draw Locality 1.

His careful dating of Clovis carbon traces provided Haynes with one of the most significant advances in the understanding of early human activity and migration in North America.

[7] In 1997, Haynes co-authored a memorial of his teacher Emil Haury, an article written with Raymond Harris Thompson and James Jefferson Reid which appeared in Biographical Memoirs, Volume 72, of the National Academy of Sciences.

[8] The Argonaut Archaeological Research Fund (AARF) was the recipient in Fall 2002 of Haynes's extensive collection of 800 mostly epoxy resin, with some acrylic, casts made from Paleoindian projectile points.

[9] In 2003–2004, Haynes submitted arguments to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with other scientists to question various tribal claims to the remains of the Kennewick Man, estimated to be 8,340 to 9,200 years old, in order to determine which tribe, if any, it could be identified with.

[13] In the 1950s, in his work on the Lehner Mammoth-Kill Site near Hereford, Arizona, Emil Haury found Clovis point artifacts buried by a distinctive black clay layer.

[15] Firestone and colleagues published an Inner Traditions trade book about cosmic catastrophes in which they claimed that raised levels of radioactivity were associated with the mat at the Murray Springs Clovis Site.

[16] But Haynes found no such radioactive anomaly of the black mat or the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary that it covers at Murray Springs, Lehner Ranch, or Blackwater Draw.

Astrophysicist David Morrison later characterized Firestone's book as "catastrophist pseudoscience" [17] In the late 1990s, it was reported that, in the North American Great Basin area, black mats actually occur between 11,000 and 6300 BP (cal).

This was to replace the tedious customizing of sporting rifles by production of a standard model for officers to use on campaigns during the Indian wars in the west.