An excavation in April 1988, led by Peter J. Mehringer of Washington State University, with a team of leading local and national authorities in Paleo-Indian Archaeology and members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, discovered 22 more stone and bone tools, but removed only five for laboratory study.
Richey, who in November 1988 bought out his partners and became sole owner of the Clovis site, replaced the Mehringer team with New York archaeologist R. Michael Gramly, who then led another dig in October 1990.
This excavation became controversial, with members of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation protesting the state government’s granting of an archaeological permit for Gramly, whose statements and writings questioned a link between Clovis Paleo-Indians and modern Indians.
In light of the dispute, Gramly’s dig proceeded on a shortened time frame, and ultimately removed approximatively 69 artifacts including tools, debitage, and bone fragments before closing the site.
In 1992 Richey donated all the recovered Clovis artifacts and sold the archaeological rights to the 35-square-meter site for $250,000 to the Washington State Historical Society, which owns them in perpetuity.
The cache held the largest Clovis points then known to science, one of them 9.15 inches (23.25 cm) long, knapped from white agate (also called chalcedony).
Some researchers postulated that the cache might have represented a large habitation camp; a hunting toolkit, buried and then dug up for seasonal stalking of game; a ceremonial or funeral site; or a ritual offering to stave off ecological harm brought on by the eruption of nearby Glacier Peak, 11,250 radiocarbon years BP, even though the presence of large amounts of debitage and fragmented bone is a good indicator that the site didn't represent a cache at all and the Glacier Peak eruption is thought to have occurred over two centuries before the emergence of the Clovis culture.