The Page–Ladson archaeological and paleontological site (8JE591) is a deep sinkhole in the bed of the karstic Aucilla River (between Jefferson and Taylor counties in the Big Bend region of Florida) that has stratified deposits of late Pleistocene and early Holocene animal bones and human artifacts.

[2]: 414  Early dates for Page–Ladson challenge theories that humans quickly decimated large game populations in the area once they arrived.

The only reliable sources of fresh water at elevations that are currently above sea level were sinkholes and the deeper parts of river beds.

[1] The lower part of the Aucilla River (from the Cody Scarp to the Gulf of Mexico) crosses the Woodville Karst Plain, which consists of a thin layer of sand over limestone bedrock.

Starting in 1959, Dick Ohmes and other scuba divers began retrieving artifacts and Pleistocene animal bones bearing butcher marks from the lower reaches of the Aucilla River.

Florida Museum of Natural History published an annual Aucilla River Times newsletter,[7] as well as researchers reporting in scientific periodicals.

[1] This excavation yielded six lithic artifacts (bifaces and flakes) made from local coastal plain chert from layers dating before Clovis.

It includes mastodon, mammoth, horse, ground sloth, palaeolama bones, and "straw mats" of chopped vegetation (leaves, bark, and wood) of relatively uniform length.

The length of the chopped vegetation is consistent with the spacing between cusps on mastodon teeth, and the "straw mats" have been interpreted as equivalent to the layers of trampled elephant dung found around water holes in Africa.

Ivory spear points (often called "foreshafts") are found more frequently in the Aucilla River than from any other sites in North America.

[18] Underwater archaeologists and other researchers reexamining the Page–Ladson site have shown that some Late Pleistocene human populations provisioned themselves with mastodons that were either butchered or scavenged 14,450 years ago (~14,550 cal yr B.P.