The foreman, George McJunkin, was a black man who had been born into slavery and, like so many people freed from servitude by law or by flight, had migrated west and taken up the life available to such drifters in the business of cattle ranching. Besides being a capable manager of a cattle operation, McJunkin was something of a naturalist, it seems, or at least a sharp observer of his surroundings. While out on his horse checking fences and looking for strays, he paused near the curve in Wild Horse Arroyo, noticing some bones that had been partly uncovered by the torrent of water. They were too big to be the remains of cattle, and they seemed even large to be bison bones.
He showed the bones to a blacksmith from the nearby town of Raton, Carl Schwachheim, who, over the years, tried to interest the Colorado Museum of Natural History in McJunkin's find. Not until 1926, four years after McJunkin died at age sixty-six, did the blacksmith prevail on the director of the Colorado museum to come and have a look. It does not appear to have been any mention of a stone point that brought Jesse D. Figgins, the director of the museum, to the site. But come he did, bent (he said in a memorandum) only on collecting enough fossil bones of the ancient bisons to produce a mounted skeleton of one in his museum.
There may have been more to it than that, however. In 1925, Figgins had become involved at a dig at Lone Wolf Creek near Colorado City, Texas, where it seems that stone points had been found in association with the remains of ancient mammals. In fact, Figgins had made three such claims for signs of human activity associated with Ice Age creatures, but the Washington establishment had dismissed all of them with a shrug, pointing out that the dig had not been run by “responsible archaeologists.”
In the summer of 1926, Figgins found a delicately made stone point among the ancient bison bones in Wild Horse Arroyo, and in 1927 he wrote up a preliminary report designed to “stir up all the venom there is in” the Smithsonian's Hrdlíčka. Then he learned that a meeting had been arranged with the great man and met with Hrdlíčka in Washington that spring. Figgins was surprised to be received cordially by Hrdlíčka, who regretted only that the points had not been left in situ so others could have seen them there. He suggested that in the event that Figgins made another such find, he let the professionals know by telegram so they could comequickly and see with their own eyes a human artifact embedded in the remains of an Ice Age mammal.
In spite of a certain western bravado on Figgins's part and the fact that this was Hrdlíčka's way of saying that a western rube could hardly be deemed competent to handle such a matter, Figgins was humble enough— not claiming to be either an archaeologist or a paleontologist—to think this admonition quite reasonable. And in the following summer, near Folsom, when he and his party came across a stone point imbedded between the fossilized ribs of an Ice Age bison, he left it there and hastened to telegraph Hrdlíčka, and then others at the Smithsonian and other major museums: ANOTHER ARROWHEAD FOUND IN POSITION WITH BISON REMAINS AT FOLSOM NEW MEXICO HAVE INVITED HRDLICKA TO MAKE INVESTIGATION.
Eagerly, the big shots from the East showed up. Hrdlíčka was otherwise engaged, so a young colleague of his from the Bureau of Ethnography, Frank Roberts, came, arriving with Alfred Vincent Kidder of Washington's Carnegie Institution. Kidder and Roberts were at the time putting together the cultural sequence of the Pueblo country only a hundred or so miles south of Folsom, based on a major excavation of the ruins at Pecos, New Mexico, but the two did not arrive at Folsom before Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York (the first man to uncover a Tyrannosaurus rex) got there and began dusting the matrix away from the stone point and the bones. There was no doubting that the point and the bones had arrived in place simultaneously, and other scientists who arrived subsequently all got to see the same thing (in modern archaeological parlance, the artifacts and bones were in direct association). In all, Brown went on to discover some seventeen points in association with Ice Age mammal bones as the summer progressed. Within a month of his visit, Kidder—recognized widely as a, if not the, major figure in the field— pronounced the find to be some 15,000 to 20,000 years old. And later, Brown wrote up a report which, a bit ungraciously, did not mention Figgins at all.
Even with these panjandrums of the field weighing in about the site's authenticity, there was room for disagreement. When, it was asked, had this particular bison species gone extinct—in the late Pleistocene or the early Holocene? Was the geology consistent with a late Pleistocene date? The matter was not settled until geologists had pored over the site and pronouncedthe deposits to be at least late Pleistocene in age. Even then, William Henry Holmes would refer people to the “prevailing” opinions, and Hrdlíčka grumbled that there still were no prehuman remains (which is true to this day and irrelevant), thereafter maintaining a silence on the whole affair. In short order, however, virtually everyone agreed. The three criteria the Washington elite had long insisted upon had been met. Humans had dwelled in North America at least by the end of the Pleistocene.
The discovery of an Ice Age existence of humans was not without its ironies. Hrdlíčka himself, by telling Figgins to call in the eastern cognoscenti, had helped things along in the gainsaying of his own theory of a far more recent human arrival. And also, the Pleistocene artifacts—which came to be called Folsom points—were hardly the “crude” cobbles that Abbott and others had assumed were all Glacial Man would technically have been capable of making. Instead, they were exquisitely made implements—delicate, with finely chipped edges and a large central area on each face chipped out to make the smooth groove called a flute or channel flute. Clearly they were the work of skilled artisans, people who had mastered the fine art of flint knapping by pressure flaking, not a bunch of PreMousterian oafs banging rocks together. And, importantly, no one had ever seen anything like these points; with the fluting, they were unique in the known archaeological record, something that was peculiarly American.
The Folsom discoveries were a watershed event in American archaeology, and more discoveries were on the way. Another find in New Mexico a few years later would usher in the period called Clovis that would dominate the study of early man in North America for about seventy years. The traces of the man—yes, the man—who would bestride the late Pleistocene continent and points south as a veritable colossus were discovered in an out-of-the-way town in the arid badlands near the Texas border. And Clovis Man, soon perceived as the mightiest hunter ever to appear in the Americas, might have been called Riley had it not been for a girl who was fascinated by medieval French history. For in 1906, the daughter of a Santa Fe Railroad official was given the opportunity to rename the obscure little railway stop of Riley's Switch. Enamored of a fifth-century Frankish king who had converted to Christianity, she named the place for him—Clovis— and it grew into a small agricultural and commercial center. By the 1930s, Clovis was in the western side of the Dust Bowl, a place of ferocious summerheat and little promise for the cattlemen who were trying to raise beef in the neighborhood. Over the years, ranch hands had been finding large bladelike pieces of chipped stone here and there in the dusty ground, and word of this reached a genteel man with a fancy address on Philadelphia's Main Line and a soft accent from his birthplace, New Orleans. This was Edgar Billings Howard, a wealthy patrician who in his early forties had taken up archaeology as a second career.
According to a young graduate student named Loren Eiseley who worked with Howard one summer and who would later be lionized more for his poetic writing style than for his work as an anthropologist, Howard had a “driving mania” to find the skeletal remains of Folsom Man. To this end he began searching three hundred miles due south of Folsom in the Chihuahuan desert near Alamogordo and later Carlsbad, New Mexico, backed by Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences. This was cave country; in addition to Carlsbad Caverns, there are an estimated two thousand caves in the old limestone formations, a huge ancient reef that lies north of the extremely craggy and hostile Guadalupe Mountains. The conditions were frightful—heat, dust, unplea
sant rock, and the heavily armed plants of the desert. But in 1932, Howard found a hearth and the bones of Ice Age animals (caribou, horse, camel, and so forth) that depended on a grassy environment. This showed that the region had once been a relatively lush part of the southern plains. Then, in that same year, Howard heard from relic hunters about the appearance near the town of Clovis of stone implements among the bones of huge Ice Age mammals, and he moved his operation there for four years beginning in 1933.
While the town of Clovis had grown since it had ceased being Riley's Switch, even becoming something of a center of aviation, the surrounding area had suffered from the long drought and the nearly constant winds that were scouring the land, occasionally revealing long-buried bones. A local collector, Ridgely Whiteman, took Howard to a place called Blackwater Draw fourteen miles south of Clovis, where the winds had uncovered a large bone bed of bison and mammoth remains, and soon enough Howard secured the area for the Philadelphia Academy.
Many tantalizing finds were made in a gravel bed there by Howard and his multidisciplinary team, which even included a specialist in mollusks (a malacologist) to study fossil snails as indicators of environmentalconditions. Indeed, Howard's was essentially the first such broad-based team to undertake a major archaeological excavation in the United States. In the fourth year of work, 1937, Howard and his team found Folsom points associated with the remains of Pleistocene bison. Beneath that layer, they found larger and somewhat less finely made stone points associated with the remains of mammoths.
Here, then, were late Pleistocene mammoth hunters, who had lived in this area even earlier than the Folsom bison hunters. Their characteristic stone points were larger and longer than Folsom points, with slightly cruder and shorter flutes. They eventually came to be called Clovis points, rather than some early and cruder version of the Folsom tradition. And what came to be called the Mammoth Pit in the gravel bed in Blackwater Draw— a place scientifically known as Blackwater Locality No. 1—became the accepted “type” locality for Clovis culture. For there, in addition to the Clovis points, Howard's team found a number of other stone and bone artifacts that made up the basic Clovis tool kit soon found practically everywhere across the United States.
General view of a portion of Blackwater Draw (South Pit excavations), ca. 1933.
The tool kit included large blades from which other tools could be made: distinctive end scrapers, tools that are beveled on one or both ends that may have been hafted and used for defleshing hides before they were tanned; handheld side scrapers used for various scraping and cutting chores; gravers (beaked tools used to incise wood and bone); large and small fluted projectile points; and bevel-ended shafts made of bone that may have been attached to wooden spear shafts, with the projectile point hafted to the other end. Another typical Clovis tool, though not found at Blackwater, is what amounts to a bone wrench putatively used for straightening out spear or dart shafts but more likely used to make cordage from various plant materials, such as its analogs are still used today.
The stone tools from Blackwater Draw were clearly not made of any local stone. Instead, as later analysis showed, they were fashioned from materials located, in some cases, hundreds of miles away: Edwards chert, found some twenty miles to the east in present-day Texas; Tecovas jasper from north of the Edwards chert; Alibates agate from the Texas panhandle. Presumably, these people traveled far on arduous treks to specific places for specific preferred materials—or, less likely, they were participants in far-flung trade networks. Did they plan these trips ahead, or were they merely taking advantage of rock that lay along the seasonal migration routes of Columbia mammoths and other herds the hunters followed?
From plant materials found in the gravel bed of the Mammoth Pit, Howard's people were able to determine the climate around the time the Clovis hunters had thrived here in the southern plains. Evidently, just before the Clovis hunters arrived on the scene, the region had been a cool, dry savanna ringed with spruce and pine forests on higher ground. In Clovis times, the area was moister—damper soils and a good deal of standing fresh water from springs and perennial streams. The grasslands and forests would have persisted, but summer and winter extremes of temperature were somewhat moderated. There was plenty of game, both large and small, easily stalked at the many watering places. In short, it was a perfect place for hunter-gatherers. But this wonderful late Pleistocene world was already changing even as Clovis people arrived.
By the time Clovis culture in this region had ended—a time we can now peg as extending no more than seven hundred years after it all began—the big mammals, including horse, camel, and mammoth, but notbison, were gone, extinct in the area. It may have been a period of prolonged drought that did in both the big herbivores and their carnivorous predators such as dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. There is evidence that the water table began to drop in this period, with springs and year-round streams beginning to disappear. The Clovis people in Blackwater Draw would have found themselves in a highly stressful situation, suggested by what appears to be an attempt to dig a well.
By the time the people present in the area were producing the smaller Folsom points and hunting bison, many ponds had turned into marshy areas, most streams no longer ran year-round, and many were gone altogether. It was by then well into the Holocene, and the entire climate was undergoing big changes as the glaciers in the north receded. On the southern plains, it was hotter and drier, the temperature extremes greater. Ancient bison and pronghorns congregated at the edges of the dwindling water holes with their little surrounds of lush vegetation. The forests of the higher ground were mostly gone, deep-rooted trees clinging only along old watercourses in the lowlands. The winds increased and may well have been comparable to the spring winds that assault this region today, laden with yellow dust, roaring over the land, rendering plant life horizontal, and eroding hope.
Was the short-lived Clovis culture a kind of apex in the art of the North American big-game hunter? Certainly at Blackwater Draw, the Clovis people appear to have killed mammoths, which were not only huge but hugely powerful and probably extremely dangerous when aroused. But how? Did they drive them to the ponds and the muck, where the great beasts got stuck and were possibly further immobilized by wrapping ropes made of grasses around their legs? Or were they more like scavengers, waiting for the mammoths to get stuck in the mud on their own, then bringing them down? Or did they simply scavenge dying mammoths? The evidence at Blackwater Draw, and the many other places where the artifacts of the Clovis people soon began to be found, was not and is not conclusive.
In any case, by the late 1930s, while the nations of Europe were about to start another world war, the tool kit of the Clovis culture emerged in the minds of American archaeologists and then percolated into the public mind as the earliest sign of human habitation in the New World. No signof human habitation had by then been found underneath any assemblage of Clovis material. Clovis appeared from the limited evidence to be a culture that had apparently spread with lightning speed across the continent and then south into Latin America. In a nation given to setting records— on foot, in automobiles, or in flying machines—these Clovis people had what it takes. Speed. Daring. Inventiveness. The pioneering spirit writ large. Conquerors of the frontier. People could cheer for these First Americans.
By now, the field of archaeology was a far more professional arena. Numerous graduate schools offered archaeological degrees. Journals for the reporting of new finds were beginning to spring up in the subfields of the discipline. Obtaining a degree in archaeology now called for the mastery of a tremendous variety of information. Finds in Africa and soon Asia would revolutionize knowledge about the long course of human evolution, bringing to light humanoid creatures with strange names such as Australopithecus. Systematic ways of studying the astonishing ruins of the Southwest such as Mesa Verde were coming about. Studies of the Pleistocene and earlier eras in Europe and elsewhere were turning up exciting new data and insights into life in the three ages
: Stone, Bronze, and Iron. A student of archaeology had too much to learn as other fields enriched his or her own— such as geology, of course, botany, hydrology, and zoology. The answer to this dilemma had already been found: the multidisciplinary excavation, like that of Blackwater Draw. This would become the norm and would add considerably to the data an excavation could generate. But, as is so often the case, a gain in one area can be accompanied by a loss. Not many noticed at the time, but more and more, students of archaeology learned less and less of the field from which archaeology had originally sprung: geology. It was a new era—one of increasing specialization.
But not even the shrewdest geologists of the era could determine exactly when those exemplary first Americans—Clovis people—had lived. The dates of their perceived sovereignty over all the other creatures of North America remained ambiguous, and the matter would stay that way until after World War II, when some more peaceful uses were found for the mysterious force that ended the war: radioactivity.
CHAPTER FIVE
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
From the dawn of prehistoric study, archaeologists were hamstrung by the fact that no one knew exactly when anything prehistoric had actually happened. A few exceptions existed. In temperate-zone areas, where the seasons differ considerably from winter to summer, one could count tree rings on recovered wood beams or posts to establish the age of the wood and, by extrapolation, the building of which the wood had once been a part. The recognition that tree rings were annual growth markers goes back to no other than Leonardo da Vinci and is now an elaborate and technical field called dendrochronology. It depends on the fact that trees in such areas exhibit clearly defined rings added annually when new growth occurs in the spring. Then growth slows through the end of the summer and ceases altogether in the winter. The width of the growth ring varies depending on many things, notably the amount, duration, and delivery periods of rainfall during the growing season. The patterns thus formed can lead you from tree to tree back in time as much as 10,000 years into the past—to the beginning of the Holocene.
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