can find a story in a stone.
Before Coronado
by Robert H. Weber
The cultural heritage of New Mexico is a rich and colorful one, blending as it does the three separate traditions of Indian, Spanish, and Anglo-American. Of these, the lifeways of the Indian, ancient and modern, are of particular interest to both the visitor and resident. These were the first inhabitants of the New World, whose roots extend back in time many thousands of years before the first European set foot here. People who had adapted themselves to the varied and often harsh environments of desert, plain, valley, canyon, and mountain; who witnessed the disappearance of the large mammals of the Pleistocene Ice Age and concomitant changes in climate and vegetation; the first prospectors and miners seeking flint, obsidian, turquoise, clay, salt, and mineral pigments; early traders exchanging valued minerals and handicrafts for shells of the coastal regions; hunters and farmers, architects and builders, civic and religious leaders, philosophers and critics, skilled craftsmen and artists, explorers and soldiers—all ancient counterparts of those who were to follow.
In 1540, when the train of soldiers in the company of Coronado’s Spanish Expedition entered the unknown lands later called New Mexico, four groups of native Americans were established residents in the area. Along the arable valley of the Rio Grande and its tributaries, and in several outlying areas were the adobe and stone apartment-house villages of the Pueblo Indians, whose livelihood was based largely on agriculture. East of the mountains were scattered bands of Plains Indians, Eastern Apaches, who were nomadic hunters following the herds of buffalo that ranged across the vast grasslands of the High Plains. Western Apaches were dispersed in small bands of hunters and gatherers of wild foods through the mountainous country to the west of the Rio Grande. A related group, the Navajo, augmented the necessities of life gained by hunting and gathering with subordinate agricultural crops in the Plateau region to the northwest.
Early contacts of the conquistadores were largely with the Pueblo Indians, although they had limited knowledge of the Apaches and Navajos in outlying districts. There was little to suggest to the Spanish invaders, except for the ruins of long-abandoned Pueblo villages, that the fragmentary record of thousands of years of human prehistory lay scattered in the dust beneath their feet. Undoubtedly they would have dismissed as utter nonsense any notion that men armed with stone-tipped spears had here slain elephants in a marsh 12,000 years old that now lay buried beneath shifting sands of a desert landscape. Indeed, it was not until the last quarter of the 1800’s that serious attempts were made to decipher the prehistoric traces of the Pueblo Indians, whereas concrete evidence that man had hunted long-extinct Pleistocene big game in America was not discovered until less than forty years ago.
EARLY HUNTERS
The year 1926 was marked by the first of a series of important archeological finds in New Mexico that were eventually to demonstrate that man had occupied this area as much as 11,000 to 12,000 years ago. During this period, Late Pleistocene ice sheets of continental glaciers still blanketed parts of the northern tier of states in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, and elephants (both mammoths and mastodons), horses, camels, giant bison, tapirs, and ground sloths roamed the Southwest. Excavations begun in 1926 near the small town of Folsom, in northeastern New Mexico ([fig. 1]), disclosed a number of fossil skeletons of a large form of extinct bison, forerunners of the modern bison or buffalo. Among these bones were dart or spear points of distinctive form and workmanship, characterized by broad, shallow flutes or channels on each face ([fig. 2]). These artifacts, now known as Folsom points, have since been recovered from a number of sites in New Mexico and elsewhere in North America, commonly in association with the remains of extinct bison. Evidently Folsom “Man” (whose skeletal remains have not been discovered) was a nomadic hunter particularly dependent upon the bison for his food supply, much as were the later Plains Indians of historic time. Ages of from 10,000 to 11,000 years have been obtained from charcoal and other organic remains at Folsom camp sites by the radiocarbon method.
Succeeding years have seen an increasing number of valuable archeological discoveries at camp and game-kill sites of Folsom Man and other Early Hunters. Unquestionably, the most important of these sites is the Blackwater Draw locality between Clovis and Portales in extreme eastern New Mexico, where excavations for gravel disclosed a stratified sequence of sediments that were deposited in an ancient pond and spring. Here, too, were the characteristic Folsom points in association with the bones of fossil bison. Below the Folsom layer, still older deposits contained the fossil bones of mammoth, horse, camel, and bison associated with fluted spear points that resembled those from Folsom but were generally larger and less skillfully chipped and fluted. These points, now known as Clovis points, are so commonly found beside the remains of mammoths in a number of sites in the High Plains and the Southwest that their makers are believed to have been adept at hunting these extinct elephants. Radiocarbon dates place Clovis points in a time range of from 11,000 to 12,000 years ago.
In a layer above that containing Folsom points at Blackwater Draw, several varieties of unfluted lanceolate points were found to be associated with the bones of fossil bison. These points have been identified by various specific names such as Plainview, Milnesand, Eden, and Scottsbluff from excavated sites elsewhere in the High Plains region, and probably range in age from 8000 to 10,000 years. Although the giant bison still survived into this level of stratigraphy and time, the elephant, camel, and horse of the Clovis level had disappeared from the area.