In the first decade of the 20th century an African-American cowboy discovered large, deeply buried bones eroding from a bank of Wild Horse Arroyo in the northeast corner of New Mexico near the town of Folsom. George McJunkin recognized that these bones were special and reported them to amateur naturalists in the area. Paleontologists from the Colorado Museum of Natural History arrived in 1926 to excavate a specimen for the museum and they identified the bones as belonging to a large extinct bison species. The next year the excavators discovered a striking, fluted spear point embedded between the ribs of one of the ancient bison.
That discovery put humans at Folsom at the end of the last Ice Age, and thousands of years prior to the then accepted date of human colonization of the New World. It also set off a controversy among archaeologists that continues unabated to this day—the search for the first Americans.
The Folsom excavators returned to the site in 1928, and then left for good. Except for a couple of brief visits, it remained unscathed until David Meltzer and his crew from Southern Methodist University returned for three summers of fieldwork from 1997 to 1999. A renowned Paleo-Indian archaeologist as well as an archaeological historian, Meltzer recounts the fascinating story of the Folsom site over the past 100 years and its impact on the history of American archaeology. The latest dating techniques confirmed the sites antiquity—around 10,500 B.C.—and the recent excavations shed new light on the Folsom hunters who dispatched a small herd of ancient bison so long ago. Meltzer has woven a captivating history with the latest in archaeological technology producing a thoroughly enjoyable story of one of America’s most famous and interesting early sites.
