Clovis Hunters, Antiquity Stretches Out

I was amazed this morning as I perused the Yahoo! News to see a few very interesting stories that brought about some recollectioin of earlier things I had done.  One was this story regarding the prehistoric Clovis Culture in the southern great plains.  Clovis, New Mexico is within “spitting distance” of where I went to graduate school and I spent a few months or more at the Blackwater Draw Museum situated between Clovis and Portales, NM.  I worked a summer if memory serves at the actual site on a Folsom-aged prehistoric killsite.

If you are unfamiliar with that part of the world, Clovis and Portales sit on this magnificent table of land called the Llano Estacado.  The area is rich with prehistoric and historic archeological resources and I worked as far as east as the Canadian River breaks in the panhandle of Texas around Amarillo and Canyon, Texas.

The prehistoric antiquity of the Clovis in the initial article brings a lot of questions but one of the best lines I thought was setting a basic time to when people arrived in the new world is rather limiting in nature.  I like the approach that people arrived in waves and perhaps as early as 20k years ago.  That means the sturdy Clovis Projectile Points we all found out in farms and ranches and on the Llano may not be indicative of the very first arrivals.  I like the idea that geography, ecology, and geology all conspired to open and periodically close lanes of movement for the new world and people moved about for thousands of years obeying the climate’s imperatives and limitations.  This does not lessen the rather amazing projectile points or the hunting of mammothus on the plains.  Instead it may point at a different type of habitation instead of one where we just pronounce “the earliest”.  In fact, it seems people like to know that there was an “earliest” because then the later things may make more sense. 

Out in the desert west, around the Antelope Valley is where I practiced the most archeology and anthropology.  One of the significant landforms there is the Rogers Dry Lakebed which now is surrounded by the Air Force Flight Test Center or Edwards, AFB.  The base is a wondrous place if you practice biology, geology, or archeology.  My friend Dave would include Botany since the many desert dunes and foothills were home to a wide splendor of poppy and other beautiful desert wild flowers.  Out there, I wandered those lanes of prehistory and the people were just as interesting and also had this intimate understanding of the desert and its bounty.  Traveling hunter-gatherer groups exploited the desert bottoms and oftne ended up in the Tehachapi Mountains to the north and a bit west or moving into the buttes which dot the valley to the east. 

The questions of antiquity, how Clovis cultures inhabited and where; how desert cultures adapted and adopted were always of interest to me.  But truthfully, I loved the entire measure and meter of their existance.  Their use of plants, animals and how they cooked same.  Given the chance of a “do over”, I would always choose for the years I spent doing archeology as a profession.  I miss many of the people, the places, and the things I saw greatly.  When stories arise on these things, I find the stirring and questions rising to the surface.  I may say I’m a technology professional; but there is this other thing which runs silent and runs deep.