A Long, Long Time Ago

Folsom Field at the University of Colorado at Boulder

On this day in 1927, workers excavating on behalf of the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of History and Science) at a site in northeastern New Mexico containing bones of an extinct species of prehistoric bison found, intact and in situ among the bison bones, a projectile point. The point, made of chert, was missing one corner but was otherwise complete. It was clearly of human manufacture, presumably by the prehistoric inhabitants of the area. Carl Schwachheim, a blacksmith from Raton, New Mexico who was supervising the excavations, immediately notified Jesse Figgins, the director of the museum, who sent telegrams to several geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists inviting them to visit the site, which was about 20 miles southeast of Trinidad, Colorado and a few miles west of the small town of Folsom, New Mexico, after which it was named, to observe the point in person. In accordance with Figgins’s instructions, Schwachheim left the point unexcavated and kept a close eye on it to ensure that it remained undisturbed.

"Rush to the Rockies" Sign, Trinidad, Colorado

This was not the first artifact to be found in the course of the excavations. The previous summer, during the first season of excavation at the bone bed, the crew had found two broken points, but they were not in situ and there was no way to tell if or how they had originally related to the bones. The discovery, however, had prompted Figgins to instruct Schwachheim to watch carefully for artifacts or human remains and, if any were found, to leave them in place and let him know immediately. No in situ artifacts or remains were found during the course of the first season, and Figgins had given renewed instructions the beginning of the second season to watch out for artifacts and to leave them in place if found.

Statue of Ralphie the Buffalo at Folsom Field, Boulder, Colorado

Schwachheim waited patiently for a few days after the discovery of the in situ point while Figgins contacted various researchers and arranged for them to visit the site. Barnum Brown, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, happened to be in Denver at the time, and he agreed to accompany Figgins on a visit to the site. Brown could lend his expertise to analyzing the bison bones and the geology of the area, but to examine the artifact itself Figgins needed to find an archaeologist, preferably one with experience in the southwest.

Looking East toward the Great Plains from Las Vegas, New Mexico

Luckily for him, just about every southwestern archaeologist active at the time happened to be attending a conference at the ruins of Pecos Pueblo, which were being excavated by a crew from Phillips Andover Academy under the supervision of Alfred Vincent Kidder. This conference, which began on August 29 and continued until August 31, was the first Pecos Conference, a seminal event in the history of southwestern archaeology. Kidder organized it in order to bring together the various researchers active in the southwest at a time of quite extensive research. One of the main purposes of bringing all these scholars together was to develop a standard system of classification for the chronology of the prehistoric southwest, and the result was what is known as the Pecos Classification, which, with some modifications, is still in use today. Also still around today is the Pecos Conference itself, which is held annually at a different place in the southwest each year. The latest iteration, which I attended, was earlier this month in Cortez, Colorado.

First National Bank of Miracles, Trinidad, Colorado

Among the attendees at the original conference was Frank H. H. Roberts Jr. of the Smithsonian Institution‘s Bureau of American Ethnology, who agreed to accompany Figgins and Brown on a visit to the Folsom site. Roberts, a prominent figure in early southwestern archaeology, is known for his research and excavations at various sites in the area, including several in Chaco Canyon (most notably Shabik’eshchee Village). He, Figgins, and Brown arrived at Folsom on September 4 to examine the site and the point. Brown took some notes on the stratigraphy and geology of the site, and Roberts took a look at the point. He was sufficiently convinced of its association with the bison bones to decide that it was a discovery of considerable importance, and he returned with Kidder on September 8 to study the site some more. All of the researchers who examined the point concluded that it was contemporaneous with the bison bones.

Highway Construction, Trinidad, Colorado

This was a very big deal. The implications of it for American archaeology and understandings of prehistoric America were vast and unsettling to the scholarly orthodoxy of the time, which held that human occupation of the New World was quite recent, perhaps two thousand or so years old. Geologists and paleontologists, however, were well aware that the type of bison found at Folsom had gone extinct several thousand years ago, so the unambiguous association of human-made artifacts with the bison bones indicated that humans had been on the North American continent for much, much longer than the scholarly consensus held. Charles Mann has a good, accessible account of the importance of the discovery in his book 1491.

Bison Statue in Downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado

So how old is it? At the time, no one knew exactly. There were no techniques for direct dating of archaeological sites available in 1927. Andrew Douglas of the University of Arizona was working on tree-ring dating, which would be the first available chronometric technique, but at this point he had not yet completed the development of a master chronology against which specimens could be dated. He attended the Pecos Conference and presented on his work so far, which many could see had enormous potential that was not yet realizable. He encouraged his audience to gather samples from sites all over the southwest to submit to him in the hope that they would help fill in the gaps in the chronology so far. This would soon lead to success, and many sites throughout the southwest were nearly instantaneously dated with astonishing precision as early as the 1930s. In 1933 Harold Cook, curator of paleontology at the Colorado Museum, collected some samples of charcoal from near the Folsom site in the hopes of dating them by dendrochronology. This did not end up working, but the specimens were later dated by the newly developed radiocarbon technique, which determined that they were around 4,000 years old. This seemed surprisingly young, and it turned out that the charcoal was not associated with the site at all. Later radiocarbon dating of the bison bones themselves gave a rough date of about 8500 BC for the kill, which accords with radiocarbon dating of other Folsom culture sites. While we now know that human occupation of the western hemisphere goes back much further, this is still very old, and while only relative dating was available in 1927, it was apparent from the geological and paleontological context that a similarly ancient date was appropriate for the site.

Side Street in Trinidad, Colorado

Once the importance of the Folsom site had been determined, the American Museum of Natural History decided to join the Colorado Museum in excavating the following year. Over the course of the summer of 1928, the excavations, led by Peter Kaisen of the American Museum, covered a much larger area than had been dug during the previous two seasons, and test pits around the bone bed in various directions delimited its apparent extent. By August 29, exactly one year after the momentous discovery of the in situ point, Kaisen had decided that the excavations had covered the entire bed and were therefore complete. Over the three seasons of work, the crews had collected over 3,000 bison bones and at least 14 projectile points; more points were found in close association with the bones as they were unpacked and analyzed in the laboratory. Brown concluded that the bones represented at least 30 bison of all ages and both sexes, all killed at the same time, presumably by the people who made the points found with the bones and used them in the killing. The type of point was named the Folsom Point, and it served to define a whole cultural complex that would become better understood in the succeeding decades as more aspects of it were uncovered at a variety of sites throughout the Great Plains and adjacent areas of the Rocky Mountains.

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs, Colorado

As this work was going on elsewhere, however, the Folsom site itself languished. It was generally thought that the excavations in the 1920s had exhausted the site, and very little additional research was done until the 1990s, when a new research project led by David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University took another look at the site and did some more studies to try to map out its extent and see if there was more to it than the initial excavations had found. It turned out there was, and that the kill site covered more area than had been found in the 1920s. Additional excavations uncovered a significant number of additional bison bones, and geomorphological studies led to a better understanding of the geology of the site. Preliminary results were reported in a 2002 article by Meltzer, Lawrence Todd of Colorado State University, and Vance Holliday, then of the University of Wisconsin (now of the University of Arizona). This article not only documented the recent fieldwork at the site but also reported on archival research on the earlier excavations. It is the main source for the account I gave above.

Santa Fe Trail Highway Sign, Trinidad, Colorado

The article contains much more information than I can summarize here, but it touches on a whole variety of interesting aspects of the Folsom type site. Among the most important are confirmation of the conclusions of the initial researchers that the site represents a single incident in which a group of mobile hunter-gatherers killed a herd of approximately 32 bison and performed some initial processing of the carcasses. The kill site does not appear to have been the location for more extensive processing, however, as the bone elements found there are primarily from low-utility parts of the carcass with little usable meat. This implies that the higher-utility parts were taken elsewhere for processing, probably to a temporary camp site nearby, but no such processing station or camp has yet been found. The authors speculate that there may well be one very close to the kill site, but since the site is deeply buried under later sediment, which kept the bones in a remarkable state of preservation, efforts to locate a campsite nearby have been totally unsuccessful. The kill site appears to be more extensive than first thought, however, and some parts of it apparently were not as well protected by later sediment, as some bones found nearby seem to have been moved by later erosion or redeposition. This implies that even if there was originally a campsite, it may no longer be present in any recognizable form.

Texas Welcome Sign

There some other interesting things about the artifacts found at Folsom. Almost all are projectile points, most of which are broken. Only four other tools have been found, compared to at least 23 points, and two of those are now missing. This seems to confirm that the site, or at least the part known so far, is exclusively a kill site without any evidence of intensive processing or habitation. The points are made of high-quality stone from relatively distant locations, which the authors of the article attribute to direct procurement rather than trade for reasons they don’t explain. (They do cite an earlier publication by Meltzer that apparently lays out the case for this interpretation.) The main sources are in the Texas Panhandle to the southeast, including the Alibates Flint Quarries near Amarillo, and to the north near Colorado Springs and Sterling, Colorado. This implies that the group was highly mobile, and that they had frequent access to high-quality raw materials. There is also no evidence for intensive processing of the bison carcasses, such as cracking the bones for marrow, which suggests that they took only the best parts and were not under significant subsistence stress. This is typical of other Folsom-era sites, but is in striking contrast to the pattern at late prehistoric sites, including Pueblo ones, where processing was intense and nothing was wasted.

Pike's Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado

Basically, times were good for these people. Population density was likely very low, and there was plenty of everything to go around. There is often a tendency these days to consider hunter-gatherer adaptations as a “lower” level of subsistence than agriculture, but in terms of the everyday experience of average people, in many contexts a hunter-gatherer lifestyle works out just fine. If population gets too high or the environment deteriorates, however, things can change very fast. David Stuart’s Anasazi America, which gives an interpretation of developments in the southwest starting in Folsom times and continuing to the present day, is a good place to look for an account of how this works in practice.

Colorado Welcome Center, Trinidad, Colorado

I began reading about this in response to the recent news that a dealer in projectile points and other artifacts has been indicted as part of the recent series of investigations into the trade in illegally excavated antiquities, but I was immediately struck by how interesting and relevant the story of Folsom is in all sorts of ways, including the coincidental temporal connection to both the Pecos Conference at the time and the time when I was reading about it now. So I decided to write a bit about it in depth, even though it’s a little far afield from my usual domain.

"America the Beautiful" Monument, Colorado Springs, Colorado