New West Feature

How a New Mexico Find Revolutionized Archaeology

By Andy Stiny, 3-28-11

	A spear point next to buffalo bones discovered near Folsom. It's evidence man existed and hunted thousands of years previously theorized by the world's leading archeologists. Photo courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Two of 75 souls who live in Folsom, New Mexico, are strolling into the tiny post office across the highway from a row of ancient, empty storefronts on a recent mid-March day.

The sun is shining on range lands that are too dry too early. No vehicles are moving at this convergence of three two-lane highways that go to places you probably never heard of. This town has no store, no cafe, no gas station.

When your cell phone goes dead and the pay phone in front of the post office probably hasn’t worked since the Eisenhower administration, it doesn’t matter.

You just introduce yourself to Dino Kornay, who asks the postmistress to ring up Kay Thompson so she can come down and open the museum and you can keep your appointment. A museum in a town of 75?

Although little visited, it was near this town in a valley of pine-covered volcanic buttes near the border of New Mexico and Colorado, that sensational discoveries were made in the last century. They proved ancient man lived and hunted here long before previously thought.

The existence of Folsom Man and the projectile points he used to down massive, now-extinct creatures was revealed here in 1926-27, after the bones were found in 1908. Thompson was opening the Folsom Museum on a Saturday to show me how it happened.

Until those years, the theory held by influential archeologists at the Smithsonian Institute was that native people had only been in North America for about 4,000 years, said Steve Holen, curator of archeology for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

“The Folsom site, overnight, completely blew that out of the water ... it completely changed the field of archeology,” said Holen.

Folsom proved that people had been in North America since the end of the last glacial period—around 12,000 years ago, he said.

The significance of Folsom artifacts was reinforced recently after an ongoing federal sting operation netted the conviction of a Chicago anthropology professor for stealing artifacts from federal lands in southcentral New Mexico in violation of the Archeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA).

They were, of course, found long before he came along.

It took a tragic flood in a “dry” riverbed in 1908 to reveal Folsom’s hidden treasures—a flood that destroyed much of what was a thriving farming town of 1,000 people.

In August of that year, a heroine telephone operator got word of a deluge west of town near the headwaters of the dry Cimarron River. Sarah Rooke got a call that a wall of water was coming from eight miles up-river. She phoned everyone who had a telephone and was credited with saving many lives in the flood that swept away 17 people. Rooke was found dead several days later.

The flood exposed much more of the nearby Wild Horse Arroyo, so that the sides could be seen 10 feet below ground level.

Self-Educated Cowboy Spots Bones

Black cowboy George McJunkin was a crack shot, an expert bronc rider, a former buffalo hunter and was “one the best ropers ever ... and one of the top cow hands ever in this part of the state,” according to a 1951 talk excerpted in the booklet, “The Folsom, New Mexico Story.”

In September 1908, according to a 1974 article in “The American West” magazine, McJunkin, foreman of the Crowfoot Ranch, was riding with another cowboy along the arroyo.

“McJunkin noticed some white objects that had been exposed ... (he) climbed down ... and, using a pair of a barbed wire clippers, dug out one of the white things that proved to be a bone - one of many.”

McJunkin, who reportedly had insatiable curiosity, “knew cattle bones when he saw them, and these had not come from any cow ... he took the specimens to his cabin and put them on the mantle over his fireplace.”

Amateurs Collectors Spark Academic Interest

A motley group of amateurs from the town of Raton, including a bank employee, a Roman Catholic priest, a striking iron worker, a student taxidermist and a Lebanese bricklayer began to explore the site in 1922, 12 years after McJunkin told a blacksmith about his find, said the magazine article.

They dug up a bagful of bones and took them back to Raton.

About the same time, Jesse Figgins and Harold Cook from the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature & Science) believed man existed on the continent thousands of years prior to the commonly accepted theory. But at a Texas dig, an excavator had allowed extinct bison bones and projectile points to be separated before they could be photographed.

One of the amateur Folsom excavators wrote to Figgins and took the bones to Denver in March 1926, 85 years ago this month, and Figgins went to the site and started excavating in May.

In August, one of the amateur archeologists, the blacksmith, wrote in his dairy, as related in the magazine article, “I found an arrow point this morning ... The point is near the rib (bison) in the matrix. One barb is broken off.”

The blacksmith hit a pothole as he raced in his wagon to Raton to get a letter off to Figgins on the evening Denver train. “At that point, he decided that the information which had been in the ground for thousands of years could wait a few more minutes, and he slowed down.”

Figgins sent telegrams to major museums and the rest is history.

Museum a Wealth of Folsom History

It’s chilly when Kay Thompson opens the museum for me, which is closed until the beginning of May. She turns a portable electric heater on and peeks out from her hoodie as she contemplates my first question with a laugh.

What has she learned in the 20 years she has worked there? “I learned that Indians - you know they were very smart people,” she says in her distinctive Oklahoma drawl. “They could live off the land and make their own weapons and things like that ... they were smart people to figure all these things out.”

Last Site Excavation in 1997

It was that year that Southern Methodist University archeologist David Meltzer began a multiyear re-excavation of the site.

Meltzer was unavailable for an interview, but he lays out what he learned in his new book, “First Peoples in a New World.”

In the 1920s, the goal was to retrieve bison skeletons for museums, but not much was learned. “But while Folsom is one of the best-known sites in American archeology, for a time it was also one of the least-known, scientifically speaking,” he writes.

“Everyone had been so keen to link artifacts to bison that scarcely little more was learned about Folsom than bison were killed here a very long time ago.”

Meltzer believes that the Paleo-Indian hunters used the “steep bedrock walls” of the arroyo to their advantage, possibly stampeding and trapping the animals there for the kill or also killing ones as they managed to scramble free.

“By all measures this was a successful hunt. A cow-calf herd of thirty-two bison were killed in the fall when the animals were at their peak of body fat. With a complement of flake tools and a quartzite skinning knife, the hunters dismembered the bison, and packed the meaty parts for transport (they made off with lots of rib cages).”

Using high-quality stone from the Texas Panhandle, “the hunters’ weapons included at least 28 fluted points.”

Meltzer and his group figured that the hunters camped nearby. They searched and discovered nothing. “No traces of one were found, so if it’s there, it’s deeply buried, lurking undetected beneath 4 to 5 meters of sediment.”

Why Not More Excavation?

“The search has been made for the campsite and it hasn’t been found,” said Denver archeologist Holen. “Your chances of finding it in that coring (drilling for sediment samples) are pretty slim.”

Holen speculates the camp could be buried deep underground after 12,000 years. A lot was learned from Folsom and it may be better to concentrate now on other sites, he said. The Denver museum has five or six of the original Folsom points.

When the Folsom museum opens for the summer season, it usually welcomes about 1,700 to 2,000 visitors a year, said Kay Thompson. “For a little place kind of off in the sticks like we are, it’s quite a few visitors.”

In explaining her awe at the hunters who roamed these plains, Thompson tells of their use of the atladl, a leveraging spear throwing device that “would extend the length of their arm and help them to kill a huge, 9-foot-tall bison so they could have meat and things like that. ... They were smarter than I am, that’s for sure.”

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