Folsom Site
|
Folsom Site
|
|
|
|
| Nearest city | Folsom, New Mexico |
|---|---|
| Area | 10 acres (4.0 ha) |
| NRHP Reference # | 66000473 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | October 15, 1966 |
| Designated NHL | January 20, 1961 |
Folsom Site or Wild Horse Arroyo, designated by the Smithsonian trinomial 29CX1, is a major archaeological site about 8 miles (13 km) west of Folsom, New Mexico. It is the type site for the Folsom tradition, a Paleo-Indian cultural sequence dating to between 9000 BC and 8000 BC. The Folsom Site was excavated in 1926 and found to have been a marsh-side kill site or camp where 23 bison had been killed using distinctive tools, known as Folsom points. This site is significant because it was the first time that artifacts indisputably made by humans were found directly associated with faunal remains from an extinct form of bison from the . The information culled from this site was the first of a set of discoveries that would allow archaeologists to revise their estimations for the time of arrival of Native Americans on the North American continent.
The site was found in 1908 by George McJunkin, an ex-slave cowboy and ranch foreman. While riding across the Crowfoot Ranch following the very severe rainstorm of August 27, which had devastated the nearby town of Folsom, he noticed and investigated a number of large bones where flash flooding from that storm had cut deeply into the bed of Wild Horse Arroyo. McJunkin was a self-educated man, with enough interest in geology and archaeology to recognize that the bones were not modern bison, and had been too deeply buried to be recent. For several years he tried to interest field archaeologists to visit the site, with little success. In 1918 he and Ivan Shoemaker, the teenage son of the Crowfoot Ranch's owner, dug bones and a fluted lance point out of the arroyo bank, and sent them to the Denver Museum of Natural History. The museum sent paleontologist Harold Cook to the Crowfoot the following spring, and he and McJunkin did some exploratory digging.
During the first quarter of the 20th century, a bitter debate raged in the archaeology and physical anthropology communities, about recent discoveries suggesting that humans had arrived in the Americas several thousand years earlier than had previously been thought possible. Most notably Ales Hrdlicka, then curator of the U.S. National Museum (now the Smithsonian Museum National Museum of Natural History), remained adamant in his belief that humans could not have arrived until about three thousand years ago. Findings of stone tools together with ancient animal remains were dismissed as, at best, mixing due to erosion or burrowing animals, or worse as careless excavation techniques, or even fraudulent "salting" of artifacts among the bones. Any archaeologist bold enough to challenge the conventional view risked damage to his reputation and career, without indisputable proof. The site in Wild Horse Arroyo provided this opportunity.
...
Wikipedia