The Folsom site, in Colfax County, New Mexico (29CX1, LA 8121), is one of the most widely known archaeological localities in North America. It is routinely mentioned in archaeological texts, regularly appears on maps of notable American sites, and, of course, served historically as the type locality for the Folsom Paleoindian period—a slice of time and a distinctive archaeological culture dating from about 10,900 to 10,200 radiocarbon years before the present (hereafter,¹⁴C yr B.P.).¹ Folsom is on the National Register of Historic Places (Murtaugh 1976:481), as well as being a National Historic Landmark, and a New Mexico State...

Folsom played a pivotal role in the development of American archaeology. Most everyone knows this. What may be less well known is why this particular site, alone among dozens of localities championed since the midnineteenth century, including several bison kills, finally established that humans were in the Americas by late Pleistocene times (see Meltzer 1991b). What may not be known at all is why, in the decade after the breakthrough at Folsom, the site’s investigators—Jesse Figgins and Harold Cook—were completely excluded from professional discussions of the site and North American Paleoindians.

As it happens, those issues are linked...

The Folsom site is situated in northeastern New Mexico, in the Great Plains physiographic province. It is often assumed that the site is set on the High Plains portion of that province, amid the vast, flat, almost-featureless, dry, windswept grassland that reaches from Texas into Canada. Yet, although many important Folsom-age sites are in just that setting, the type site is not. Instead, and to the surprise of many first-time visitors, it is situated in the midst of an open woodland/parkland of high mesas, volcanic cones, and upland pediment surfaces, in a region dissected by small, relatively narrow streams and...

The investigations conducted at the Folsom site in the 1920s, and again in the 1990s, were very different in their goals, scope, design, and execution. Given the very different questions being asked across the decades separating these investigations, that is not surprising. Not should it come as a surprise that the more limited goals of the original investigations (chapter 1) were matched by a more limited research design or that there was never a published discussion of the strategies guiding that fieldwork, the methods and techniques used, and the nature and potential biases of the data that resulted. Such was...

Many preserved kill sites are indeed “geological oddities,” as Albanese (1978:61) put it, and Folsom is no exception. To understand why and how this site was preserved where it is, and to use that information to gain insight into the form of the ancient landscape, we need to explore Folsom’s geological context and stratigraphic history. Although important insights into these topics emerged from earlier work here, especially that of Anderson and Haynes in the early 1970s, there were significant gaps in our knowledge of these matters when our fieldwork began, as detailed in chapter 1.

To fill those gaps and...

The Folsom area presently experiences a continental, semiarid climate of cold winters and relatively warm summers (chapter 3). Summer rainfall is dominant (fig. 3.9), but there is the potential for heavy winter snowfall. It is an area of significant topographic variability and, therefore, considerable biotic diversity, the vegetation ranging from open oak and locust parkland in the immediate vicinity of the site, to pine and spruce galleries and rolling grassland on the slopes of and atop (respectively) nearby Johnson Mesa (figs. 3.6, 3.8, 3.11). The area today has few plants capable of providing the carbohydrates and essential fats necessary to...

It was the bison bones at Folsom that caught McJunkin’s eye, and until the midsummer of 1926, that was all the Colorado Museum was interested in as well (chapter 2). That changed, of course, when the first projectile point came out of the ground, and this became an archaeological site. Even so, the site continued to be referred to as the Folsom “bone quarry,” testimony to the sheer numbers of bison bones, which constitute by bulk the largest class of material from the site. Much of the early analytical attention was on just what kind of bison these were; questions...

The great majority of artifacts recovered from the Folsom site are projectile points. Found scattered across a bonebed, a few deeply embedded in bison skeletons, there is little doubt what these points were used for: They were weapons for killing very large game.

To be sure, these hunters must have had additional artifacts in their toolkit. Other sites of this age are replete with a variety of formal and non-formal tools, such as end and side scrapers, gravers, burins, ultrathin and other bifaces, cores, and preforms (e.g., Jodry 1999a; Root, William, and Emerson 2000; William 2000). But then these other...

At the outset of this book, I detailed a series of questions that guided the recent field, laboratory, and historical investigations at Folsom. I expressed the caveat that not all of them would necessarily be answered or were even answerable. That has proven to be true. Nonetheless, in the course of asking and attempting to answer those questions, much has been learned of the Folsom site, in terms of both what occurred there in Late Glacial times and the events there in the 1920s. Let me return to those questions, as a framework for summarizing the archaeology, geology, history, and...