Societies that grow rich, like individuals, become afraid of losing their wealth and comfort. My god, my god, the lattes, the 10-second videos: what will we do if it all goes poof? We forget, through every crisis, that we’ve known how to live here for tens of thousands of years.

Well into the 20th century, however, a “Great Paleolithic War” raged in American archaeology about how long humans had been in North America. In 1908, George McJunkin, a ranch manager and self-taught naturalist in northern New Mexico, discovered animal bones he recognized as bison, but unlike any bison he’d ever seen.

McJunkin, an accomplished cowboy who’d been freed from slavery as a youth at the end of the Civil War, tried to get archaeologists to visit the site, but it wasn’t until the 1920s, after his death, that excavation of what became known as the Folsom site finally began. The hunt was for prehistoric animal skeletons, not necessarily evidence of humans. But then they found a spear point between two ribs. It was thin, with a central groove and flaked edges, unlike the familiar, smaller arrowheads commonly found in topsoil, which are thousands of years younger.

The Folsom site, and soon after, the Clovis site, which was even older, both gave their names to point types and definitively established that humans were here during the last Ice Age, at least 13,000 years ago, perhaps longer. McJunkin’s discovery confirmed what Native Americans have always said: they’ve been here “since time immemorial.”

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Links:

• How the Folsom Point Became an Archaeological Icon - Stephen E. Nash, Sapiens, July 28, 2017

  
  

• George McJunkin and the Discovery That Changed American Archaeology - Matt Peeples, Archaeology Southwest, 2015

  
  

• Indian Takers - Robert Draper, Texas Monthly, March 1993

  
  

• This Fifth Grader Found a 14,000-Year-Old Clovis Point, Likely Unearthed From Hurricane Sandy - Max Kutner, Smithsonian Magazine, November 4, 2014

  
  

• David J. Meltzer, The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America’s Ice Age Past, 2015. (University of Chicago Press)

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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