Trego's Mountain Ear

For years, archaeologists had a simple saying in North America – “Don’t dig below Clovis.” The Clovis points were assumed to be the oldest technology that showed up in New World archaeology. More recently sites have been cropping up that are older than Clovis.

I was lucky when I taught at TSJC – the school once had a museum program, and the museum and as I looked it over, I realized how close the Folsom site was to Trinidad, Colorado. We had loads of artifacts that I could use to teach “Indians of the Southwest.” Even a bit of Clovis stuff – though Clovis was more distant. It was a great place to see the real stuff that, as a student at MSU, I had seen only in books. The Folsom site – where prehistoric hunters harvested mastodons – is essentially part of the Goodnight-Loving Trail. An area where cattle drives could occur in the old west (In Lonesome Dove, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call were modeled after Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving). A good trail is a good trail – whether you use it for cattle or mastodons.

I just can’t picture folks cautioning aspiring archaeologists with “Don’t dig below Riley’s Switch.” And Clovis was the town’s second name – it really did start as a railroad stop named Riley’s Switch. Since those early classes, archaeologists have found more and more evidence that people were on the American Continent before the Clovis culture. Monte Verde, in Chile, was being excavated as I finished college – and, since the artifacts found at Monte Verde were in peat, wooden items survived for radiocarbon dating. And, if there were people in Chile that early, the land bridge at Beringia may not have been the only path into the Americas.