Clovis Man in Lubbock

Posted by Cindy on January 22, 2010

Ever hear of Clovis Man?  He was part of the Clovis culture, a prehistoric Paleolithic Indian culture in what would eventually become the United States of America.  He first made an appearance nearly thirteen thousand years ago, around the time of the last glacial period.  Over time, Clovis Man disappeared entirely, with only bone and ivory tools left to indicate that he was once here.  However, we still remember his people, and after Clovis sites were found in America, in the 1930s, the Clovis culture is considered to be the first humans to inhabit the New World, the ancestor then of all the peoples of North and South America.  While this is not an uncontested view of the Clovis Culture (other archaeological discoveries may contradict some of this), they still were once here and still were among the first to explore the American continents.  And, believe it or not, you can learn more about him in Lubbock, Texas.
 
If you’re staying  for a few days in one of the hotels in Lubbock, and you’ve explored the Buddy Holly Center and his bedroom suite (now on exhibit there), and you’ve taken a look at the Silent Wings Museum (a museum dedicated to gliders and their pilots of World War II), perhaps it’s time to go even farther back in time than the 1950s and 1940s, stretching all the way back twelve thousand years or more, and explore the Lubbock Lake Landmark, which is Lubbock’s archaeological and natural history preserve.
 
Lubbock Lake is found in Yellowhouse Draw, next to an ancient spring.  The spring went dry in the 1930s, but before then, for thousands upon thousands of years, the waters were a resource for people living on the Southern High Plains.  When the city of Lubbock, in 1936, attempted to revive the springs, they found that the sediment in the area held traces of human activity going back millennia.  Out of these discoveries, the West Texas Museum (now Museum of Texas Tech University), began to explore the site in the 1940s.  Here, Folsom Period bison kills were discovered (i.e., eleven thousand years ago); charred bison bones helped date the discovery of people in the area to the 9,800 years ago.  Today, the museum serves as a field laboratory for soils and radiocarbon dating and geology, as well as a place the public can visit as an active archaeological and natural history preserve.  It’s well worth checking out!