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Big Dig

Posted on: Tuesday, 24 February 2004, 06:00 CST

Excavations continue at Blackwater Draw near Portales, a site once home to prehistoric creatures and ancient

man

Archaeologist John Montgomery stands on a hillside six miles north of Portales and describes a time 12,000 years ago when eastern New Mexico was a lush world of lakes and giant mammals.

This abandoned gravel quarry, known to archaeologists worldwide as Blackwater Draw, was once home to creatures such as mammoths, camels, saber-tooth cats, giant bison and large horses.

The hunter's paradise also attracted some of the earliest human inhabitants of the New World -- nomadic people who camped here regularly for thousands of years, leaving a rich record of bones and spearpoints buried layer upon layer.

"This place was the puzzle solver," said Montgomery, who heads the archaeology program at Eastern New Mexico University, which owns the site.

Montgomery calls Blackwater Draw the Rosetta Stone of New World archaeology because it draws a comprehensive picture of 12,000 years of human occupation.

Blackwater Draw, he said, "put it all together for archaeologists for the first time."

Excavations continue at the site today, more than seven decades after an amateur archaeologist found the first spear point and mammoth bones in 1932.

That discovery, followed by professional excavations beginning in the 1930s, helped shatter a commonly held belief that humans had inhabited the New World for no more than a couple thousand years.

"Archaeologists come here from all over the world," he said. "There's no other place like it for them."

ENMU bought the 157-acre site in 1978 to save it from the ravages of gravel mining.

Blackwater Draw serves as a student magnet for ENMU's Department of Anthropology and Applied Archaeology. The program has about 20 undergraduate majors and 30 graduate students.

Le'Ann Miller, 19, of Whitharral, Texas, said she inherited her father's fascination with the continent's first human inhabitants and chose to attend ENMU to work at the site.

"I've heard about Blackwater Draw ever since I was a kid," Miller said recently, pausing from her work mapping the location of 6,000- year-old bison bones excavated there.

Miller works in Blackwater Draw's interpretive center -- a 3,500- square-foot steel enclosure where workers are uncovering new material.

The structure was built in 1997 to slow the weathering of exposed bones that carpet the excavated hillside. At present, three strata are exposed here, ranging from 11,000 to 6,000 years old. Workers have yet to dig down to Clovis-era material in the center.

"If I had seen something like this when I was a kid, it would have blown me away," Montgomery said.

The site is open to the public from April through October. The nearby Blackwater Draw Museum, which displays artifacts from the site, is open year round.

"Clovis culture" -- named for the nearby New Mexico town -- was the name given in the 1930s to the Paleolithic hunters first discovered at Blackwater Draw.

Clovis hunters thrived across North America between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago, Montgomery said. But later people returned here to hunt bison, leaving their record for archaeologists.

"The site has been occupied continuously for 12,000 years," he said.

For decades, Clovis culture remained unchallenged as the New World's oldest known inhabitants.

But in the 1990s, archaeologists at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile found evidence that humans had reached South America at least 12,500 years ago.

David Kilby, a University of New Mexico doctoral student who studies Clovis culture, said many anthropologists are waiting for the discovery of additional sites of Monte Verde's age before deciding whether the site predates Clovis.

"Right now, it's an ongoing debate," said Kilby, an ENMU graduate who's writing a dissertation on Clovis spear points. The antiquity of Clovis culture is verified by hundreds of sites throughout North America, he said. For now, Monte Verde stands alone.

"It doesn't look like (the debate) is going to be resolved any time soon," he said.

Montgomery said the discussion about Monte Verde heightens the scientific importance of Blackwater Draw.

"No matter how that debate comes out, we'll be part of the solution," he said.

If you go

WHAT: Blackwater Draw Museum

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays. Expanded summer hours start Memorial Day.

WHERE: U.S. 70, seven miles north of Portales.

HOW MUCH: $2 adults, $1 children. Call 562-2202 for more information.

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