Category: Folsom

The Lindenmeier Site

1/26/2025

The Soapstone Prairie Natural Area is in central Colorado, just south of the Wyoming border. It has within it an archeological site that few know about, even though it is very important to our understanding of man in the Americas. The Lindenmeier Folsom Site is one of the hidden gems of American Prehistory.

point from the Lindenmeier Site, 1934

Folsom Man is the name given to a group of Paleo-Indian nomadic hunters who roamed throughout Central North America between approximately 9,000 BC and 4,000 BC. They are identified by their stone points, which have a distinct concavity on one side.

Folsom Man is named after the small town of Folsom, New Mexico, In 1908, a devastating flood unearthed bison bones that were exceedingly large. It wasn’t until 1925, when scientists finally investigated the site, that stone points were found with the bones. The bones were determined to be those of bison antiquus, an ancestor of the modern bison that had died out approximately 10,000 years ago.

Bison Antiquus. They were 25-30% larger than present day bison.

Prior to the investigation of the Folsom Site, scientists believed that man had only been in North America for approximately 5,000 years.

The Folsom Site is just a kill site. It contains bones and stone points, but there is no evidence of habitation, no campfires, no other tools or implements. Although it proved that man was in the Americas much earlier than previously supposed, it shed little light on who these people were.

In 1924, three amateur archaeologists, A. Lynn Coffin, his father, Judge Claude C. Coffin, and their friend, C. K. Collins were wandering through a ranch owned by William Lindenmeier, Jr.. They were walking through an arroyo when they discovered some fluted points that were very different from the more abundant and smaller arrow points they usually found. The points were some fifteen feet below the surface. That depth suggested that they were very old. They called in the Judge’s brother, Major Roy G. Coffin, who persuaded Dr. Frank Roberts of the Smithsonian Institution to visit in 1934. The Smithsonian Institution, supported by the Colorado Museum of Natural History, excavated the site between 1935 and 1940. The Coffin brothers also did some excavating of their own.

The well-preserved site is buried under twelve to fifteen feet of sediment and covered by layers of silts and clays slowly deposited by floods and windstorms over thousands of years. It contains clusters of stone and bone debris, strewn over at least a half-mile. These clusters represent work areas, where Folsom peoples manufactured projectile points, repaired or discarded broken tools, cooked their food, cleaned and transformed animal hides into leather, and manufactured clothing.

Some archaeologists suggest that the clusters represent a single large camp simultaneously occupied by several large Folsom groups, each with twenty to forty members. These groups may have come together for a rendezvous or trade fair. Other archaeologists believe the clusters were laid down by a single group that returned year after year, generation after generation. Either way, the Lindemeier Site is the largest Folsom site yet found. It is still being excavated, and its secrets revealed.

While the original Folsom site provided no tools except points, the Lindenmeier site shows that the Paleo-indians referred to as Folsom People created many types and shapes of tools. In addition to spearheads, archaeologists found wedge shaped scrapers and other tools made for chopping, slicing and skinning the hides of the bison. They also found scored pieces of hematite which were used to extract red ochre, believed to be used to paint for their faces or for ceremonial purposes. Highly polished 1-2”discs inscribed with designs were found at the site and are the oldest artwork found in Colorado.

The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a National Historic Landmark. Artifacts from the site are held by the Smithsonian Institution, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, and in private collections.

There is not much to see at the Lindenmeier Site. A short paved trail leads to a covered overlook where visitors look out over the arroyo in which the excavations have occurred, but they are either hidden from view or so carefully reburied that they are not visible. The weather was cooler and wetter during the period when the Folsom men inhabited it, but it is still easy to look over the vastness of the rolling hills and envision what life might have been like so many millennia ago.

Soapstone Prairie has multiple trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding and is open for visitation from March 1 until November 30 each year. It is a habitat for bison, black-footed ferrets, pronghorn antelopes, and other native species.

https://fortcollinsimages.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/lindenmeier-a-folsom-man-site/
https://www.fcgov.com/naturalareas/finder/soapstone

In the Shadow of Sunrise is an historical novel set during the Folsom Period. The characters in the novel shelter every winter in the San Luis Valley, but during the summers they go on long migrations, following the herds and collecting suitable rocks for making spear points and other tools. While these characters do not visit the Linenmeier Site in my story, they would have done so in other years, and some of the people who lived at this site would have met my characters at other sites that they visited. The information available about this site did a lot to inform how I structured my story.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle school and high school history and language arts teacher. She lives in the mountains of central New Mexico and write historical and contemporary fiction for middle grade through adult readers. She is available to lecture on the history behind her stories.
The booklink in the above blog is for Bookshop.org, an online bookseller that gives 75% of its profits to independent bookstores, authors, and reviewers. If you click through my book lists and make a purchase on Bookshop.org, I will receive a commission, and Bookshop.org will give a matching commission to independent booksellers. But if you’re not looking to buy, ask your local library for a copy, and request that they buy one if they haven't already.

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Who were the Folsom People?

12/5/2024

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Wild Horse Arroyo, location of the Folsom Site

Between about 10800 BCE and 10200 BCE, a group of people lived throughout much of central North America. These Paleo-Indians left enough artifacts that archaeologists were able to recognize that their culture was distinct from that which came before them, and that which came after. The discovery of Folsom artifacts, particularly those first found at Wild Horse Arroyo, are significant enough to site have been called the "discovery that changed American archaeology."

It took early scientists quite a while to figure out what they were finding.

Biblical tradition asserted that the world was created 6,000 years ago. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, advances in geology and paleontology began to challenge that date. European discoveries of human bones and artifacts in association with extinct Pleistocene mammals proved that human beings existed side by side with Ice Age mammals. However, most scientific experts thought that humans had been in North America for only a few thousand years. Ales Hrdlicka and William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution suggested that no one was in the Americas 3,000 years ago. Any scientist who advocated a longer antiquity for inhabitants of the Americas risked being blackballed from academia.

Carl Schwachheim, left, and Barnum Brown are examining the first Folsom point found in situ, circa 1927. Jesse D. Figgins snapped the photo. (Courtesy of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science)

In 1922, two amateur naturalists, a Raton blacksmith named Carl Schwachheim, and a banker named Fred Howarth visited a section of Wild Horse Arroyo where a cowboy named George McJunkin had discovered extremely large bison bones after a monsoon in August of 1908. McJunkin had recognized that these bones were not from modern bison, and had tried to interest paleontologists in the site, but hadn’t been able to convince anyone to visit the site before he died in 1922.

Schwachheim and Howarth collected bones and took them to Jesse Figgins, director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and to paleontologist Harold Cook. Figgins and Cook were already proponents of human antiquity in the New World. Cook had found a human tooth among the bones of extinct mammals at Snake Creek in Nebraska in 1922. Two years later, excavators at Lone Wolf Creek in Texas reported to Figgins that they had found three projectile points associated with a bison skeleton. However, since Schwachheim and Howarth had presented nothing but bison bones to Figgins and Cook, the two scientists didn’t believe there was anything significant about the site in Wild Horse Arroyo.

In 1926, v Schwachheim, and Howarth took Figgins and Cook to the Folsom site. They began excavations, with the intention of collecting full skeletons of bison antiquus to take back to the museum. But on August 29, 1927, they found man-made stone projectile points in the same layers, and therefore of the same age as, the bison bones. Other archaeologists were invited to see the findings in situ and they agreed that the bison bones and the spear point were contemporaneous.

However, no one could pinpoint when bison antiquus had lived. At a December 1927 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, archaeologists speculated that the evidence from the Folsom site suggested that man had arrived in the New World 15 to 20 thousand years ago. Speculation about the exact antiquity of Folsom continued until radiocarbon dating came into use in the 1950s and the bison bones at the site could be dated more precisely. Even without an exact date, the Folsom point demonstrated conclusively that human beings were in North America during the last ice age—thousands of years earlier than Hrdliča's 3,000-year limit. Hrdlička, angry at having his theory criticized, managed to make Figgins and Cook were not invited to any of the seven academic symposia devoted to American antiquity which took place from 1927 to 1937.

The points Figgins and Cook discovered at the Folsom Site in Wildhorse Arroyo were distinctive. Figgins called the culture which created these points the Folsom Culture, named after the small town of Folsom, New Mexico which was nearby. Soon after the Folsom Culture was discovered, an earlier group, the Clovis Culture, was found. Folsom projectiles have a concavity running down their center that Clovis projectiles did not have. Statistical analysis of radiocarbon dates suggest that the earliest Folsom dates overlap with the latest Clovis dates, so the two technologies overlapped for multiple generations. This points to Folsom Culture being an outgrowth of Clovis Culture. It might be that the extinction of most species of megafauna marks the boundary between Clovis and Folsom Cultures. Clovis artifacts are associated with mammoth bones, while Folsom people hunted Bison antiquus, which became extinct about the same time that Folsom evolved into cultures relying on greater dependence on smaller animals and plant foods. It is unknown whether the extinctions of megafauna were caused by climate change or by over-hunting, or both.

Although the Folsom culture is associated with the kill site in Northern New Mexico, it flourished over a large area on the Great Plains, in what is now both the United States and Canada, eastward as far as what is now Illinois and westward into the Rocky Mountains. There is even one Folsom site in Mexico, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas.

In the Shadow of Sunrise, Jennifer Bohnhoff's middle grade novel about the Folsom People in what is now New Mexico, Texas and Colorado will be published by Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing in April 2. It can be preordered in ebook and paperback here.

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Disaster Leads to Stunning Archaeological Discovery

11/28/2024

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On August 28, 1908, disaster struck Folsom, a ranching and farming town on the plains in north- eastern New Mexico. It was late summer, which is often monsoon season. The hay had been cut and harvested. Leftover stalks littered the fields.

Monsoons can bring stunning amounts of water to the parched plains in short amounts of time. A cloudburst on August 28 dumped 14”, an unusually large amount of rain, even for monsoon season. The waters collected the hay stalks and other debris and swept it down the arroyos and rivers that are often dry. When the water reached the small railroad bridges that crossed those arroyos and dry rivers, the debris got caught and created impromptu dams. Under pressure from the swelling river, the dams gave way, resulting in a huge surge of water.

Residents up river from Folsom realized that the town was in danger. They called Sarah J. "Sally" Rooke, the Folsom telephone operator to warn of the coming danger. In 1908, telephones were not yet automated and connections could only be made by hand, sticking wires into holes for each telephone. Rooke stayed at her station and continued to call as many residents as she could to alert them to the impending wall of water. When the flood hit the town, Ms. Rooke was washed away. She was one of 18 people who died in the disaster.

On the day after the flood, a cowboy named George McJunkin was riding the range above the ravaged town of Folsom. He was looking for cattle that had gotten bogged down in the mud and fences that had been broken down. Instead, he found something that eventually changed the story of humans in North America.

McJunkin had been born a slave on a ranch in Midway, Texas. He was born in about 1856 and was probably around 9 years old when the Civil War began. Although he never received a formal education, he had a quick and inquisitive mind. Other cowboys taught him to read and write, speak Spanish, and play the fiddle and guitar. An enterprising man, when he was freed at the end of the war, he worked many jobs, including hunting buffalo and working on ranches in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. He also spent some time loading bison bones onto boxcars.

Hundreds of thousands of bison had been shot during the time that the railroads were coming west. Their carcasses were left to rot where they had fallen. When it was discovered that bone meal strengthens concrete, many of those piles of bison bones were loaded into boxcars and shipped east, to New York City, where the first skyscrapers were beginning to rise.

At the time of the Folsom flood, McJunkin was the foreman of the Crowfoot ranch, which lay upstream from Folsom. McJunkin was riding through Wild Horse Arroyo when he saw some bones sticking out of the soil some 11 feet below the surface of the mesa. McJunkin knew that the deeper an object was found, the older they usually were. These bones must be older than the ones typically found on the high-country grasslands. Furthermore, they were much larger than any bison bones he’d seen during his time loading bones onto railroad cars. Recognizing the significance of the find, McJunkin left the site undisturbed. He spent the rest of his life trying to get scientists to visit Wild Horse Arroyo. In 1918 he sent sample bones and a lance point to the Denver Museum of Natural History, who sent paleontologist Harold Cook to look at them the following spring. Cook and McJunkin did some exploratory digging but found nothing that Cook deemed important. When McJunkin died in 1922, the site was still considered just a place where bison antiquus had died.

Scientists already knew that giant bison, far larger than modern ones, once roamed North America. Their bones were first discovered at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky in the 1850s. One of the many megafaunas, or giant animals that existed during the Pleistocene period, or the last Ice Age, Bison Antiquus could reach 7.4 ft tall, be 15 ft long, and weigh up to 3,501 lbs. Their horns were considerably larger than those of living American bison and differed in shape, some looking more like longhorn cattle than the small, curved horns of modern bison. These giant beasts had a large range. Specimens of Bison antiquus have been discovered in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. They went extinct sometime around 9,000 years B.C.E.

Four years after McJunkin’s death, the Colorado Museum of Natural History sent a crew of paleontologists to Wild Horse Arroyo with the intention of excavating a prehistoric Bison skeleton for their museum. Instead, they discovered something that changed archaeologist's understanding of man in the North American hemisphere. The Museum workers found stone projectile points that are now known as “Folsom points.” One, actually embedded in a rib, proved that the points were left by men who were hunting bison these bison. By studying the site and the angles of the cut marks in the bones, scientists have been able to determine that ancient men herded the bison into the arroyo, then attacked them from above. Scientists have found the skeletons of 32 bison. Cut marks in the bones show that some of the choicest meats where butchered off the animals, but much was left in place.

An illustration by Ian Bristow, from Jennifer Bohnhoff's In the Shadow of Sunrise, a middle grade novel about the Folsom people.

Until this discovery, scientists had believed that men had crossed the Bering Strait into North America about 2,000 b.c.e. George McJunkin’s find showed that man was here 7,000 years earlier than previously thought. Since then, Folsom points have been found in many places in North America, and other finds have pushed back man’s arrival on the continent even further.

Sally Rooke and George McJunkin are both buried in the Folsom Cemetery, which occupies a windy and isolated hill outside of town. The town itself has a museum that is housed in an old mercantile. The Historical Society sponsors trips to the Folsom Site twice a year.

A former New Mexico History teacher, Jennifer Bohnhoff is the author of a number of books for middle grade through adult readers, many of which are set in her home state of New Mexico. Her latest book, In the Shadow of Sunrise, tells the story of Folsom people in Colorado, Texas and New Mexico and includes the Folsom site. It will be published in April 2025 and is available for preorder.

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The Lindenmeier Site

Who were the Folsom People?

Disaster Leads to Stunning Archaeological Discovery

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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