Archeology began with the hunt for artifacts, but it’s evolved a range of specialized disciplines, like geoarcheology. By bringing the tools of geology to bear on prehistory, geoarcheology yields potent insights into the changing landscapes, and changing human lives, of the deep past.
Dr. Vance Holliday is one of the Southwest’s leading geoarcheologists, and while he teaches today at the University of Arizona, he cut his teeth on the West Texas plains. In 1997, he synthesized two decades of research here in “Paleoindian Geoarchaeology of the Southern High Plains,” from UT Press. It’s a sweeping story of Ice Age West Texas.
In 1936, federal work crews digging in Yellow House Draw on the north end of Lubbock unearthed Ice Age animal bones – and Ice Age human tools. They’d found a singular archeological site. Known as Lubbock Lake Landmark, the site reveals 12,000 years of Native American life.
Holliday volunteered at the site in 1973, as a recent anthropology grad. His colleagues may have been focused on the artifacts. But Holliday saw that the soil itself has stories to tell.
“There were lake beds, stream deposits, wind blown deposits,” Holiday said. “There were soils where you have a landscape was stable, and there's organic matter accumulating, wetlands. All that stuff was right there, right in front of us every day when we were in the field. And so that's what did it for me.”
Lubbock Lake isn’t the only important site here that testifies to the earliest Americans, the “Paleoindians.” There are the Clovis and Folsom sites in eastern New Mexico, the Midland, Miami and Lake Theo sites in West Texas. After he earned a PhD in geology, Holliday brought his geoarcheological perspective to all these sites.
The Llano Estacado is a forbidding landscape today. But the first people found a lusher terrain, Holliday said, with sizable canyons where there are shallow arroyos today.
“And during Clovis times there was flowing water,” he said, “perennial streams, meandering streams, gravel bars like you'd see in Central Texas today. And they were deeper. They hadn't filled in so much. So there was a fair amount of relief. In places, it was 5 meters deeper than it is today.”
Twelve thousand years ago, the West Texas plains were an American Serengeti, home to mammoths, horses and camels. Between 10 and 11,000 years ago, that began to change.
“The water stopped flowing,” Holliday said. “And you started getting lakes. Not everywhere, but locally, there were ponds, freshwater ponds.”
Many of the great creatures vanished. But Ice Age bison – 25 percent more massive than their contemporary kin – endured. They were a touchstone for a culture known as the Folsom. Prehistoric human populations here may have peaked during this Folsom period.
But the drying continued. And Holliday’s research shows that ancient hunters were soon contending with a familiar West Texas phenomenon: the dust storm.
“There are massive amounts of windblown sediment coming in,” Holliday said, “a meter or two. So there were some pretty dry environments destabilizing the plains, and everything starts blowing around.”
As the Ice Age ended, Texas Hill Country populations grew. That may have been the result of an exodus from the High Plains.
But Native life here certainly didn’t end. Lubbock Lake shows the continuous presence of people, and of bison.
West Texas may seem like a timeless wilderness. But as geoarcheology reveals, this land has undergone complex and dramatic changes, which have shaped the human experience.
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