If on a West Texas hike you’ve spotted an arrowhead or spearpoint, you know how potent the experience is. Such projectiles are the quintessential artifacts of our region’s ancient Indigenous past. Textiles, wooden implements, campsites and shelters – all give way to the elements. But stone tools endure. And though the insights they provide are partial, these artifacts can also be revelatory.
One such revelatory find came near the town of Plainview, 45 miles north of Lubbock. Here, in 1944, archeologists discovered two dozen examples of a previously unknown spearpoint – the Plainview style – among the bones of at least 100 Ice Age bison. The discovery offers a tantalizing if enigmatic glimpse into the lives of the continent’s first people, the Paleoindians.
Dr. Vance Holliday is an expert on the Paleoindian archeology of West Texas.
“It was the first really careful, systematic study of the artifacts,” Holliday said, “so that was a landmark. And this was less than 20 years after the Folsom discovery, so it was still a big deal. And it was a bison kill – lots of bison.”
In 1926, archeological expectations had been upended, when, near Folsom, New Mexico, spearpoints were discovered among the bones of now-extinct bison. It was the first proof humans lived in North America in the Ice Age. Three years later, near Clovis, New Mexico, spearpoints of a different style were found among mammoth bones.
The Plainview find deepened the picture. The points here were similar to those of Folsom and Clovis in their exquisite, lance-like construction. But they were distinct – lacking the “flutes” of Clovis and Folsom points. These flutes are shallow grooves chipped into a spearpoint’s base, used for affixing the point to a shaft.
The Plainview site is in Running Water Draw. Holliday said the number of bison bones suggests mass kills. Hunters here succeeded in stampeding bison herds off a cliff – in one of the earliest examples of a bison jump. Though it’s now an ephemeral watercourse, Running Water Draw was then a perennial stream, lined with juniper, pine and even birch trees.
Clovis points are found across North America, and date to about 13,000 years old. Folsom points date to between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, and are found across the Great Plains and Rockies. But determining the age, and the geographic range, of the Plainview style has been fraught.
“Plainview has always been a bit of a head-scratcher,” Holliday said, “because there are a lot of Plainview-like things. And then the dating is surprisingly poor. We just haven't found that many Plainview sites where we can get good dateable material.”
The best estimate, Holliday said, is that Plainview points date to between 12,100 and 11,300 years old. They’ve have been found in the Trans-Pecos, in Culberson and Jeff Davis counties. Plainview-type points have also been discovered near Albuquerque and in Wyoming.
The people who made these spearpoints were clearly highly mobile. But their range was constricted relative to their Clovis and Folsom forbears. Holliday said that may suggest changing Ice Age social dynamics.
“I think what a lot of people attribute it to is just that there's more people on the landscape,” he said. “So there's quite possibly more territoriality. You don't go hunting bison on the land where the guys that make this other kind of point do. And that makes perfect sense. Human beings, we know how they are: That is an issue, a fundamental issue.”
The Plainview site later became the city’s landfill, and it can’t be visited today. But what was found here underscores the richness of West Texas history.
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