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Renewed investigations at the Folsom Palaeoindian type site

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

David J. Meltzer*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX 75275, USA, dmeltzer@mail.smu.edu

Extract

The Folsom site (New Mexico, USA) is justly famous as the place where in 1927 four decades of sometimes bitter controversy came to an end, when it was finally demonstrated humans had been in the New World since the Pleistocene (Meltzer 1993). Folsom became the type site for the Palaeoindian period and distinctive fluted projectile point that bears its name (see Hofman 1999). Yet, as the excavations done in the 1920s by the Colorado (now Denver) and American Museums of Natural History focused initially on the recovery of Bison antiquus skeletons suitable for museum display, and latterly on documenting the association of projectile points with those bison remains, many fundamental questions of interest about the site’s stratigraphic, environmental and archaeological context were left unanswered (and often not asked).

Type
News and Notes
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2000

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References

Hofman, J.L. 1999. Unbounded hunters: Folsom bison hunting on the southern Plains, circa 105U0 BP, the lithic evidence, in Jaubert, J. Brugal, J. David, F. & Enloe, J. (ed.), Le bison: gibier et moyen de subsistance de hommes du paléolithique aux paléoindiens des grandes plaines: 383415. Antibes: Editions APDCA.Google Scholar
Meltzer, D.J. 1993. Search for the first Americans, Washington (DC): Smithsonian Books.Google Scholar