THE PLAINS OF EASTERN NEW MEXICO begin bending into gentle hills and folds—grass-coated dunes, some of which are still “actively migrating,” says Brendon Asher. The archaeologist and director of the Blackwater Draw National Historic Landmark and Museum points through the car window to a pocket in the landscape. “There’s a site in that hole that’s 9,000 years old,” he says. “There’s archaeology everywhere here.”
We’re on our way to the apex of that ancient life, a 156-acre site that upended the timeline of human habitation in North America. At Blackwater Draw in 1929, a lonely five-mile drive north of Portales, Clovis rancher Ridgley Whiteman came upon evidence of people hunting animals that were far larger than anything he could have imagined. Just three years earlier, archaeologists had confirmed that ancient people killed off a species of bison near what is now the town of Folsom, some 240 miles north of Portales. That discovery pushed back the people-were-here clock to 10,000 years, and scientists were still struggling to wrap their heads around that fact.
But these were no bones, Whiteman insisted. They were enormous. He eventually persuaded archaeologists to study what turned out to be the remains of mammoths, themselves
