Blackwater Draw

Blackwater Draw is an intermittent stream channel about 140 km long that runs from Roosevelt County, New Mexico, south-eastward across the Llano Estacado towards Lubbock, Texas, and holds Blackwater Locality No. 1, the type site of the Clovis culture. Ridgley Whiteman first recognized the site in 1929, and the first large excavation came in 1932. Its stratified levels, from Clovis and Folsom to the historic period, hold fluted Clovis points and other tools with the remains of extinct Late Pleistocene animals such as mammoth, camel, bison and dire wolf. Two of its points were used in the 1930s to define Clovis technology, and its Clovis layers date to around 11,290 years before the present.