Blackwater Draw and the Clovis People

The Clovis are known above all for their spearpoints, finely worked stone blades with a distinctive channel, or flute, chipped up each face so they could be fitted to a shaft. These points have been found across much of North America, and for a long time the Clovis were regarded as the earliest widespread culture on the continent, the ancestors, in one view, of many later Native peoples.

At Blackwater Draw, Clovis hunters camped beside the ancient springs and ponds and took mammoths, bison, and other large animals, leaving their tools and the butchered bones behind in the mud. Newer discoveries elsewhere suggest people may have reached the Americas even earlier, but Blackwater Draw remains the place that first defined the Clovis and anchored the study of the continent's earliest inhabitants.

Blackwater Draw is dry today, but at the end of the last Ice Age it was very different, a chain of spring-fed ponds and marshes on a greener, cooler plain. That reliable water drew mammoths, ancient bison, camels, horses, and other now-vanished animals, and where the animals gathered, the hunters came too.

Over the thousands of years that followed, layer upon layer of sediment sealed those ancient shorelines, preserving bones, tools, and campsites in a kind of natural archive. Later peoples returned to the same springs, so the ground holds not just the Clovis but a long succession of cultures, one of the reasons the site is so rich and so carefully studied.

At the site itself, an interpreted excavation lets visitors see the layered earth exposed in cross-section, with the different periods of occupation stacked one atop another like pages in a book. Walking the grounds where the discoveries were made, on the open plains under a huge sky, gives a powerful sense of the deep time involved.

A short drive away, the Blackwater Draw Museum, run by Eastern New Mexico University, displays spearpoints, stone tools, and the bones of Ice Age animals recovered from the draw, along with exhibits that explain what the finds mean. Together the dig and the museum make an unassuming but genuinely significant stop for anyone interested in the human story of the Americas.

Blackwater Draw sits in the farming country between Portales and Clovis, a land of peanut fields, dairies, and grain elevators on the Llano Estacado, the great flat tableland of eastern New Mexico and West Texas. It is quiet, working country, far from the mountains and mesas most visitors associate with the state, and all the more interesting for it.

Because it is a working educational site, hours can be seasonal, so it is worth checking before making the drive. The plains are hot and shadeless in summer and can be bitterly windy and cold in winter, so spring and fall are the most comfortable seasons. Whatever the weather, the value here is not scenery but a rare chance to stand at the very origin of a chapter of human history.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.