The Folsom tradition is a Paleo-Indian archaeological culture that occupied much of central North America from to c. 10200 BCE. The term was first used in 1927 by Jesse Dade Figgins, director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The discovery by archaeologists of projectile points in association with the bones of extinct Bison antiquus, especially at the Folsom site near Folsom, New Mexico, established much greater antiquity for human residence in the Americas than the previous scholarly opinion that humans in the Americas dated back only 3,000 years. The findings at the Folsom site have been called the "discovery that changed American archaeology."
Controversy
The antiquity of man in the New World was a controversial topic in the late 19th and early 20th century. Beginning in 1859, discoveries of human bones in Europe in association with extinct Pleistocene mammals proved to scientists that human beings had existed further into the past than the Biblical tradition of a world created 6,000 years ago. Pioneering American archaeologists soon found evidence of early humans living in the Americas. In 1872, Charles Conrad Abbott announced the discovery of traces of human presence in the Delaware River Valley dating from the ice ages, Although many of his findings were later disproven, Abbott inspired a hunt for the remains of ancient man in the Americas.
However, claims that humans may have inhabited the Americas thousands or tens of thousands of years ago were controversial. In the "Great Paleolithic War" proponents of recent and ancient peopling faced off in opposition to each other. In the early 1900s, Ales Hrdlicka and William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution became the chief advocates of the view that man had not lived in the Americas for longer than 3,000 years. Hrdlicka and others made it "virtually taboo" for any archaeologist "desirous of a successful career" to advocate a deep antiquity for inhabitants of the Americas. The findings at the Folsom site eventually overturned that conventional wisdom.
Discovery of Folsom
On August 27, 1908, of rain fell on Johnson Mesa in New Mexico causing downstream floods along the Dry Cimarron River. A local African-American cowboy, George McJunkin, surveyed the damage in Wild Horse Arroyo and found bones uncovered by the flood. He recognized the bones as similar to but larger than bison bones and among the bones he found projectile points. McJunkin tried to interest amateur palentologists from Raton, New Mexico, to visit the isolated site but he died in 1922 with the Folsom site still unvisited by scientists.
Archaeologists had made earlier and similar discoveries. In 1895, at the 12 Mile Creek site in western Kansas, an archaeologist found a projectile point in conjunction with the bones of extinct bison. At Vero Beach, Florida in 1916, an archaeologist found human bones and the bones of extinct mammals mixed together. Additional findings of human bones mixed with those of extinct mammals were found in Nebraska and Kansas. Hrdlicka discounted all of the findings based on his belief that the human remnants were too modern in appearance to belong to older human beings. In 1922, shortly after McJunkin's death, a Raton blacksmith, Carl Schwachheim, and a banker, Fred Howarth, both amateur naturalists visited the Folsom site. They collected bones and took them to Jesse Figgins, director of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and palaentologist Harold Cook. Figgins and Cook identified the bones as belonging to an extinct species of bison, Bison antiquus. In 1926, all four men visited the Folsom site and began excavations.