The Lindenmeier Site

 The Soapstone Prairie Natural Area is in central Colorado, just south of the Wyoming border. It has within it an archeological site that few know about, even though it is very important to our understanding of man in the Americas. The Lindenmeier Folsom Site is one of the hidden gems of American Prehistory.

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point from the Lindenmeier Site, 1934

​Folsom Man is the name given to a group of Paleo-Indian nomadic hunters who roamed throughout Central North America between approximately 9,000 BC and 4,000 BC. They are identified by their stone points, which have a distinct concavity on one side.

​Folsom Man is named after the small town of Folsom, New Mexico, In 1908, a devastating flood unearthed bison bones that were exceedingly large. It wasn’t until 1925, when scientists finally investigated the site, that stone points were found with the bones. The bones were determined to be those of bison antiquus, an ancestor of the modern bison that had died out approximately 10,000 years ago.

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Bison Antiquus. They were 25-30% larger than present day bison.

 Prior to the investigation of the Folsom Site, scientists believed that man had only been in North America for approximately 5,000 years. 

​The Folsom Site is just a kill site. It contains bones and stone points, but there is no evidence of habitation, no campfires, no other tools or implements. Although it proved that man was in the Americas much earlier than previously supposed, it shed little light on who these people were. ​

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Working at the site with horses 1936

In 1924, three amateur archaeologists, A. Lynn Coffin, his father, Judge Claude C. Coffin, and their friend, C. K. Collins were wandering through a ranch owned by William Lindenmeier, Jr.. They were walking through an arroyo when they discovered some fluted points that were very different from the more abundant and smaller arrow points they usually found. The points were some fifteen feet below the surface. That depth suggested that they were very old. They called in the Judge’s brother, Major Roy G. Coffin, who persuaded Dr. Frank Roberts of the Smithsonian Institution to visit in 1934. The Smithsonian Institution, supported by the Colorado Museum of Natural History, excavated the site between 1935 and 1940. The Coffin brothers also did some excavating of their own. 

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The Coffins at the site 1935

The well-preserved site is buried under twelve to fifteen feet of sediment and covered by layers of silts and clays slowly deposited by floods and windstorms over thousands of years. It contains clusters of stone and bone debris, strewn over at least a half-mile. These clusters represent work areas, where Folsom peoples manufactured projectile points, repaired or discarded broken tools, cooked their food, cleaned and transformed animal hides into leather, and manufactured clothing.

Some archaeologists suggest that the clusters represent a single large camp simultaneously occupied by several large Folsom groups, each with twenty to forty members. These groups may have come together for a rendezvous or trade fair. Other archaeologists believe the clusters were laid down by a single group that returned year after year, generation after generation. Either way, the Lindemeier Site is the largest Folsom site yet found. It is still being excavated, and its secrets revealed. 

While the original Folsom site provided no tools except points, the Lindenmeier site shows that the  Paleo-indians referred to as Folsom People created many types and shapes of tools. In addition to spearheads, archaeologists found wedge shaped scrapers and other tools made for chopping, slicing and skinning the hides of the bison. They also found scored pieces of hematite which were used to extract red ochre, believed to be used to paint for their faces or for ceremonial purposes. Highly polished 1-2”discs inscribed with designs were found at the site and are the oldest artwork found in Colorado.
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The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a National Historic Landmark. Artifacts from the site are held by the Smithsonian Institution, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, and in private collections. 

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There is not much to see at the Lindenmeier Site. A short paved trail leads to a covered overlook where visitors look out over the arroyo in which the excavations have occurred, but they are either hidden from view or so carefully reburied that they are not visible. The weather was cooler and wetter during the period when the Folsom men inhabited it, but it is still easy to look over the vastness of the rolling hills and envision what life might have been like so many millennia ago. 

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Soapstone Prairie has multiple trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding and is open for visitation from March 1 until November 30 each year. It is a habitat for bison, black-footed ferrets, pronghorn antelopes, and other native species.
 
https://fortcollinsimages.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/lindenmeier-a-folsom-man-site/
https://www.fcgov.com/naturalareas/finder/soapstone​

In the Shadow of Sunrise is an historical novel set during the Folsom Period. The characters in the novel shelter every winter in the San Luis Valley, but during the summers they go on long migrations, following the herds and collecting suitable rocks for making spear points and other tools. While these characters do not visit the Linenmeier Site in my story, they would have done so in other years, and some of the people who lived at this site would have met my characters at other sites that they visited. The information available about this site did a lot to inform how I structured my story. 

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The Long Road from Kid to President

 

One of the first books I read this year was Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President. In this, her first book written specifically for juvenile readers, Goodwin analyzes how the childhoods of four men: Abraham Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, shaped their presidencies.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a brilliant woman and an engaging writer who has spent considerable time researching these four men. Her first book was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.  After that, she published the Pulitzer Prize–winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II. She earned the Lincoln Prize for Team of Rivals, which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, about the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Goodwin looked at all four men in her bestselling book Leadership: In Turbulent Times, which she went on to produce when it became a History Channel docuseries on Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt. There is no question that she is well qualified to introduce these four famous men to younger readers. She knows these men intimately, including all the small stories that make them human and understandable.

The subtitle of this books is How Four Kids Became President, and I think this book would have been more satisfying for its intended audience if Goodwin had stopped right there. However, Goodwin continues on through each presidency, and the result is a book that is rather lengthy for middle grade readers. At 360 pages, it’d be quite a slog for most kids ages 8-12. To me, this is more a good overview for high school libraries or middle schools who do biography projects about political figures, or for adults who want an easy-to-read overview.

Ancient Footprints Provide a Look at Life Long Ago

 

White Sands National Monument, in southern of New Mexico has given scientists a unique view into the lives of people living long ago. Here, amid the pristine, white gypsum sand dunes that surrounded an ancient lake, scientists have discovered the footprints of a woman and child who were crossing the sands. They have also found footprints from a hunt involving ancient human beings and a large prehistoric sloth. Both discoveries are extremely rare and could change our understanding of how long ago people were in the area and how they interacted with large animals.

The footprints of the woman and child are part of what is considered the longest preserved "trace" of a person's fossilized footprints. Found on the plateau of a dried-up untouched lake bed, they extend for almost a full mile. The area also has hundreds of thousands of footprints of various ice age animals, including Columbian mammoths, giant sloths, sabertoothed cats, dire wolves, and giant bison.

The reason researchers believe that the person who crossed the plateau was a woman is because of the size of her feet. A second set of much smaller footprints amble about, sometimes disappearing and reappearing some distance away. This indicates that the woman was traveling with a small child who sometimes walked and sometimes was carried.

The woman seems to have been in a hurry to get somewhere. Scientists came to this conclusion based on the distance between the prints. The woman seems to have been walking at 1.7 meters per second, which is much faster than the average relaxed walking speed of between 1.2 and 1.5 meters per second. Her tracks, unlike the meandering smaller tracks, follow a straight line, indicating that she was traveling to a specific place, and that she knew where she was going. Scientists say that a second set of tracks moving in the opposite direction are also hers, indicating that hours later, she returned the same way, but without the child.

A second set of tracks tells an even more interesting story, with more graphic details. Researchers have found more than 100 footprints dating back between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago that seem to show humans following, and perhaps hunting, a giant ground sloth. The animals, which disappeared about 11,000 years ago, could reach the size of an elephant. Although the distance between steps for a giant sloth is greater than that of a human step, the footprints show that the human hunters were following the sloth, sometimes walking directly in the giant beast’s footsteps.

In some places, the human footprints appear close to the sloth’s markings, and one human appears to have gotten up on tip-toe very close to the animal. The sloth, then, appears to have suddenly changed direction, and researchers suggest that it stood up on its back legs and flailed about with its front legs in order to defend itself.

Matthew Bennett, the lead writer of a recent report on the discovery that appeared in the scientific publication Science Advances says that hunting such a large animal "would have come with huge amounts of risk." The geology professor from Bournemouth University in England has studied these tracks and others, and speculates that they can help prove whether or not early men played a role in the eradication of mega fauna at the end of the last Ice Age.

 

My novel, In the Shadow of Sunrise, tells the story of Earth Shadow, a handicapped boy who goes on his first Walk Around, where he has the chance to prove his manhood. By the time that Earth Shadow walked along Lake Lucero, a thousand years had passed, and with it, most of the megafauna that roamed the plains of North America. Earth Shadow is a member of the Folsom culture, and the only large beasts left are the Bison Antiquus, an early, and much larger form of the American Bison that continues to live on the great plains. Earth Shadow recognizes that the footprints he sees are old, but he doesn’t know how old. He must rely on the stories of his people.

Recently, scientists found seeds from the aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa in the same levels of sand as the human footprints and subjected them to radiocarbon dating. The procedures produced dates between 23,000 and21,000 years ago.  Although these ages might have been skewed by potentially old carbon reservoirs, it might indicate that humans inhabited North America far longer than has been previously supposed.

Telescoping Distance and Time

 

If you’ve lived in a place with sweeping, wide vistas, you understand that objects can appear much closer than they actually are. Here in New Mexico, where the air is thin and dry, it’s not uncommon to see mountain peaks that are well over a hundred miles distant. From my living room, South Mountain looks like an easy walk, when it is really a good twenty miles away. 

Charles Dickens experienced this when he visited the Alps in September of 1846. The individual mountain peaks were so large that they fooled the eye into believing they were much closer than they actually were. In his novel Little Dorrit, he begins Chapter 1 of Book 2 by describing this phenomena: 

In the autumn of the year, Darkness and Night were creeping up to the highest ridges of the Alps. . . . The air had been warm and transparent through the whole of the bright day. Shining metal spires and church-roofs, distant and rarely seen, had sparkled in the view; and the snowy mountain-tops had been so clear that unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the intervening country, and slighting their rugged height for something fabulous, would have measured them as within a few hours’ easy reach. Mountain-peaks of great celebrity in the valleys, whence no trace of their existence was visible sometimes for months together, had been since morning plain and near in the blue sky. And now, when it was dark below, though they seemed solemnly to recede, like specters who were going to vanish, as the red dye of the sunset faded out of them and left them coldly white, they were yet distinctly defined in their loneliness, above the mists and shadows. 

I think reading historical fiction can do the same thing for events long distant. As we read what it was like in long ago times, the events draw nearer to us, the people more real. We live and breathe the experience as if it were in our own time, and we realize that we are much closer to these ancient peoples than we believed.