DUANE
Duane's take
The way the marker at this site tells it, here's what went down on Running Water Draw. Now, most great discoveries have some gray-bearded professor at the center of the story. This one starts with a fifteen-year-old.
Val Keene Whitacre, just a kid, out in a caliche quarry on Running Water Draw in 1941, and he turns up something nobody had ever formally identified before — a long, finely worked flint dart point unlike anything in the known record. Distinctive, the scientists would later call it. That word does a lot of work when you're talking about something eight or nine thousand years old.
For a few years, that point just sat there in the category of interesting. Then in 1944, quarry workers uncovered a fossil bone deposit. That got the attention of scientists who were out surveying the geology of the Plains, and once scientists start paying attention, the next thing you know, you've got a full excavation on your hands.
The very next year — 1945 — a team of archeologists from the University of Texas arrived. Dr. E.
H. Sellards and Dr. Alex D.
Krieger were among them. What they pulled out of that ground was something to reckon with. Twenty-six man-made artifacts, including several of those same distinctive points young Whitacre had spotted four years earlier.
And right there alongside those artifacts, the remains of about a hundred extinct bison — Bison Taylori, the marker calls them — animals about twice the size of a modern bison. Let that settle in for a second. Twice the size.
The long flint point was named for this site. The Plainview point. Now, how did a hundred of those enormous animals end up piled together in one spot?
The marker says the bone bed probably resulted from a primitive hunting method — stampeding bison over a cliff, then butchering the dead and crippled animals for food. Whoever those hunters were, eight or nine thousand years ago, they were organized, they were patient, and they understood how to move a herd. After the hunt, time did what time does.
The cliff eroded away. Silt poured in — twelve to fourteen feet of it — and sealed that whole scene underneath Running Water Draw like a page pressed shut in a book. When the bone bed was finally exposed, it measured sixty-two feet long, up to ten feet wide, and a foot and a half thick.
Radiocarbon dating puts this site somewhere between eight thousand and nine thousand years old. And that Plainview point — the one that started with a fifteen-year-old and a caliche quarry — it didn't stay local. It's found most commonly across the Great Plains of North America, but it's also turned up in Alaska and in Mexico.
A point shaped right here on Running Water Draw, carried or copied across a continent. Not bad for a day's work in 1941.
What the marker says
The first of this distinctive type of early man dart point was found by 15-year-old Val Keene Whitacre in 1941, in a caliche quarry on Running Water Draw. In 1944, quarry workers uncovered a fossil bone deposit, which was noted by scientists surveying the geology of the Plains. The next year a team of archeologists from the University of Texas, including Dr. E. H. Sellards and Dr. Alex D. Krieger, excavated the site and found 26 man-made artifacts, including several of the points, in association with the remains of about 100 extinct bison (Bison Taylori), about twice the size of modern species. The long flint point was then named for this site. The bone bed probably resulted from the primitive hunting method of stampeding bison over a cliff, and butchering of the dead and crippled animals for food. The cliff eroded away and covered the bones with 12 to 14 feet of silt. When exposed, the bone bed was 62 feet long, up to 10 feet wide, and 1.5 feet thick. Radiocarbon dating indicates that this site is 8,000 to 9,000 years old. The Plainview point is found most commonly in the Great Plains region of North America, but has been located also in Alaska and Mexico. 1973