Folsom Complex
Culture | Defunct
9000 BCE to 8000 BCE
The Folsom Complex is a name given by archaeologists to a specific Paleo-Indian archaeological culture that occupied much of central North America.
The term was first used in 1927 by Jesse Dade Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Numerous Paleoindian cultures occupied North America, with some restricted to the Great Plains and Great Lakes of the modern United States of America and Canada as well as adjacent areas to the west and south west.
The Folsom Tradition was characterized by use of Folsom points as projectile tips and activities known from kill sites where slaughter and butchering of bison took place and Folsom tools were left behind Some kill sites exhibit evidence of up to 50 bison being killed, although the Folsom diet apparently included mountain sheep, marmots, deer and cottontail rabbit as well.A Folsom site at Hanson, Wyoming also revealed areas of hardstanding which indicate possible dwellings.The type site is Folsom Site, near Folsom, New Mexico in Colfax County (29CX1), a marsh-side kill site found in about 1908 by George McJunkin, a cowboy and former slave who had lived in Texas as a child.
Archaeologists excavated the site in 1926.The Folsom Complex is thought to have derived from the earlier Clovis culture and dates to between 9000 BC and 8000 BCE.
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The earliest occupation of Sandia Cave, a tunnel-like archaeological site in the Sandia Mountains east of present Albuquerque in central New Mexico, dates from about 9000 BCE.
The inhabitants use so-called Sandia points, a distinctive type of unfluted projectile point with a single shoulder on one side of the base of the blade.
Other implements employed by the inhabitants include scrapers, lamellar blades and bone awls made from camels' leg bones.
A second occupation of Sandia Cave, dating from 8500, uses flutes of the Folsom type.