Blackwater Draw

The big-game hunting on this panel left an inventory. At least twenty-eight mammoths have come out of Blackwater Draw in more than eighty years of digging, and the Ice Age bison found with them were twenty to thirty percent larger than bison today. Most of the bone deposits date from the last fourteen thousand years, a span that runs from the mammoth hunters to people who no longer had mammoths to hunt. This panel shares a roadside pullout on US-70 with the one for Rose Powers White; the site itself lies off NM-467.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Blackwater Draw Blackwater Draw consists of sev- eral important archaeological sites that have yielded much infor- mation about the big-game hunting way of life. Some of the animals that were hunted, like the mam- moth, are long extinct. Eastern New Mexico University's Black- water Draw Museum contains arti- facts of the Paleo-Indian cultures that existed here as early as 10,000 B.C.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blackwater Draw — 4.7 mi
  The site between Clovis and Portales that gave the Clovis culture its name, found by a nineteen-year-old in 1929 and dug for decades inside a working gravel pit.

More markers nearby

• Rose Powers White — steps away
• Portales — 5.0 mi
• Portales — 7.5 mi
• Eastern New Mexico University — 7.5 mi