The landmark sits in a meander of Yellow House Draw, a Brazos tributary fed by springs that held water until the early 1930s. In 1936 the city dredged the bend for a reservoir. The water project failed, but the cut exposed bone and stone tools, and the West Texas Museum, now the Museum of Texas Tech, began work here in 1939. Folsom bison kills turned up in the late 1940s, and charred bison bone from one early kill was radiocarbon dated to about 9,800 years.
What makes the place matter is the order of it. Stream, lake and windblown sediments laid the record down in separate bands, and close to 175 radiocarbon dates tie it together. The Clovis level holds mammoth, horse, camel and giant short-faced bear butchered on an old gravel bar. Above it come Folsom bison hunters, Archaic camps and a roasting pit about 5,000 years old, Puebloan trade pottery, signs of the Apache from at least 1450 and then the Comanche, who held the Llano from the mid-1700s to the 1870s. The top layer carries the buffalo hunters and George Singer's store of 1881-86, the start of Lubbock.
The Museum of Texas Tech has run field research here every summer since the early 1970s. The 336-acre preserve has trails through restored prairie and the Robert A. Nash Interpretive Center. It is a National Historic Landmark and a State Archeological Landmark: stay on the trails and leave everything where it lies.
The closest stops worth working into your route