Lubbock Lake: Late Quaternary Studies on the Southern High Plains Book

Lubbock Lake, one of the best-dated and best-stratified archaeological sites in the New World, was discovered in 1936, when City of Lubbock work crews were dredging for a municipal reservoir. Poking around the piles of dredged earth, a group of boys found a perfect Folsom projectile point, which they delivered to Prof. W.C. Holden at Texas Technological College. Even in light of this important discovery, only limited excavations of the site were conducted until 1972.

Beginning that year, researchers on the Lubbock Lake project set out to explore and study the strata systematically. The site surpassed their expectations, yielding information on 12,000 years of natural history. It contained five major stratigraphic units, five different soils revealed that the area was once cool and marshy, and that gradual warming and drying followed, with periods of blowing dust and, throughout, the steady reduction of vegetation. The bones of mammoths and extinct species of bear, bison, reptiles, and various aquatic creatures and artifacts of cultural interaction offered clues to animal and human adaptation of the changing climate and ecosystem on the Southern High Plains.

This book, the primary site report, details research methodologies used and includes reports on the regional and local setting. Also included are the site's history and its geologic, pedologic, botanical, and cultural chronology. Although ten seasons of intensive effort at Lubbock Lake have resulted in the complete excavation of only 0.05% of the vast 120-hectare site, this volume, fully illustrated and documented with site plans, photographs, drawings, and tabular material, is the most comprehensive work available on the 12,000 years of life that existed in Lubbock Lake.