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Monthly Meeting

THE PALEOINDIAN SOUTHWEST: HOW SOUTHWEST ARCHAEOLOGY SHAPED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE EARLIEST AMERICANS

David Kilby

7:30 PM, Tuesday, October 20, 2026 

Albuquerque Museum of Art and History 

2000 Mountain Road NW

The first definitive evidence of Ice Age Americans in North America came from the Folsom site in northeastern New Mexico. Subsequent discoveries at Blackwater Draw and Arizona’s San Pedro Valley established the presence of Clovis mammoth hunters on the Southwestern landscape. In the ensuing decades, it became clear that underlying the relatively conspicuous ceramic period archaeology of the Southwest is an abundant record of Paleoindian occupations, with a correspondingly abundant history of significant discoveries and insights regarding late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in western North America. This presentation reviews the role of the Greater Southwest, including the US and Mexico, in past and present Paleoindian research, touching on some of the classic sites as well as new discoveries that drive our understanding of the earliest chapters of Southwest prehistory.

David Kilby is a UNM alumnus and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University. His research focuses on the archaeology of the earliest inhabitants of the North American Southwest and Southern Plains. Current projects include the excavation of Bonfire Shelter, perhaps the earliest bison jump in North America, and new research at the Mockingbird Gap Clovis site in southern New Mexico. He recently published the book The Paleoindian Southwest along with the late Bruce Huckell.