WEBVTT - Ep. 25: Thinking About Big History in One Western Place 0:00:01.520 --> 0:00:07.360 The famous geographic dictum space plus culture equals place is 0:00:07.400 --> 0:00:10.479 nowhere more vivid than on the high plains of the West, 0:00:10.840 --> 0:00:15.320 where a succession of human cultures have repeatedly inhabited a 0:00:15.400 --> 0:00:21.360 setting already changed by previous inhabitants. I'm dan Flor's and 0:00:21.480 --> 0:00:45.000 this is the American West, thinking about big history in 0:00:45.159 --> 0:00:52.280 one Western place. On a blessery gray day in March 0:00:52.400 --> 0:00:56.160 twenty years ago, Stephen Ranella and I spent an afternoon 0:00:56.200 --> 0:00:58.720 giving ourselves a tour of a piece of the West 0:00:58.960 --> 0:01:02.160 that ought to be as famous as Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. 0:01:03.520 --> 0:01:06.600 Stephen was then working on his book on Buffalo, and 0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:09.400 on a visit to Santa Fe, where I'd recently built 0:01:09.400 --> 0:01:12.280 a house, he proposed that we'd take off across the 0:01:12.280 --> 0:01:15.520 Great Plains to see what then stood as a kind 0:01:15.560 --> 0:01:19.560 of ground zero in the American story. The place we 0:01:19.600 --> 0:01:23.679 were heading entirely lacked the school book associations of a 0:01:23.720 --> 0:01:29.080 colonial Virginia or Massachusetts Bay, or even of Santa Fe, 0:01:29.120 --> 0:01:32.840 then closing in on its four hundredth year as the 0:01:33.000 --> 0:01:37.520 oldest city founded by Europeans in the American West. But 0:01:37.640 --> 0:01:40.920 the place we were driving towards did have one great 0:01:40.959 --> 0:01:45.680 advantage not enjoyed by those more famous sites. The Blackwater 0:01:45.840 --> 0:01:51.520 draw UNESCO World Heritage Site outside Clovis, New Mexico, pushes 0:01:51.720 --> 0:01:56.440 definite human inhabitation of North America back more than thirteen 0:01:56.560 --> 0:02:01.240 thousand years in the past in twenty twenty six. There 0:02:01.240 --> 0:02:04.960 are pretty definitive arguments for a human presence in America 0:02:05.280 --> 0:02:09.240 even older. Of course, the best evidence so far is 0:02:09.280 --> 0:02:13.160 the blockbuster find in twenty nineteen of what turned out 0:02:13.200 --> 0:02:18.160 to be sixty one beautifully preserved footprints, mostly left by 0:02:18.280 --> 0:02:22.800 children or adolescents, in the soft mud of an ancient lake, 0:02:22.919 --> 0:02:26.320 a couple of one hundred miles southwest of the Blackwater 0:02:26.400 --> 0:02:32.400 Clovis site in today's White Sands National Monument. Grass remains 0:02:32.480 --> 0:02:36.200 crushed by those feet have dated to twenty three thousand 0:02:36.280 --> 0:02:41.760 years ago, a full ten millennia before Clovis. But so far, 0:02:42.040 --> 0:02:46.760 no ancient culture whose remains archaeologists have on Earth seems 0:02:46.800 --> 0:02:50.559 to have draped itself over this continent with the geographic 0:02:50.680 --> 0:02:56.120 sweep of the Clovis Paleolithic hunters, whose excavated campsites and 0:02:56.160 --> 0:03:01.200 tools cover every part of the present United States. For 0:03:01.320 --> 0:03:04.280 most of America, and this is certainly true of most 0:03:04.280 --> 0:03:09.200 of the American West, places like White Sands excepted. Clovis 0:03:09.320 --> 0:03:13.120 is the beginning of the human presence here, our human 0:03:13.200 --> 0:03:17.919 ground zero. Before Clovis, most pieces of the West truly 0:03:18.040 --> 0:03:24.160 were wilderness landscapes that lacked a human presence. After Clovis, 0:03:24.360 --> 0:03:28.560 the pattern in most places is one occupation after another 0:03:29.120 --> 0:03:34.639 right down through today. In search of Clovis America, Stephen 0:03:34.680 --> 0:03:38.160 and I were out in a country I'd once made home. 0:03:38.800 --> 0:03:41.760 We call it the High Plains today, although who knows 0:03:41.800 --> 0:03:44.760 what names most of its ancient inhabitants might have used 0:03:45.040 --> 0:03:48.600 for these flat prairies. The names we do know seem 0:03:48.680 --> 0:03:54.200 to reference the region's endless horizontal flatness, a sensory impression 0:03:54.240 --> 0:03:59.440 that perhaps was universal for us upright primates. Steven and 0:03:59.440 --> 0:04:02.960 I were headed for a very old set piece here 0:04:03.640 --> 0:04:07.520 less than a century ago when archaeologists discovered the spot. 0:04:08.000 --> 0:04:12.560 Clovis culture was unknown and Blackwater draw was about to 0:04:12.600 --> 0:04:16.560 be mined for gravel to pill roads through a handful 0:04:16.680 --> 0:04:22.160 of nearby American farming towns. When archaeologist E. B. Howard 0:04:22.200 --> 0:04:26.279 made discoveries here that rocked the world. Scientists named the culture, 0:04:26.560 --> 0:04:30.720 whose large dramatic points they were finding after the closest 0:04:30.880 --> 0:04:35.240 of those towns, Clovis, New Mexico. With the addition of 0:04:35.279 --> 0:04:39.960 a grand new tool, radiocarbon dating, over the next half century, 0:04:40.200 --> 0:04:43.360 science would find evidence all over the West and all 0:04:43.400 --> 0:04:47.960 over America of a Clovisia the beautiful that had lasted 0:04:48.120 --> 0:04:52.919 four hundred years, significantly longer than the two hundred and 0:04:52.920 --> 0:04:57.960 fifty years of the present United States. Stephen and I 0:04:58.000 --> 0:05:01.000 had made one cardinal mistake in our over to the 0:05:01.040 --> 0:05:04.800 Texas border from Santa Fe. We'd forgotten to check if 0:05:04.839 --> 0:05:09.159 the Blackwater draw Grounds and its visitor center were actually open. 0:05:10.000 --> 0:05:12.680 For some reason now lost to time. It turned out 0:05:12.760 --> 0:05:15.839 the site was in fact closed for the day, which 0:05:15.839 --> 0:05:19.960 I'll confessed didn't really deter us. Interested in information and 0:05:20.120 --> 0:05:23.559 education rather than mischief, we simply climbed over the gate 0:05:23.839 --> 0:05:27.679 and proceeded to give ourselves a self guided tour around 0:05:27.720 --> 0:05:32.599 one of our country's most famous ancient human sites. That 0:05:32.680 --> 0:05:35.320 tour made it clear that the Clovis people had arrived 0:05:35.360 --> 0:05:40.080 in America at a propitious time. Among the large cosmic 0:05:40.160 --> 0:05:43.520 forces that have shaped North America's big history, one of 0:05:43.520 --> 0:05:46.920 them had allowed these people their access to the continent 0:05:47.760 --> 0:05:51.359 hemmed up for thousands of years on the Baringian land 0:05:51.400 --> 0:05:55.279 mass that formed between Siberia and Alaska, when much of 0:05:55.320 --> 0:05:59.160 the northern Ocean waters were ice. The ancestors of these 0:05:59.200 --> 0:06:03.880 people had been blocked from entering America i Tinrant. Earlier 0:06:03.920 --> 0:06:07.760 groups like those who found White Sands had probably followed 0:06:07.760 --> 0:06:11.920 the coastlines from Asia to America in some kind of watercraft, 0:06:12.760 --> 0:06:16.720 but sixteen thousand or so years ago, the Wisconsin Maximum 0:06:16.920 --> 0:06:20.360 had ebbed enough to open a passage out of Beringia 0:06:20.400 --> 0:06:24.159 and into North America. As best we can tell, by 0:06:24.240 --> 0:06:28.040 thirteen thousand years ago, the early Americans we now call 0:06:28.120 --> 0:06:31.680 Clovis were all the way down to Blackwater in today's 0:06:31.680 --> 0:06:35.839 New Mexico. The Clovis people were lucky enough to be 0:06:35.920 --> 0:06:40.039 here when giants still roamed the continent. Indeed, it was 0:06:40.080 --> 0:06:43.480 the Pleistocene megafauna of the Americas that drew humans out 0:06:43.520 --> 0:06:47.039 of Siberia in the first place. Across most of the 0:06:47.080 --> 0:06:50.839 American West thirteen thousand years ago, it was possible for 0:06:50.920 --> 0:06:54.560 Clovis people to do what so many humans loved to do, 0:06:55.160 --> 0:06:59.279 specialize economically, and what they appeared to have wanted to 0:06:59.320 --> 0:07:05.080 specialize in was hunting big animals, especially elephants, the various 0:07:05.080 --> 0:07:09.039 species of mammoths that had evolved in America when they could. 0:07:10.520 --> 0:07:14.520 It was the discovery of large Clovis spear points embedded 0:07:14.560 --> 0:07:19.080 in the remains of mammoths, giant groundsloss, camels, and horses 0:07:19.320 --> 0:07:23.040 that rocked the world in the nineteen thirties. It confirmed 0:07:23.080 --> 0:07:27.680 something the famed fulsome Side found fewer than ten years earlier, 0:07:27.960 --> 0:07:31.480 had indicated that what many thought was a brand new 0:07:31.600 --> 0:07:36.560 American story actually was a very very ancient one, with 0:07:36.680 --> 0:07:39.720 people hunting giant creatures so far back in time, these 0:07:39.760 --> 0:07:44.760 animals were no longer even found on earth. Walking along 0:07:44.800 --> 0:07:48.400 Blackwater Draws set into these vast plains that March afternoon, 0:07:48.760 --> 0:07:52.520 the obvious observation to make was that the elephant hunt 0:07:52.640 --> 0:07:56.400 did not last. Twenty eight of those mammoths died at 0:07:56.480 --> 0:07:59.960 human hands in this spot. Except for an isolated pot 0:08:00.000 --> 0:08:03.320 population on a tiny island in the Burying Sea, all 0:08:03.360 --> 0:08:08.440 the species of American mammoths went extinct during Clovis times. Then, 0:08:08.520 --> 0:08:12.840 in the early nineteen seventies, archaeologists uncovered more than eight 0:08:12.960 --> 0:08:17.920 thousand artifacts at Blackwater draw from the Fulsome culture. The 0:08:17.960 --> 0:08:22.400 people who followed the Clovis people. In time, as indicated 0:08:22.440 --> 0:08:25.679 by the Fulsome site and many others like it across 0:08:25.720 --> 0:08:29.200 the West, the extinction of the elephants had led the 0:08:29.240 --> 0:08:33.600 next inhabitants of the interior West, especially on the high plains, 0:08:33.640 --> 0:08:37.839 to specialize and yet another of the great Pleascetocene species, 0:08:38.160 --> 0:08:44.800 a massive early bison, now called bison antiquis. But like 0:08:44.920 --> 0:08:49.320 the mammos in time, Bison antiquis was also faded to 0:08:49.360 --> 0:08:54.479 become extinct. While Fulsome culture and its spent offs perfected 0:08:54.559 --> 0:08:59.040 bison drives, corrals and at adle technology to enable them 0:08:59.040 --> 0:09:04.040 to survive some two thousand years around roughly eleven thousand 0:09:04.160 --> 0:09:09.640 years ago, this LifeWay too collapsed. Looking around us at 0:09:09.679 --> 0:09:14.480 these windy, usually brightly lit savannahs now bereft of both 0:09:14.559 --> 0:09:18.560 elephants and giant bison, but populated in the present by 0:09:18.679 --> 0:09:23.000 oil wells and monocrop agriculture, led Steven and me to 0:09:23.120 --> 0:09:27.559 commence some reconstruction of the big patterns in the deep 0:09:27.679 --> 0:09:31.640 time history of this place, track any part of the 0:09:31.679 --> 0:09:35.319 world across the large expanses of time since humans arrived, 0:09:35.520 --> 0:09:38.720 and a story begins to unfold that demonstrates a set 0:09:38.760 --> 0:09:44.079 of principles about history. First, because the grand forces mean 0:09:44.160 --> 0:09:48.240 that the Earth is an evolving and endlessly changing world. 0:09:48.400 --> 0:09:52.960 No place remains the same across big history. The science 0:09:53.000 --> 0:09:58.479 of ecology once waxed eloquent about climax the biophysical reality 0:09:58.520 --> 0:10:04.560 of natural environments if left undisturbed supposedly, but every environment 0:10:04.720 --> 0:10:09.320 is endlessly undergoing disturbance or recovery from it, so that 0:10:09.400 --> 0:10:13.840 what appears to be climaxes are merely snapshots in time 0:10:14.520 --> 0:10:18.080 changing as we look, is in fact the normal state 0:10:18.240 --> 0:10:23.680 of the world. Second, we human beings, like every other species, 0:10:24.200 --> 0:10:28.880 alter the places where we live. The famous geographer Ye 0:10:29.000 --> 0:10:33.600 Thutwan once composed a simple and elegant aphorism I long 0:10:33.640 --> 0:10:41.360 ago committed a memory. Space plus culture equals place. Space 0:10:41.640 --> 0:10:46.680 plus culture equals place. What do you meant was take 0:10:46.800 --> 0:10:52.720 natural settings, add in human economies and technologies and ideas 0:10:52.760 --> 0:10:57.400 about living, and what you get are places. Yet the 0:10:57.440 --> 0:11:01.720 truth about life in a given place is that the 0:11:01.880 --> 0:11:06.680 past of a place never remains in the past. Only 0:11:06.720 --> 0:11:09.480 the first human inhabitants to occupy a piece of ground 0:11:09.880 --> 0:11:14.600 get to interact with an unaltered space. This is the 0:11:14.640 --> 0:11:19.040 biological principle that drove the human migrations out of Africa 0:11:19.200 --> 0:11:23.199 and around the world. The search for places other humans 0:11:23.600 --> 0:11:27.959 haven't yet altered remains a part of our psychological makeup. 0:11:28.240 --> 0:11:30.520 It's why we love to find ourselves on a trail 0:11:30.840 --> 0:11:32.960 where no one is in front of us, or on 0:11:33.000 --> 0:11:36.320 an overlook with no houses or other humans in sight. 0:11:36.920 --> 0:11:41.240 It's why wilderness is so important to us. As for 0:11:41.440 --> 0:11:46.920 inhabiting places, since we succeed one another in place after place, 0:11:47.440 --> 0:11:52.680 we human inhabitants end up interacting not with pristine environments, 0:11:52.960 --> 0:11:56.280 but with settings that have already been changed by the 0:11:56.320 --> 0:12:00.360 people who have occupied the ground before us. Does the 0:12:00.400 --> 0:12:03.040 folsome people did in the wake of four hundred years 0:12:03.240 --> 0:12:06.200 of Clovis inhabitation of the high planes, all of us 0:12:06.240 --> 0:12:11.840 who come later are engaging with someone else's previously created place. 0:12:12.960 --> 0:12:17.440 Henry David Threaux's famous passage about wishing to know an 0:12:17.760 --> 0:12:21.600 entire heaven and an entire Earth included a line where 0:12:21.679 --> 0:12:24.960 he hoped some demi god, as he put it, hadn't 0:12:25.000 --> 0:12:28.280 preceded him and plucked from the heavens the best of 0:12:28.320 --> 0:12:33.640 the stars. Unfortunately for the natural world, that's often the 0:12:33.760 --> 0:12:37.960 narrative of human history. Someone else has already been there. 0:12:38.360 --> 0:12:41.200 The real question usually has to do with which of 0:12:41.280 --> 0:12:47.040 the best stars got erased and which few survived. What 0:12:47.120 --> 0:12:49.160 I want to do with this episode is to lay 0:12:49.200 --> 0:12:51.840 out what Stephen and I dropped into that day on 0:12:51.920 --> 0:12:55.800 the High Plains, the general patterns of thirteen thousand years 0:12:56.160 --> 0:13:00.560 of human conversion of space to place and then place 0:13:01.040 --> 0:13:04.600 into another place. And in honor of that day at 0:13:04.640 --> 0:13:07.040 Blackwater Draw, I think the best way to do this 0:13:07.440 --> 0:13:10.320 is to concentrate on that country. The country we were 0:13:10.400 --> 0:13:13.920 visiting then. The High Plains is one example of what 0:13:14.040 --> 0:13:16.600 seems to have happened in every place we live in 0:13:16.640 --> 0:13:19.760 the West. So I mean to provide the outlines of 0:13:19.800 --> 0:13:23.000 the big history. The French who study this in Europe 0:13:23.080 --> 0:13:27.120 call it La Longueiray in a region now divided by 0:13:27.200 --> 0:13:29.760 state lines, and that today we tend to think of 0:13:29.840 --> 0:13:35.040 as New Mexico or Texas, or Oklahoma or Colorado or Kansas. 0:13:35.800 --> 0:13:38.840 Yet like most regions, the High Plains has long been 0:13:38.920 --> 0:13:43.440 something real and discernible in and of itself. Whether we 0:13:43.520 --> 0:13:46.840 call it Kansas or Colorado, the High Plains have been 0:13:46.880 --> 0:13:50.520 shaped fairly uniformly by the grand forces of the planet 0:13:50.880 --> 0:13:53.760 and by an American story that has given it a 0:13:53.840 --> 0:13:58.920 regional art through time. Here's one insight for thinking about 0:13:58.920 --> 0:14:03.920 things like this. There's a theory about human settlement in place, 0:14:04.720 --> 0:14:10.200 assembled as a kind of convergence of history, geography, and ecology, 0:14:10.720 --> 0:14:16.200 and it's sometimes called the theory of possibilism. An eccentric 0:14:16.320 --> 0:14:21.800 Kansas professor of ecological history named James Malin back in 0:14:21.840 --> 0:14:27.240 the nineteen thirties brainstormed that bioregional environments like the High 0:14:27.240 --> 0:14:33.680 Planes do not actually determine how people live in them. Instead, 0:14:33.840 --> 0:14:37.800 they offer up a range of possibilities from which we 0:14:37.960 --> 0:14:42.520 choose based on our cultural preparation, what we recognize as 0:14:42.600 --> 0:14:47.960 potential resources, and our technological abilities. A region like the 0:14:48.040 --> 0:14:53.080 High Planes doesn't offer unlimited possibilities, though whaling or an 0:14:53.160 --> 0:14:57.240 economy based on processing timber doesn't fall within the range 0:14:57.280 --> 0:15:01.880 of lifeways here yet on this as if sunlit grassland, 0:15:02.160 --> 0:15:06.000 whose offerings might seem quite limited, There's been a wide 0:15:06.160 --> 0:15:10.840 range of possibilities for human life from Clovis times to 0:15:10.920 --> 0:15:15.200 the present. As is the case with every region of Earth, 0:15:15.680 --> 0:15:20.920 the geology, topography, climate, and ecology of the West High 0:15:20.920 --> 0:15:26.200 Plains have been the fundamental keys to human life here. Generally, 0:15:26.640 --> 0:15:32.120 this region's surface geology is a sedimentary outwash from the 0:15:32.240 --> 0:15:38.560 Rocky Mountains that buried ancient carboniferous life forms from the Permian, Triassic, 0:15:38.800 --> 0:15:43.120 and in a few spots the Jurassic periods. The overlying 0:15:43.280 --> 0:15:48.120 erosional wash from the mountains also buried very old mountain 0:15:48.200 --> 0:15:52.320 stream runoff in the form of a fossil underground lake 0:15:52.640 --> 0:15:57.840 we now call the Oblalla aquifer As an erosional apron 0:15:57.920 --> 0:16:01.920 of the Rockies. The plain's surface gradually slopes downward in 0:16:02.080 --> 0:16:05.880 elevation from west to east, so despite its appearance to 0:16:05.920 --> 0:16:11.680 the eye, the topography is not actually flat. Long before 0:16:11.720 --> 0:16:17.040 Clovis hunters arrived, rivers like the Arkansas, the Cimarron, Canadian, 0:16:17.280 --> 0:16:22.720 and Pecos had carved arroyo and canyonated channels across this 0:16:22.840 --> 0:16:28.280 high plane surface. On its easternmost edge, that outwashed surface 0:16:28.400 --> 0:16:33.360 presents as a sharp plateau, the cap Rock Escarpment. For 0:16:33.440 --> 0:16:37.040 the last million years, another set of rivers borne on 0:16:37.080 --> 0:16:42.000 the plateau itself, the Red Brazos and Colorado River of Texas, 0:16:42.280 --> 0:16:46.560 have spilled off the escarpment through deep, brightly colored canyons 0:16:46.560 --> 0:16:52.240 that expose the underlying Permian and Triassic rocks. Pelloduro Canyon, 0:16:52.400 --> 0:16:55.560 which I've mentioned a few times here lately in Texas's 0:16:55.680 --> 0:16:59.680 Panhandled is the most well known, but dozens of smaller 0:17:00.120 --> 0:17:04.080 million year old canyons run water off this giant plateau. 0:17:05.520 --> 0:17:09.320 While geology and topography have remained fairly constant since humans 0:17:09.359 --> 0:17:12.880 came to live here, climate and biology have changed greatly, 0:17:12.960 --> 0:17:16.359 and often Because the region is far inland from the 0:17:16.400 --> 0:17:19.720 Gulf of Mexico and the Southern Rockies intercept much of 0:17:19.720 --> 0:17:22.960 the moisture coming from the Pacific, The High Plains has 0:17:23.000 --> 0:17:27.560 a semi arid climate since Clovis times. It's been drier 0:17:27.600 --> 0:17:30.840 than the country on either side of it, typically bathed 0:17:30.920 --> 0:17:34.399 in three hundred and twenty annual days of sunshine and 0:17:34.600 --> 0:17:39.840 vigorously wind swept, but its climate has always been truly 0:17:40.040 --> 0:17:45.080 variable over time, sometimes producing cool, lush conditions, but there 0:17:45.080 --> 0:17:49.760 are always drought episodes and raging dust storms. One major 0:17:49.880 --> 0:17:52.720 dry period since humans have been in America, the so 0:17:52.920 --> 0:17:56.920 called Alta thermal prevailed for thousands of years on the 0:17:57.000 --> 0:18:00.879 High Plains. This kind of topograph and this kind of 0:18:00.880 --> 0:18:04.119 climate have made the High Planes a short grass and 0:18:04.240 --> 0:18:07.680 mid height grassland for most of human history, and that's 0:18:07.720 --> 0:18:11.480 important to this story. The energy that drives most terrestrial 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:15.679 systems comes directly from the sun, and sunny, semi arid 0:18:15.720 --> 0:18:21.040 grasslands are a very direct converter of solar energy into 0:18:21.160 --> 0:18:25.159 forms that other life can use. In one simple step 0:18:25.359 --> 0:18:30.720 of photosynthesis, thermodynamic energy streaming from the sun is directly 0:18:30.760 --> 0:18:35.600 available to animals that eat grass, then to other animals 0:18:35.840 --> 0:18:39.480 that eat the grass eaters. So when early humans came 0:18:39.520 --> 0:18:43.359 to the high planes, they found biological life centered on 0:18:43.440 --> 0:18:47.920 the conversion of this massive solar energy charge had produced 0:18:48.160 --> 0:18:52.480 a remarkable and diverse world of different life forms. Those 0:18:52.560 --> 0:18:56.920 life forms, elephants and bison, and their wide array of predators, 0:18:57.320 --> 0:19:02.560 became the first possible basis of human high planes and habitation. 0:19:05.600 --> 0:19:08.840 One other element influenced the range of possibilities on the 0:19:08.920 --> 0:19:15.639 high planes geographical connections. As social animals, we humans seek 0:19:15.680 --> 0:19:19.280 out contacts with other human groups. If those groups live 0:19:19.320 --> 0:19:23.160 in environments different from ours. We trade what we produce 0:19:23.520 --> 0:19:28.159 for things we lack and they have. Today's global market 0:19:28.200 --> 0:19:31.920 economy is the modern result, but more limited forms of 0:19:31.960 --> 0:19:36.040 the idea have always been around. During every part of 0:19:36.119 --> 0:19:40.240 high plane's history, people joined in economic systems that tied 0:19:40.320 --> 0:19:44.760 them by trade to people living somewhere else. Quite often, 0:19:44.840 --> 0:19:48.639 when people are using local nature to provide economic resources 0:19:48.680 --> 0:19:53.000 for people living in other places, those trade networks act 0:19:53.000 --> 0:19:57.159 to simplify the natural world. There are plenty of examples 0:19:57.200 --> 0:20:01.760 to follow. Here is the basic template of history in 0:20:01.880 --> 0:20:05.679 most of the West, in America and the world on 0:20:05.760 --> 0:20:09.280 the high Plains from the time of the Clovis elephant hunters. 0:20:09.520 --> 0:20:14.720 The Fulsome hunters inherited a Clovis place that Clovis culture 0:20:15.000 --> 0:20:19.560 had changed from its original condition. The place fashioned by 0:20:19.600 --> 0:20:23.919 the Clovis people no longer offered the possibility of a 0:20:24.000 --> 0:20:27.560 life based on hunting elephants. In the couple of thousands 0:20:27.600 --> 0:20:30.840 of years that followed, the Fulsome people and their several 0:20:30.880 --> 0:20:35.359 offshoots dominated the high planes and concentrated their economies on 0:20:35.440 --> 0:20:41.359 the remaining animals, particularly herds of giant pleisosne bison. But 0:20:41.520 --> 0:20:45.960 by nine thousand years ago, the huge Pleistocene bison were 0:20:46.040 --> 0:20:51.120 also gone, so were ground sloths, camels, horses, dire wolves, 0:20:51.400 --> 0:20:56.159 American cheetahs. Entire ecologies that humans had found on the 0:20:56.240 --> 0:21:01.600 high plains had vanished. So the next inhabitants inherited a 0:21:01.640 --> 0:21:08.439 place pretty drastically altered by two major predecessors. These new people, 0:21:08.760 --> 0:21:12.720 a collection of slightly different regional cultural groups who are 0:21:12.760 --> 0:21:16.720 collectively known as the Archaics, would live full, in rich 0:21:16.800 --> 0:21:20.800 lives across the high plains for the next eight thousand years. 0:21:21.720 --> 0:21:25.680 To offer a sense of scale that's almost forty times 0:21:25.800 --> 0:21:30.920 longer than the United States has existed, Archaic peoples were 0:21:31.040 --> 0:21:35.639 hunter gatherers who devoted far more attention to plant gathering 0:21:36.000 --> 0:21:40.320 than had their ancestors. But on the windswept, sun drenched 0:21:40.400 --> 0:21:44.480 high planes grasslands, it was still a grazing animal that 0:21:44.600 --> 0:21:51.040 converted sunlight most efficiently into energy. Mammoths, camels, and horses 0:21:51.280 --> 0:21:55.840 had left no successor species, but bison did. With most 0:21:55.880 --> 0:22:00.919 of its grazing competition eliminated. The modern bison floated in 0:22:01.000 --> 0:22:06.440 an almost weed like efflorescence, better adapted to the grasslands 0:22:06.560 --> 0:22:09.960 than even the Archaic people who hunted them. Bison made 0:22:10.119 --> 0:22:15.160 possible an archaic high planes place that would survive across 0:22:15.240 --> 0:22:19.720 those eighty centuries. Think of that as we celebrate two 0:22:19.760 --> 0:22:25.000 and a half centuries of the United States. The archaic 0:22:25.119 --> 0:22:29.240 high planes place did confront a major climate emergency that 0:22:29.359 --> 0:22:33.920 demanded an extreme response. About sixty five hundred years ago, 0:22:34.040 --> 0:22:37.720 climate in the American West cycled into an extremely warm, 0:22:37.840 --> 0:22:41.720 dry phase that lasted nearly two thousand years. This is 0:22:41.840 --> 0:22:46.479 the long hot drought climate historians called the Alta thermal. 0:22:47.200 --> 0:22:50.360 It may be a predictor for our response to global 0:22:50.480 --> 0:22:54.200 climate change in the West. In our time, the Alta 0:22:54.240 --> 0:22:56.639 thermal came close to turning the High Planes into a 0:22:56.680 --> 0:23:00.960 true desert and a vacant one. Not only did bison 0:23:01.080 --> 0:23:04.720 leave the region for wetter conditions to the east and north, 0:23:05.280 --> 0:23:09.200 evidence is strong that most of the Archaic peoples did 0:23:09.240 --> 0:23:12.800 the same. While a few villages of Archaics held on 0:23:13.200 --> 0:23:17.160 at permanent wetlands like Blackwater Draw and at Lubbock Lake, 0:23:17.520 --> 0:23:21.440 where springs bubbled the Oglalla aquafor to the surface, pretty 0:23:21.520 --> 0:23:26.800 much everybody else left. Starting about two thousand years ago, 0:23:27.119 --> 0:23:30.440 significant change, occurring on both sides of the High Plains 0:23:30.640 --> 0:23:35.320 began to create a new set of human possibilities. Crop 0:23:35.440 --> 0:23:39.760 growing as a brand new LifeWay, diffused northward from its 0:23:39.800 --> 0:23:43.439 invention in Mexico to groups like the Mugga Yawn and 0:23:43.520 --> 0:23:47.040 the Anasazi of the desert southwest, and to the mound 0:23:47.119 --> 0:23:53.040 building Mississippian cultures of the Mississippi Valley. When farming societies 0:23:53.080 --> 0:23:56.760 developed on either side of the High Plains. The opportunity 0:23:56.800 --> 0:24:00.480 to create new kinds of local places was under way 0:24:01.560 --> 0:24:04.600 in president New Mexico, just west of the High Plains, 0:24:04.920 --> 0:24:10.520 corn growing, pottery making, pueblo building societies of great sophistication 0:24:10.920 --> 0:24:15.479 and far reaching trade networks emerged to cast spheres of 0:24:15.640 --> 0:24:20.040 influence onto the plains. Only a few hundred years later, 0:24:20.520 --> 0:24:25.520 agricultural village dwelling Mississippian peoples Caddo and speakers in what 0:24:25.680 --> 0:24:31.080 is now East Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana also established vibrant 0:24:31.119 --> 0:24:34.199 societies that began to push up the rivers towards the 0:24:34.240 --> 0:24:38.480 High Plains, looking for trading partners. That trade took on 0:24:38.880 --> 0:24:43.400 a tantalizing form. What High Plains people had in profusion 0:24:43.680 --> 0:24:47.200 were the products of the bison hunt. They had maroon 0:24:47.359 --> 0:24:51.639 and blue striped flints from a famous quarry called Alibates, 0:24:52.160 --> 0:24:57.639 beautifully tanned robes, and especially dried protein in abundance. What 0:24:57.760 --> 0:25:01.679 they had always had in ins dificient supply of was 0:25:01.720 --> 0:25:06.760 a source of carbohydrates. With agricultural people not far away, 0:25:07.040 --> 0:25:11.800 both hunters and farmers could overcome their dietary bottlenecks. A 0:25:11.840 --> 0:25:16.840 form of mutualism for all groups involved luxury and status. 0:25:16.880 --> 0:25:21.560 Goods like turquoise from the Pueblo mines lubricated that exchange. 0:25:21.640 --> 0:25:25.359 While these trade items would change over time, immersion into 0:25:25.480 --> 0:25:30.080 far flung regional trade networks was a new possibility that 0:25:30.400 --> 0:25:36.679 didn't depend on one's local resources to create place with 0:25:36.800 --> 0:25:41.000 a more imaginative take on the possibilities now high planes, 0:25:41.040 --> 0:25:46.760 people pursued life ways of increasing complexity between twelve hundred 0:25:46.800 --> 0:25:50.480 and fifteen hundred. In fact, a famous experiment on the 0:25:50.520 --> 0:25:54.320 high planes involved a group called the Antelope Creek people, 0:25:54.760 --> 0:25:59.080 who tried agricultural towns far out in the heart of 0:25:59.119 --> 0:26:04.080 the high planes along the Canadian and Republican rivers. Antelope 0:26:04.119 --> 0:26:09.080 Creek crops, points, pottery, and tools came from both the 0:26:09.119 --> 0:26:14.480 Eastern and the Western farming traditions. Rather than the hide 0:26:14.520 --> 0:26:18.640 tepees of the buffalo hunters, these people built rock slab 0:26:18.800 --> 0:26:24.480 houses of multiple rooms, including one built Acoma style on 0:26:24.600 --> 0:26:29.560 the top of a butte now called landergen Mesa. The 0:26:29.680 --> 0:26:33.040 architecture seemed to be based on the Pueblo model from 0:26:33.119 --> 0:26:37.560 two hundred and fifty miles farther west. Ideas from multiple 0:26:37.640 --> 0:26:40.680 cultures had made the act of creating place on the 0:26:40.760 --> 0:26:47.080 high plains more imaginative than it had ever been. Crop growing, though, 0:26:47.240 --> 0:26:51.680 is a strategy to extract solar energy directly, but plants 0:26:51.800 --> 0:26:56.040 need moisture too, and the Antelope Creek people ultimately couldn't 0:26:56.080 --> 0:26:59.560 sustain farming on the high plains with the moisture that 0:26:59.600 --> 0:27:03.679 fell from the sky. Drought finally caused them to abandon 0:27:03.920 --> 0:27:08.280 their experiment. Other groups Catto and speakers like the Wichitas 0:27:08.359 --> 0:27:11.720 and Pawnees and sue and speakers like the O Sages 0:27:11.760 --> 0:27:15.640 and Mandans, would later push farming villages part way up 0:27:15.720 --> 0:27:19.320 the plains rivers, but it required a new technology in 0:27:19.359 --> 0:27:23.720 the twentieth century before anyone else would try to create 0:27:23.880 --> 0:27:27.560 farming places as far out on the high plains as 0:27:27.600 --> 0:27:33.720 the Antelope Creek people had six hundred years earlier. When 0:27:33.880 --> 0:27:38.000 Old worlders arrived on the scene and founded places like 0:27:38.119 --> 0:27:43.200 Santa Fe, Nacotish, New Orleans, and Saint Louis, radically new 0:27:43.320 --> 0:27:49.240 possibilities opened up on the high plains. Two developments, domesticated 0:27:49.280 --> 0:27:53.280 animals from Europe and the bottomless trade lusts of a 0:27:53.320 --> 0:27:59.720 truly global market, created dramatic new possibilities out on the grasslands. 0:28:00.920 --> 0:28:03.960 One of the animals was an old American native. The 0:28:04.080 --> 0:28:09.480 horse returned to America, it underwent a stunning ecological release. 0:28:09.840 --> 0:28:13.920 It took less than a century for new dominant horse riders, 0:28:14.280 --> 0:28:19.560 the Comanches, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas to merge this animal 0:28:19.880 --> 0:28:24.119 with the bison of antiquity to create a new LifeWay 0:28:24.440 --> 0:28:27.639 and a new place in the global market. Trade economy 0:28:27.880 --> 0:28:32.480 for the high planes horse and bison more than doubled 0:28:32.720 --> 0:28:36.880 the human capture of solar energy streaming into the grasslands. 0:28:37.640 --> 0:28:41.680 These horse riders built on old trade networks to exchange 0:28:41.720 --> 0:28:45.920 bison products, both for crops from farmers and now for 0:28:46.120 --> 0:28:51.920 European industrial goods. But the Comanches at least still saw 0:28:52.160 --> 0:28:56.840 the solar connection. They made the sun their primary object 0:28:56.960 --> 0:29:01.040 of religious veneration, and visitors to their vi villa said 0:29:01.040 --> 0:29:04.840 that in the mornings, the Comanches would hang their shields 0:29:04.880 --> 0:29:08.280 in full view of the sun and rotate them throughout 0:29:08.320 --> 0:29:13.600 the day like a field of leather sunflowers, absorbing sun power. 0:29:15.360 --> 0:29:18.920 Of course, high plane settlement and the creation of place 0:29:19.240 --> 0:29:22.880 didn't end here. The people who now came to the 0:29:22.920 --> 0:29:27.720 region had old World cultures that benefited from ideas and 0:29:27.840 --> 0:29:33.000 technology from across the globe, bison and even grass would 0:29:33.000 --> 0:29:38.280 not survive them. Once their global market economy entirely obliterated 0:29:38.360 --> 0:29:42.120 bison for a period of well over a decade, new 0:29:42.200 --> 0:29:47.520 Mexicans from west to the Plains directed new grazing animals, 0:29:47.880 --> 0:29:52.240 in their case enormous flocks of sheep, onto the now 0:29:52.320 --> 0:29:58.080 strangely silent high planes grasslands. This Old World animal introduction 0:29:58.560 --> 0:30:02.920 began the alteration of high plains ecology by weakening the 0:30:02.960 --> 0:30:09.600 grass cover and introducing invasive weed species like tumbleweeds. Then 0:30:09.800 --> 0:30:13.920 Texans and other Americans from Old World backgrounds poured in 0:30:14.000 --> 0:30:17.960