Clovis is a railroad-and-cattle town on the High Plains where eastern New Mexico runs into the Texas Panhandle. The downtown has a small, walkable cluster of 1920s and 1930s buildings that have aged into a quiet historic district; on its edge is one of the most consequential recording studios in twentieth-century American music, where Buddy Holly cut his hits. A few miles out of town are some of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas.