About twenty miles south of Clovis, on the road toward Portales, Blackwater Draw is the type-site of the Clovis culture — the people whose distinctive fluted stone spear points have been found across most of North America, dating to about 13,000 years ago. The excavation site is preserved under a metal cover with viewing platforms above the dig; an interpretive museum a few miles away on the campus of Eastern New Mexico University holds the recovered tools, bones, and a full mammoth skeleton.
The site is open seasonally and run by ENMU. It is small but substantive, and the windswept depression — once a Pleistocene spring, now a dry hollow — is a genuinely affecting place to think about deep time on the High Plains.