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GONE TO ROCK AND RUIN: ALIBATES FLINT QUARRIES NATIONAL MONUMENT is a collection of brief essays on the lives and lifeways of the people who settled there about the end of the Ice Age. Each can be read alone, making it an ideal book for grandpa or teacher to share with younger people interested in prehistory and science. A deliberate effort has been made to avoid advanced scientific terminology while explaining scientific theories, such as how the people crossed water too deep to wade and too wide to jump, or the contribution of the Yellowstone Super Volcano to flint in faraway Texas.
There are two stories here. First, about 11,000 BCE, thousands of years before Stonehenge or Egyptian Pyramids, even 2,000 years before Gobleki Tepe, a group of hunters and gatherers settled in the Canadian River Valley in the Texas Panhandle. Their remarkable flint enabled them to set up a trading network over much of the western United States; both the Clovis and Folsom points are made of Alibates Flint. What did they eat and drink and wear? Did they have language? At what point did they become agriculturalists, and why did they build houses with slab-and-rubble foundations? What are cupules? Did you know a lot of people, even today, deliberately eat dirt? And why is there a Canadian River in Texas?
The second story concerns Floyd Studer, the self-educated insurance salesman who took on both Congress and the Bureau of Reclamation to get the place named Texas’ first National Monument. The struggle lasted nearly forty years, and when it was finally done, Studer laid down his trowel. He is buried beside his wife and daughters in Llano Cemetery in Amarillo. You can visit the quarry pits with the guidance of a Ranger most days, weather permitting, and the actual ruins any Saturday in October. For details, see https: //www.nps.gov/alfl.
