After the extinction of large game animals, some hunters began to concentrate on bison in the huge herds that grazed the plains stretching hundreds of miles east of the Rocky Mountains. For almost a thousand years after the big-game extinctions, Archaic Indians hunted bison with Folsom points, named after a site near Folsom, New Mexico. In 1908, George McJunkin, an African American cowboy, discovered this site, which contained a deposit of large fossilized bones. In 1926, archaeologists excavated this site and found evidence that proved conclusively for the first time that ancient Americans were contemporaries of giant bison—which were known to have been extinct for at least ten thousand years. One Folsom point remained stuck between two ribs of a giant bison, where a Stone Age hunter had plunged it more than ten thousand years earlier. Until this discovery, leading experts had believed that ancient Americans had arrived in the New World fairly recently, some three thousand years ago. Since the 1920s, thanks to McJunkin’s discovery, archaeologists and historians have come to understand that the history of ancient Americans was far more ancient than experts previously imagined.

Like their nomadic predecessors, Folsom hunters moved constantly to maintain contact with their prey. Great Plains hunters often stampeded bison herds over cliffs and then slaughtered the animals that plunged to their deaths. At the Folsom site McJunkin discovered, hunters drove bison into a narrow gulch and then speared twenty-three of the trapped animals.

Bows and arrows reached Great Plains hunters from the north about AD 500. They largely replaced spears, which had been the hunters’ weapons of choice for millennia. Bows permitted hunters to wound animals from farther away, arrows made it possible to shoot repeatedly, and arrowheads were easier to make and therefore less costly to lose than the larger, heavier spear points. These new weapons did not otherwise alter age-old ways of hunting. Although we often imagine bison hunters on horseback, in reality ancient Great Plains people hunted on foot. Horses did not arrive on the Great Plains until decades after 1492, when Europeans imported them. Only then did Great Plains bison hunters obtain horses and become expert riders.