Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
The 1953 exhumation of the Midland Woman in the Monahans Draw sanddunes
May 21, 2008
Driving south of Midland on Midkiff Road a person can look west at the Monahans Draw crossing and see an isolated patch of unvegetated sanddunes. It is a little unusual to see unvegetated sanddunes on top of the Llano Estacado. Plenty of unvegetated sanddunes are found west of the Llano Estacado – thousands of people visit the Monahans Sanddunes State Park, and the Bureau of Land Management’s Mescalero Dunes Park between Tatum and Roswell, or go riding four-wheelers north of Kermit, or in the dunes on the road to Imperial. Vegetated sanddunes are found near many of the major draws of the Llano Estacado. The Monahans Draw sanddunes are archaeologically famous.
The partial skeleton of a woman, known as the Midland Woman, was discovered in that little patch of dunes in 1953. Fred Wendorf and E.H. Sellards studied the site in 1953 and 1954. They presented compelling evidence that the bones were at least 10,000 years old. They believed the site to be pre-Clovis (11,500 B.C.) Next to the Midland County courthouse is an historical marker that states the bones are 20,000 years old. The skeleton became one of the first well-documented Paleo-Indian human remains in North America, and was often cited in archaeological literature and textbooks. The bones are now in storage at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, according to local archaeologists Eunice Barkes and Teddy Stickney.
Vance Holliday and David Meltzer revisited the site several times from 1989 to 1992. They concluded that the remains were not older than Folsom times (9500 to 8000 B.C.) Holliday correlated the stratigraphy and the paleoenvironmental record of the entire Llano Estacado. Using this extensive review of the region, he disagreed with Wendorf and Sellards. He pointed out that the similarities in fluorine content and degree of fossilization between the Midland woman and Pleistocene animal bones found at the site were postdepositional characteristics dependent on local environmental conditions and groundwater chemistry.
Using radiocarbon dating on bone is now recognized as problematic, for bone can take up and lose uranium at varying rates. The Pleistocene animal bones found near the Midland Woman could have been redeposited at that level by erosion.
The Midland Archaeological Society’s library at the Sibley Nature Center contains both Wendorf’s and Holliday’s books. During our programs we often mention the Midland Woman and talk about Wendorf’s and Holliday’s differences. Every year visitors to the Sibley Center will wonder why the remains of the Midland Woman are not displayed in a local museum. Their usual comment is, “The bones belong here. It is part of our history. I can understand how American Indians feel about taking bones of their people far away and putting them into boxes in some dark basement.” For such a transfer to occur a coalition of UTPB representatives, museum directors, media outlets, and local politicians would have to make a concerted effort. A special climate-controlled display would have to be acquired. As a Llano Estacado chauvinist, I think it would be a good thing to happen!
A display using the Midland Woman’s remains as the central focus would be a great opportunity to create a display of the ecological history of the region. A panel of an artist’s rendition of the oak savannah of the Pleistocene with mammoths, horses, camels, short-faced bears, and other animals of the age would begin the display. Another panel depicting the 2500 year drought of the Altithermal could be next, followed by a panel depicting the buffalo prairie of 500 years ago. Historical photographs of the region would be last, with some emphasis on the 1950s drought, with its landscape of short scattered mesquite and bare soil. The final photographs would be of the landscape of today, with taller mesquites and soil covered by grasses.
Images help a person visualize the different time periods, releasing the imagination to dream about “being present in that time.” The photographs in Wendorf’s book depicting the scene near the dunes show a landscape much starker than today’s landscape. Long-time Midlanders remember the horrible dust storms of those years. Streetlights came on during the day when the thick clouds of dust rolled in. Some fence row sand dunes were deposited in just one storm.
During a presentation to a group of senior citizens one elderly gentleman asked if there was any explanation why the long drought from 1993 to 2005 did not cause such sandstorms. The answer is three-fold. First, the farmers deep plow, have conservation strips, and often leave stubble in the field. Secondly, the mesquites today are much taller and thicker than in the 1950s, so the scouring winds did not reach the surface of the ground as readily. And lastly, few ranchers derive their primary income from livestock, so the stocking rates were lowered as the drought worsened, and some landowners pulled all of their stock out of the pastures.
Wendorf’s initial studies of the Midland Woman site were conducted during the worst of the drought of the 1950s. One of the participants in the studies was geologist Glen Evans, a former assistant director of the Texas Historical Museum, and then a long-time Midland resident who played a major role in a number of studies on the Llano Estacado, including the excavation of the Odessa Meteor Crater, studies of the Lubbock Lake archaeological site, the Lexicon of the Stratigraphy of the Permian Basin, and more. The library at the Sibley Nature Center has his memoir, Vanishing Wildness.
After World War II, West Texas was blessed by the presence of many such avidly scientifically minded individuals. Another image in Wendorf’s book has men in khaki shirts and pants, fedora hats, (wearing polished shoes) and a woman in pants kneeling in the Monahans Draw sanddunes using shaker screens to sift the sand for artifacts. With just a little help, my imagination adds a big black humpback Plymouth car (without airconditioning) parked at the edge of the dunes, along with a big wicker picnic basket and metal thermos bottles of icewater.
Do you have photographs from Wendorf’s digs? We would love to add them to this essay.