The Beginning

With this entry, Forgotten Albuquerque begins a trek back into prehistory. For the next several entries, the history will all be forgotten, will, in fact, be only varieties of speculation. For the next entry in particular, I wanted to start at The Beginning. But of course, there are many ”beginnings” to choose from- geologic cataclysms that no human eye ever saw, the primeval migrations of generation upon generation who kept no written record, early farmers in their pit houses, the trade routes of the Anasazi- and all of it, pre-historic, all of it forgotten. In fact, it isn’t until the province of Tiguex, whose verdant fields and cities a legion of lost and hungry Spaniards stumbled upon, that we find a beginning for what our culture considers “history”.

But we won’t begin there.

We'll begin in 1935.

In 1935, the scientific understanding of man’s beginnings in the Rio Grande valley, and indeed, the Americas as a whole, was profoundly rocked by a discovery in a dusty red hole in the cliffs of the Sandia Mountains just outside of Albuquerque, a cave only a few hundred meters deep, but which may have held the secret to a group of people who lived far earlier than any other on the North American continent.



Next: 1935