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While not all of the history recounted here occurred in Lubbock, or even in Lubbock County, much of it did, and most of the events happened in locations which are easily reached using Lubbock as a staging point. Museums abound, with the Texas Tech Museum being a major point of interest, but many of the small communities near Lubbock also contain major museum collections.
Long before the first Texans, the Spanish conquistadors or their Ciboleros and Comancheros; before the Plains Indians - Kiowas, Cheyenne, Arapahos, and the fearsome Comanches, the original citizens of Lubbock camped along the Lubbock Lake site many thousand of years ago. The people of the Clovis Culture, also known as Llano, dating as far back as ten to fifteen thousand years ago, lived in New Mexico and Western Texas. They hunted gigantic mammoths, the ancestor of the elephant, and other large game such as the ground sloth, musk-ox, reindeer, elk, brown bear and primitive horses. Following the Clovis Culture came the Folsom Man about eight to ten thousand years ago. These early Indian ancestors appear to have hunted the Bison, an early cousin of the buffalo. A somewhat different culture of about the same period was the Plainview Man (7,000 - 9,000 years ago). Most of these early cultures are typed by the flint that was used for hunting. From about 5,000 BC to 1 AD was the Archaic Period, when climatic changes made some of the larger game animals extinct. The Archaic Indians, besides hunting, began to gather large quantities of berries, roots and seeds to supplement their diet. From the year 1 A.D. Indians from the eastern wooded areas came into the Texas Panhandle, bringing pottery-making and farming with them. This era, known as the Woodland Period, lasted until about 1000 A.D. The Neo Period from 1,000 A.D. to 1,450 A.D. saw the rise of the modern Indians, who planted various crops and began hunting with bows and arrows. For more information about this era, see the Lubbock Lake Site pages.