The Mammoth Quest: An Epic Expedition into the Past
By: Calvin Smith
After a 45-year career as a museologist, archaeologist, paleontologist and historian, Calvin B. Smith retired the first time after a 20-year tenure at Baylor University as founder and Chair of the Department of Museum Studies, Director of the Strecker Museum Complex and the Waco Mammoth Site that has recently been designated as a National Monument. Although he has written dozens of articles, monographs and chapters in texts, this is his first novel, an action adventure narrative about the first person to be transported back in time to 13,000 years ago in an attempt to discern the origin, culture and livelihood of the Clovis people who are known to have hunted and killed mammoths with stone tipped darts cast with an atlatl. In Part I, the main character encounters several bands of these early Americans and interacts with them for a year. He experiences many adventures during his journey back in time joining in hunts, including participating in a mammoth kill and is given a widow who accompanies him on the last leg of his entrada. In Part II, after much deliberation the main character decides that he should also be the one to go back to the Folsom Period, 11,500 years ago in an attempt to discover the fate of these immigrants into a new world. He decides to make a 600 mile trek from a known lithic resource, the Alibates Flint Quarry, in north Texas to the largest recorded Folsom campsite, Lindenmeier, in northern Colorado. During the second venture, he finds and lives with a small group of these people until he reenters the 21st century. The ending has a controversial encounter but one that is becoming more plausible as a result of recent archaeological research, documentation and publication.