Blackwater Draw Artifacts

Blackwater Draw Artifacts Find Fitting Home During Museum Hiatus

By Rachel Forrester

With news that the Blackwater Draw Museum is moving to a newly remodeled location in ENMU’s Lea Hall, the museum off of Highway 70 closed its doors last year, leaving the museum’s ancient artifacts temporarily in the dark. Some of the items however, including the Star Trek prop spears featuring Folsomlike points have found a second home during the hiatus.

Right off the bat, you might be wondering what these Star Trek spears were doing with the ancient artifacts in the Blackwater Draw museum in the first place.

The Star Trek spears were previously on display with the age-old Folsom Points at ENMU’s Blackwater Draw museum. Their current home is at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamagordo.

Photo courtesy of the New Mexico Museum of Space History

In 1967, Dr. George Agogino, ENMU’s former Paleo-Indian Institute Director saw a resemblance between the spear points being used in the 1967 Star Trek episode “The Galileo Seven” and Folsom points, which were discovered in New Mexico in the late 1920s. In the episode, spears with points that resembled the ancient hunting tools were being thrown by creatures at Spock and his crew after they had crash-landed on a hostile planet.

An avid fan before the series gained today’s popularity, Dr. Agogino wrote the show’s producers to see if they would donate the props for display at the newly-built Blackwater Draw Museum. One of the producers wrote back, explaining that the spears were based on the Folsom points, but they had taken some “dramatic license” by enlarging them to 15 feet long.

George Crawford, the current director for the Blackwater Draw National Historic Landmark, reflected on Dr. Agogino’s interest in bringing the spears to the museum nearly 50 years ago.

“He was excited,” said Crawford. “He was grasping for something that would be neat to display in the museum. Something they wouldn’t have to make and that kids would enjoy.”

Nonetheless, the Star Trek spears were sent to Agogino and have been on display ever since, until this past fall when they were loaned to the New Mexico Museum of Space History for their new exhibit honoring Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry as the newest inductee into the International Space Hall of Fame.

Now in their current resting place, Sue Taylor, the curator for the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamagordo, describes how the spears help meld science fiction with science.

“It’s important because it’s not only a prop from the series, but it’s showing how, through science, we’re searching for other civilizations and hoping to learn from their tools. In this particular case they had to make some allowances for artistic endeavors, but even so the thrust of that episode is that we don’t know what we’re going to find on other planets. And that’s what the spears represent,” Taylor explained.

On loan through next summer, the spears also seem to be receiving plenty of attention from the museum’s visitors. According to Taylor, during the exhibit’s opening night “some people asked if there was anything else to see and I said ‘Did you look up?’’ And more than once that night I heard ‘Oh my god, get a load of the size of those things!’”