Burnet Cave opens on a south-facing slope about twenty-six miles west of Carlsbad, New Mexico, at an elevation of 4,600 feet. Local rancher Bill Burnet showed the site to archaeologist Alden Mason's Southwestern Expedition in 1929. By then, the cave had already been ransacked. Unknown visitors had removed two stone walls that once enclosed the shelter, dug holes three feet deep, and carried off baskets, fragments of netting, hide, sandals, and beads. One basket reportedly contained charred human bones. What remained was a disturbed surface layer and whatever lay deeper, undisturbed, below it.

Professional excavation began in 1930 under E. B. Howard, working for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. The team returned in 1931 and 1932, then again in 1936 and 1937. They found three cremated burials with artifacts dating to the Basketmaker period, the Ancestral Puebloan culture that flourished in the Southwest between roughly 1500 BCE and 500 CE. But Howard kept digging. Four feet below the Basketmaker layer, he hit something far older: the Clovis horizon. The August 1931 discovery of a Clovis point in situ, associated with extinct megafauna, was revolutionary. Howard brought the point to the 1931 Pecos Conference and showed it to colleagues, including Frank H. H. Roberts. The implications were staggering: humans had been in North America far longer than anyone had assumed.

The paleontological record from Burnet Cave reads like a bestiary of the Ice Age. Archaeologists recovered bones of ancient bison, camels, horses of several species, and musk-ox. The short-faced bear, Arctodus, one of the most formidable predators of the Pleistocene, left its mark in the deposits. So did the shrub-ox, Euceratherium collinum, and a pronghorn relative called Stockoceros. Bird remains included California condors, prairie falcons, great horned owls, and an extinct species of turkey. The faunal list spans from sagebrush voles to gray wolves, from mountain cottontails to black-footed ferrets. Taken together, these fossils paint a picture of a cooler, wetter Guadalupe region, a landscape of grasslands and mixed forests far different from the Chihuahuan Desert scrub that surrounds the cave today.

For two decades, Burnet Cave ranked among the most important Paleoindian sites in the Americas. Then, around 1950, it fell from favor. The problem was its complexity. A cave site with unusual fauna did not fit the emerging narrative of mammoth-hunting Clovis big-game specialists roaming the open plains. Archaeologists wanted dramatic kill sites, not stratified shelters with musk-ox and camels. Burnet Cave quietly slipped from textbooks. Yet the meticulous excavation methods used by Howard's team, including screening all dirt through quarter-inch mesh, set a standard that later excavations would follow. One member of that crew, the poet and naturalist Loren Eiseley, later wrote scathingly about his experiences in the Guadalupe heat. But the cave itself endures, a silent witness to the deep human past.

From the air, Burnet Cave is invisible, a small opening in the cliffs above Rocky Arroyo in the northern Guadalupe Mountains. The surrounding terrain is rugged limestone karst, pocked with sinkholes and cut by steep-walled canyons. Carlsbad Caverns National Park lies to the south, its famous underground chambers carved from the same Permian-age reef rock. The cave's southern exposure and elevated position, seventy feet above the canyon floor, made it an ideal shelter for both animals and humans seeking refuge from wind and weather. Today, the site is protected but rarely visited, a footnote in the larger story of the Guadalupe wilderness.