The Llanos de Hiray are the vast flat plains that run east of Magdalena Bay. They are sprinkled with small seasonal pond sites which may have drawn the early inhabitants of Baja California for a very long time, and not so long ago they contained numerous artifacts in the form of manos, metates, arrowheads, etc., left by these early hunter-gatherers. Tourists, however, with offroad vehicles, have rather systematically hauled off large quantities of these artifacts. This is a pity because with their disappearance we lose one of the ways in which we could learn something about the ancient peoples who made use of this area.

So Baja travelers, please don’t just keep your arrowheads in a jar, or turn your metates into a planter, but let us know what you have found there, and send us pictures of these items, and thus you can add to our knowledge of these early inhabitants of Baja California.

Fragmentary artifacts left in the Llanos de Hiray