Pendejo Cave, a small archaeological site in southern New Mexico near Orogrande, became important in debates over the earliest human presence in the Americas. Discovered in 1978 and excavated beginning in 1990 under Richard S. MacNeish, it yielded Clovis-era tools from around 11,000 BCE as well as later Native artifacts. MacNeish also argued that three deeper pre-Clovis strata contained 111 chipped tools and evidence of much earlier occupation, possibly tens of thousands of years older. Many archaeologists later disputed those earliest dates and questioned whether some objects were human-made, but the site remained central to arguments over when people first reached the American Southwest and the Americas.