Nine-year-old Jonathan Whorton sweeps away soil erosion on the Eagle Ford Ranch during the week-long T.A.S. Field School June 13.
On the Eagle Ford Ranch, just Northwest of Medina County, between Hondo and Tarpley, Texas, in brush land country, where an endless supply of mesquite-filled scenic ridges and bluestem grass-fed plains were once roamed by Native Americans and early settlers, researchers have gathered in hopes of finding artifacts needed to tell the story of what once happened here.
This is where the Texas Archeology Society has settled in to complete their annual week-long Field School, June 12-19, where roughly 400 professionals, students, amateurs and newcomers come from all over the state and beyond to study the somewhat untouched land…
“We look for arrow heads or dart points, tools or beads, that are diagnostic and help us tell a story,” Joe Rodgers, President of the Texas Archeology Society, said. “The soil tells you different things, the plants tell you different things and the rocks tell you different things, it’s geology, zoology and anthropology, and together it’s a great collection of all the tools needed to learn.
Members of the Texas Archeology Society have been researching and documenting sites throughout Texas since its inception in the 1920s, while the Field School, led by trained professionals, allows everyone, from university professors to amateur archeologists, participate in an on-site excavation where they learn the proper hands-on procedure needed to document historic sites.
While the group will spend their evenings doing meet-and-greets, taking in nearby restaurants and nightlife, and camping under the stars at the Medina County Fairgrounds, they’ll wake in the pre-dawn hours to participate in morning digs on different sites throughout the county, searching for elusive artifacts.
“An artifact is simply something made or modified by man and sometimes you learn something by finding nothing, it means nothing happened here, but if we find a pile of burned rocks that have been used in a fire, it becomes an artifact that tells a story,” Rodgers said.
Children, ranging in age from seven to 13, participate in the dig as well, and it’s here, on the Eagle Bluff Ranch children’s site a few feet North of the main site, that after three layers of digging, complete with the toil and patience it implies, reveals a discovery substantiating the story of a Toyah occupation, a dispersed group of hunters believed to roam Texas from 1300 A.D. to 1500 A.D., once inhabiting the land.
A bison bone is uncovered, followed by the shard of a Perdiz arrowhead, used for killing the animal, and finally, a beveled knife, used for removing meat.
“They’re looking for the missing end scraper, for cleaning the hide, and pieces of pottery that would have been used in cooking the buffalo,” Doug Boyd, the Youth Program Director of the Texas Archeology Society, said.
Abby Brown, a teacher from Pawnee, Texas, and Texas Archeology Society scholarship recipient, joined the society to help preserve her Native American heritage, in which her father is an elder of the Lipan Apache, a tribe still found today throughout South central Texas and in the vicinity of the lower Rio Grande.
“It all ties back to where we come from and what we can learn because we don’t have much of a written history, and we need to preserve as much of that as possible before it’s all gone,” Brown said.
Dr. William Calvert, a semi-retired Biologist, avid tour guide and owner of the 433 acre Eagle Bluff Ranch, agrees.
“There’s a lot to be learned here,” he said. “It’s extremely important to preserve the native landscape.”
Calvert’s undeveloped land is a work in progress, complete with a motley collection of vintage 1960s Avion aluminum travel trailers lining a gravel driveway, one of which he calls home, while the main house is being built a few feet ahead, on the edge of a streaming creek.
It’s here Calvert will retire when his permanent residence is complete, and it’s here that he prefers the landscape just the way it is – untouched by urban development.
“You know, there are parts of this ranch that have been changed, even the grasses aren’t native for the most part,” Calvert said. “It’s all been changed and modified from what it used to be.”
Although it’s up to the owner to decide what happens to the artifacts collected, it’s common for them to be donated to museums and libraries, Rodgers said.
“We’re not here for anybody to make a profit off it, that would be against our ethics but if we found oil here, it’d be his oil, we just want the analysis of it and to compile records to pass along the history,” Rodgers said. “For the most part, landowners have a great respect for the history of their land and want to know what happened, and we find that universally true around the state.”
originally published in The Leader News, June 17, 2010
Incredible story