DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Adair-Steadman Site, out here in Fisher County. Now, most roadside stories I tell you start maybe a couple hundred years back — a battle, a town founder, a railroad coming through. But every once in a while, we pull over for something that makes all of that feel like it happened yesterday.
This is one of those stops. Somewhere in this vicinity, not far from the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, people lived. And I do mean people — human beings, making decisions, building fires, shaping stone with their own hands.
They were here between nine and eleven thousand years ago. Let that sit for a second while the wind blows. The site itself wasn't known to the modern world until 1969, when it was discovered right here near the Clear Fork.
Archeologists took notice, and they didn't just glance around and move on. They conducted extensive scientific excavations. What they found pointed — almost all of it — to the Paleo-Indian Period, and specifically to a culture known as the Folsom culture.
Now the Folsom culture is distinctive. That's not my word — that's the marker's word, and it earns it. The people who camped here were makers of fluted points.
Fluted points. That means they were knapping stone into projectile points and then carefully, deliberately, removing a channel flake right down the face of the point — a technique that takes skill and patience and probably more than a few do-overs. The evidence of all that work turned up in the excavations: fluted point fragments, point preforms — those are the works-in-progress — channel flakes, scrapers, gravers, and large bifaces.
They chose this spot for good reasons. There was water here during their time of occupation. And nearby, there was a large stone resource area — raw material for all that careful, skilled toolmaking.
These weren't people stumbling around. They were reading the land, and they liked what they read. Archeologists call this a large base campsite, not just a place someone passed through.
People were staying. They were set up here along the Clear Fork, working stone, living the Folsom life — whatever that looked like in full, we're still piecing together. And that's the thing about the Adair-Steadman Site that gives it its real weight.
The marker tells us that future archeological, geological, and paleontological studies may yield enough data to reconstruct what this place actually looked like during its period of occupation. The story isn't finished being told. Every layer of earth here is a page that hasn't been fully read yet.
What has been read is already remarkable. This is considered one of the most significant locations of Folsom artifacts in all of North America. Not just Texas — not just the nation — the entire continent.
The marker says so, plain as day. And it's protected now, by federal and state antiquities laws, so it stays that way. So here we are, rollin' past a patch of Fisher County that looks like a lot of other Fisher County — and underneath it, reaching back nine to eleven thousand years, is one of the most important human stories on this whole continent.
Discovered in 1969, studied with care, and still yielding its secrets. Some places earn their marker. This one earned it about ten thousand years before anybody thought to put one up.
What the marker says
In this vicinity is a prehistoric archeological site discovered in 1969 near the Clear Fork of the Brazos River. Archeologists have conducted extensive scientific excavations and attribute most of the cultural materials to the Paleo-Indian Period. The Adair-Steadman Site was a large base campsite for makers of fluted points, who were part of the distinctive Folsom culture between nine and eleven thousand years ago. Prehistoric peoples chose to live here because of the availability of water at the time of occupation and the presence of a large stone resource area nearby. Stone tools and other material recovered include fluted point fragments, point preforms, channel flakes, scrapers, gravers, and large bifaces. Future archeological, geological, and paleontological studies of the site may yield sufficient data to reconstruct the physical appearance of the site during its period of occupation. One of the most significant locations of Folsom artifacts in North America, the Adair-Steadman Site is important as a valuable source of information on the prehistory of the state, the nation, and the entire continent. It is protected from disturbance by federal and state antiquities laws. (1984)