Lewisville Prehistoric Site

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm going to give it the weight it deserves. Now, most road-trip stories start with somebody building something. This one starts the same way, but what they found while they were building it reaches back further than you might be ready for.

The year was 1950, and crews were out on the land near Lewisville, constructing a dam. Just moving earth, doing the work. And that's when it happened, a number of aboriginal artifacts came up out of the ground.

Somebody's hand, somebody's tools, somebody's fire, buried under all those years of Texas soil, just waiting. Archeologists moved in and spent the better part of five years, from 1952 all the way to 1957, carefully excavating the site before the waters of Garza-Little Elm Reservoir came up and covered everything for good. Five years, and here's what they found: twenty-one hearths.

Twenty-one separate places where someone had deliberately made fire. Along with those hearths came vegetable matter, animal bone fragments, and lignite, coal, which had been used as fuel. Now I want you to sit with that image for a moment.

Twenty-one fires. Tended by hands we'll never see, in a place that's now under a reservoir in Denton County, Texas. When the scientists ran radiocarbon dating on the organic material pulled from those hearths, the number that came back was staggering.

Approximately twelve thousand years old. Twelve thousand years. That's not history, that's deep time.

That's a different world entirely, and yet here was evidence of it, right here under North Texas. The discoveries at Lewisville didn't stand alone, either. The marker tells us they are similar in age and content to findings at the Clovis site in New Mexico, one of the most significant prehistoric sites on the continent.

Similar age, similar content. Lewisville in the same conversation as Clovis. The dam got built.

The reservoir filled. The site went under. But for those five years between 1952 and 1957, archeologists pulled back the curtain on twelve thousand years of human presence in this corner of Texas, twenty-one fires that once burned, now remembered.

What the marker says

During the construction of Lewisville Dam in 1950, a number of aboriginal artifacts were unearthed; archeologists conducted several excavations (1952-57) before the waters of Garza-Little Elm Reservoir covered the site. The excavations revealed 21 hearths, vegetable matter, animal bone fragments and lignite (coal) which was used for fuel. Scientific radiocarbon dating techniques indicate the organic material is approximately 12,000 years old. The Lewisville discoveries are similar in age and content to findings at the Clovis site in New Mexico. (1980)