DUANE
Duane's take
Now, what I'm about to tell you comes straight off the official marker for Loma Sandia Prehistoric Cemetery, right here in Live Oak County — this is my telling of it. Before any European ever set foot on the southern Texas and northern Mexican gulf coast, there were people here. Hunter-gatherers, moving with the land, living by the spear.
And deep in the soil of this very vicinity, they left something behind — not monuments, not written records, but graves. Quiet, patient graves, waiting in two separate layers of earth for someone to finally come looking. In 1973, Texas Highway Department archeologists started looking.
What they found when they started excavating those burial grounds was a story told in two chapters, stacked one on top of the other. The older layer reaches back to the middle archaic period — around 850 B.C. The upper level dates to the late archaic, around 250 B.C.
Two distinct eras, two separate strata of soil, and yet the story they tell is remarkably consistent. The artifacts reveal that the same hunting-gathering culture endured across both periods, the same way of life passed down through generations without much persuasion to change it. And why would you change it, really?
These were people who hunted deer and bison with spears tipped with dart points. They knew this land. About two hundred graves held personal possessions — tools for sewing, tools for cooking, shell ornaments, red and yellow pigment, ocher stains.
The kinds of things you'd want close to you. A few of the graves — those containing adult males — had something a little more striking: white-tailed deer antler racks, affixed right there with the remains. The marker tells us that indicates those individuals held high social status.
Not every man got the antlers. Not every man earned them. And these weren't isolated people, either.
Among the artifacts were trade items — projectile points, shell beads — evidence that these groups were exchanging goods with coastal groups and interior groups both. They had connections. They had relationships that stretched well beyond this patch of ground.
Now here's a detail that stops you cold if you let it sink in. The forensic evidence suggests that only thirteen males and four females may have lived past the age of forty. Thirteen and four.
In two hundred graves. This was not an easy life, however well they had adapted to it. Life on the southern Texas gulf coast, thousands of years before the word Texas existed, was short, and the ground here holds the proof of it.
The Loma Sandia excavation project drew scholars from across the world to wrestle with that proof. Texas A&M, the University of Texas at Austin and San Antonio, Texas Tech — and, remarkably, Adam Mickiewicz University of Poland. The Texas Department of Transportation brought them all in, because what was buried here deserved that kind of attention.
Two thousand years before the first chapter of recorded Texas history, people lived here, hunted here, traded here, buried their dead with care and meaning here. And then the soil closed over them, and the centuries moved on. It took a highway department and a team of scientists from four universities and one country away to finally hear what the ground was trying to say.
Turns out it had quite a bit to say.
What the marker says
Native American bands that inhabited the southern Texas and northern Mexican gulf coast before European colonization were hunter-gatherers. In this vicinity starting in 1973, Texas Highway Department (later Texas Department of Transportation) archeologists excavated burial grounds of Native Americans in two separate soil strata. The older graves date from the middle archaic period (around 850 B.C.), while the upper level dates from the late archaic (around 250 B.C.). Artifacts reveal that the hunting-gathering culture endured over the two periods, with reliance on the use of spears tipped with dart points to hunt large game such as deer and bison. About 200 graves contained personal possessions such as tools for sewing and cooking, shell ornaments and red and yellow pigment and ocher stains. A few graves containing the remains of adult males had white-tailed deer antler racks affixed to them, indicating the individuals held high social status. Trade items such as projectile points and shell beads indicate that the groups engaged in the exchange of goods with coastal and interior groups. The forensic evidence suggests that only thirteen males and four females may have lived past the age of forty. Scientists and scholars from various universities (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poland, Texas A&M, University of Texas at Austin and San Antonio, and Texas Tech) assisted the Texas Department of Transportation in the Loma Sandia excavation project. (2012)