Dan Prikryl is a visiting researcher at TARL who has conducted  extensive archeological projects across Texas. This article is part of TARL’s December 2016 newsletter. 

The Rob Roy Site, 41TV41, is a prehistoric campsite located on Lake Austin in Travis County, Texas.  A large-scale excavation project was conducted December 1938 to April 1939 by the University of Texas (UT) at Austin with funds provided by a federal agency called the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The purpose of the project was to help salvage materials from important archaeological sites that were to be inundated by the construction of a chain of reservoirs on the Colorado River known today as the Highland Lakes.

The UT-WPA excavation block extended for a length of 185 feet on the terrace edge adjacent to the river channel and the maximum width of the excavation block was 45 feet. The site was excavated by the step profile method and the maximum depth of excavations of the terraced profile was 27.5 feet below ground surface (see attached photograph). Excavation methods and data recording were crude in comparison to current standards. However, in areas where burned rock features or dense accumulations of lithic artifacts and faunal materials were present, the majority of the burned rock features and artifacts being recorded by their exact depths below a datum marker established at the top of the terrace.

A full report of the excavation project was not ever published because the WPA program was terminated about the time that the overall excavation projects on Lake Austin and Lake Travis were completed. Since August of this year, I have been studying the notes and artifacts at TARL related to the Rob Roy excavations.  My review indicates that some portions of the excavation block appear to contain stratified prehistoric deposits. In other areas of the excavation block, erosion and redeposition have led to mixing of deposits.  The Late Archaic component which contains some burned rock features, lithic tools and faunal materials has received the majority of my attention.  I hope to complete an analysis of the site materials and then publish a journal article on the Rob Roy excavation project.

Dr. Robinson is a visiting researcher at TARL who spends a good deal of time here working on various collections from around Texas. This article is from TARL’s December 2016 newsletter. 

Recent research in the TARL microscopy lab has placed a highly magnified focus on a small section of a prehistoric Caddo structure from 41LR2, the Sanders site, a mound site in the Caddo country of northeast Texas.  The material is silty clay layers of two colors which came from the West mound.

The specimen was found by Tim Perttula, Mark Walters, and Bo Nelson, archeologists with ongoing research interests in the Sanders site.  They noticed that the item was in two colors, a yellowish brown (10YR 7/4; very pale brown) of the immediate floor about one cm thick; and a darker, grayish brown (10YR 3/2; very dark grayish brown) color above the floor surface, starting about 2.3 cm thick in the specimen (this is not the full thickness of the original deposit).  The specimen has a surface with rain cracks and a clear stick impression near one edge.  This may or may not indicate a structural floor surface.

All the microscope work was accomplished in the TARL microscopy lab on the Olympus BH2 polarizing light stereoscopic microscope.  The initial examination and transect counting were made at 100X magnification.

Results

As of this writing, the microscope work has been finished except for follow-up checks as needed.  All the counts need to be added to a spreadsheet that will facilitate the making of graphs and statistical comparisons.

The analysis returned a wealth of data on the micromorphology and mineral composition of the sample.  Particles and bodies identified in the specimen include silt quartz, hematite, hornblende, micas, pyroxene, feldspar, voids, and organic materials.

Assessment

The specimen shows no petrographic difference between the materals of different colors.  The material is technically a clayey silt rather than a clay, but it is rich in additional particles and bodies.  These additional minerals and organic bodies may provide additional information on the structures in the mound.

Acknowledgements

The work reported here has been carried out entirely at the TARL microscopy laboratory, a facility that is proving flexible to address a variety of research topics.  Marilyn Shoberg of TARL manages the microscopy lab under the direction of Dr. Brian Roberts.  The outsized sample thin section was the result of customized work by National Petrographic Service of Houston, Texas.

Reference Cited

Folk, R.L.

1980          Petrology of Sedimentary Rocks.  Hemphill Publishing Company.  Austin.

Judith Finger is a visiting researcher at TARL studying Southwestern basketry from the prehistoric and historic periods. This article is part of TARL’s December 2016 newsletter.

In October, 2016, I visited TARL to study baskets in the Paul T. Seashore Collection of Native American baskets. The baskets, most dating to the early 1900s were donated to the Texas Memorial Museum in 1950. The Collection includes baskets from many California, Southwest, and Northwest Coast tribal groups as well as other less well known groups. There are traditional, utilitarian baskets, made for the Indians’ own use in addition to fancier, made-for-market ones, those to be sold to tourists and collectors as the Native Americans became part of the dominant Anglo cash economy.

For the past ten years, Dr. Catherine Fowler, Professor Emerita of the University of Nevada, Reno, and I have been researching the baskets collected by Helen J. Stewart, a pioneer rancher in Las Vegas, Nevada. She amassed a collection of 550 baskets, focusing on baskets woven by neighboring Southern Paiute and Nevada Shoshone women.  The informative TMM publication on the Seashore Collection, which we came across during our research, contained four baskets that we were able to identify as being from the Stewart Collection based on historic photographs of the Collection.

Thanks to the cooperation and assistance of Marybeth Tomka and Lauren Bussiere, I was able to spend time with the Seashore Collection and examine the four baskets, and several others I requested, with my own eyes and hands, to identify materials and get a better sense of construction techniques and design layouts. While I hoped to find detailed collection history in the accession file, beyond a typed list of the collection objects, there was not much else. However, information on this inventory did provide important historical context for some of the other baskets, such as a Hopi coiled plaque, woven on Second Mesa, and collected by Paul Seashore. The large plaque with a geometric design originally came from the collection of Heinrich (Henry) Voth, a Mennonite missionary and minister, born in Southern Russia, who lived with the Hopi in the 1890s. This basket was dated to the late 1880s.

Discussions with the TARL staff alerted me to the fact that there might well be additional files still in storage due to the move of the baskets from the Texas Memorial Museum to TARL about 10 years ago. As we continue our research and the TARL staff works through the containers still in storage, better, more detailed information may be discovered. In the meantime, Dr. Fowler and I are still looking at museum collections that include Helen Stewart’s baskets in preparation for a publication about Southern Paiute basketry and the Stewart Collection.

Chris Ringstaff is Staff Archeologist at the Texas Department of Transportation and a visiting researcher at TARL. This article is part of TARL’s December 2016 newsletter.

As part of my continuing research into lithic technology of the South Texas Archaic sponsored by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), I have been conducting a study of bifaces from the A.E. Anderson collection and Lino Site (41WB437) collections over the past few months. The A.E. Anderson collection was chosen as it provides a large multi-county sample of Lower Rio Grande stone tools and may provide insight into regional technological and raw material variability. The Lino Site was selected as it is one of few stratified archeological sites in the region and offers a glimpse into diachronic change in Archaic period stone tool technology.

This ongoing study constitutes one aspect of TxDOT’s alternative mitigation project for site 41ZP191. The collections review is largely focused on the Middle Archaic triangular tradition and consists of a metric and technological analysis of complete and use-broken specimens as well as triangular preforms and staged bifaces. The data collected will be used to compare with specimens recovered from 41ZP191 and other excavated sites from the region. In addition, data from the staged bifaces and preforms are being used as a comparative control for a recent experimental lithic study also associated with the 41ZP191 Project. The experimental study explores the use of debitage analysis to examine biface production features and estimate labor expenditure.

The collections housed at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory offer incredible research opportunities for professional archeologists, graduate and undergraduate researchers, and avocational archeologists alike. As a visiting researcher, I found the staff at TARL knowledgeable, courteous, and helpful. They not only assisted me with locating collections and provided me lab space but made me feel welcomed as a fellow colleague, my sincere thanks to you all.

Dr. Selden is a visiting researcher from the Center for Regional Heritage Research, Stephen F. Austin State University. The following article is part of TARL’s December 2016 newsletter. 

Over the course of 2016, my 3D scanners and I had the opportunity to visit the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) on two occasions. Both of those projects are focused upon collecting data for the ongoing shape analyses (geometric morphometrics) of Caddo vessels; however, I always try to scan other artifacts and specimens as they are available. Those scans rarely get the attention that they deserve, and I thought this a proper forum to engage in a short discussion regarding one of these artifacts; a large biface from the George C. Davis site (41CE19) in East Texas (Figure 1).

This specimen (4078-63) comes from Feature 134 at the Davis site, and was associated with Skeleton 5. There is something adhering to the biface; according to Shafer (1973), this may be the remains of a leather sheath. He noted that edge smoothing and some polishing occurs almost around the full perimeter of the biface, which may have resulted from being carried in (and lightly abrading against) a loose sheath of bark or leather (Shafer 1973). This material is still present on the biface, and can also be seen on several of the Gahagan bifaces from the George C. Davis site. The biface is an impressive 480 mm (48 cm) in length.

3D Puzzle

Using those data from the 3D model, the biface was made into a 3D puzzle (Figure 2); you can download the plans here. There are 37 puzzle pieces that can be cut out from five sheets of 8.5×11″ paper; thus there is no need for a 3D printer. This puzzle is a bit more challenging than the ceramic puzzles. There are 754 triangles and 380 vertices–to put that in perspective, the decimated (50%) 3D model has over 2,400,000 triangles and 1,200,000 vertices. As you build the puzzle, take some time to ponder the skill, care and craftsmanship that the original Caddo maker took to create such an incredible tool.

Contact TARL and we’d be happy to send you an interactive 3D PDF file of Figure 1, so you can see the 3D scan from all angles. For more on how to engage with a 3D PDF, visit https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/displaying-3d-models-pdfs.html.

Dr. Perttula is a visiting researcher who spends a good deal of time working with ceramics and other artifacts from TARL’s collections. The following article is part of TARL’s December 2016 newsletter. 

In addition to examining ceramic collections at TARL from Caddo sites across East Texas—including the ceramic vessels and sherds from the platform mound at the Hatchel site (41BW3) and sherds from more than 30 sites collected by Gus Arnold during his Works Progress Administration (WPA) survey of East Texas sites—I recently completed analyses of the ceramic sherd assemblage from the Harrell site (41YN1) in the upper Brazos River basin. The Harrell site was excavated by the WPA) in 1938 and 1939.

One of the characteristic material culture remains recovered from the Harrell site in WPA excavations were sherds from a number of plain (or minimally decorated) shell-tempered vessels. Shell-tempered vessels were relatively abundant in archeological deposits of Late Prehistoric age at the site, being associated with Harrell and Washita arrow points. My concern was to determine the stylistic and technological character of the ceramic sherds and other clay artifacts from the Harrell site, based on the recent reanalysis of the rehabilitated WPA collection by sherd type, temper, surface treatment, firing conditions, sherd thickness, rim and lip character, orifice diameter, and decorative elements. This information on the sherd assemblage data was employed to more completely characterize the range of ceramic wares at the site, and then compare them to other southern Plains ceramics in northern Texas and southern Oklahoma.

The assemblage includes 578 ceramic vessel sherds as well as fragments of a figurine and clay bead. The sherds are almost exclusively (96 percent) from shell-tempered vessels. There are shell-tempered, shell-hematite-tempered, thick (14-19 mm) non-tempered or bone-tempered paint cups, and other non-tempered or bone-tempered sherds not from paint cups. Most of these sherds are from plain vessels, but 7.5 percent shell or shell-hematite-tempered sherds have decorations, as do 53.3 percent paint cup sherds. The shell-tempered and shell-hematite-tempered vessel sherds have appliqued, brushed, brushed-incised, incised, punctated, incised-punctated (Figure 1), and red washed decorative elements; the latter are from thin-walled bowls, and not from paint cups. The paint cup sherds from Harrell are not corncob-impressed, the main style of paint cups in Plains Village sites in the southern Plains. The paint cup sherds from the site are the southernmost occurrence of this distinctive vessel in North Central Texas and southern and western Oklahoma, and suggests a close association between the Harrell site aboriginal occupants and Plains Village settlements on the Red River in North Central Texas and Washita phase settlements in southern and western Oklahoma (see Brooks and Drass 2005).

The Harrell site ceramic vessel sherds comprise a distinctive but far from homogenous aboriginal assemblage in the upper Brazos River basin in the Rolling Plains of North Central Texas. The detailed analysis recognized three separate ceramic wares—shell-tempered, shell-hematite-tempered, and non-tempered and bone-tempered paint cups—with their own characteristic ways in which vessels were shaped, tempered, smoothed, decorated, and fired, not just Nocona Plain vessel sherds. The paint cup sherds are the best available clue to the cultural and social relationships of the Harrell site aboriginal occupants and contemporaneous Plains Village settlements on the Red River in North Central Texas and southern and western Oklahoma and settlements in the Washita and Canadian rivers in southern and western Oklahoma.