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Texas Archaeology: Early Humans in Texas (October 1, 2004, One)

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Program Summary

What do you picture when you think of Texas? Cattle, oil, empty prairie? Scratch below the surface and you’ll find that those prairies are far from empty, pardner. In hundreds of sites all over the state are buried the remains of the earliest humans in the New World. Two of Ira’s guests have been studying the remains to develop theories that fly in the face of traditional archeology.

For the past 72 years, it has been accepted that the first humans in America were the Clovis people, named after the place where their artifacts were first discovered. They were thought to have walked over a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska about 12,000 years ago, slowly spreading over the continent and into South America. Archaeological evidence of humans that dates back to 12,500 has been found in Chile, while a Clovis site in Texas reveals a culture far too complex to be a founding one, suggesting that Clovis culture developed from an earlier people.

Texas digs have also thrown new light onto what we know about man’s transition from the paleo period into the archaic period. The Gault project is the excavation of a Clovis culture site that was continually occupied for 11,000 years; artifacts found there have provided insight into how early North American man adapted over time to changes in the environment, such as the end of the Ice Age and the resulting disappearance of large land mammals.

Guests

James E. Bruseth, director of the Archaeology Division of the Texas Historical Commission in Austin

Steve A. Tomka, director of the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas in San Antonio

Michael Collins, research associate in the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas in Austin

Britt Bousman, director of the Center for Archaeological Studies at Texas State University in San Marcos

Related Links and Resources

Archaeology Magazine
Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum
Nautical Archaeology Program, Texas A & M University: Conservation Research Laboratory
Texas Archaeology
Texas Beyond History: Uncovering Our Cultural Heritage
University of Texas at Austin: Texas Archeological Research Laboratory
University of Texas at San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research

For Discussion:

• Why do you think Texas has so many archaeological and paleontological sites?

• What is the commonly believed theory of how humans entered North America?

• Why do some scientists think that humans came to North America before 12,000 BC? What evidence has been found to support this theory? Why is it so controversial?

• What is the Clovis culture? What is significant about it?

• What has the Gault site shown us about how early American humans adapted to change?

Activities

Early birds. Find out more about the controversy over the evidence for pre-Clovis humans in the Americas at Signs of an Earlier American (Christian Science Monitor), The First American (On Science), and The Peopling of the American Continents (Cogweb). Invite an anthropologist to your classroom to discuss theories and cultures of early American man.

Facts and artifacts. Texas Beyond History is an on-going Web project that plans to cover the wide scope of Texas pre-history, history, and cultures. The TBH Kids section is wonderful, with plenty of fun stuff, interactives, illustrations, and Ask Dr. Dirt, where an armadillo answers students’ questions about archaeology. The Lesson Plans page provides a variety of interdisciplinary units. While centered on Texas, they can easily be adapted for lessons on local cultures.

A mammoth undertaking. Explorations Through Time, from the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology, is a series of Web-based, interactive modules that use paleontology and geology to trace Earth’s history. Each module has lesson plans, activities, and a teacher guide. More activities and suggestions for using paleontology in the classroom, including how to create a paleontology teaching collection, can be found at Learning from the Fossil Record.

Down and dirty. Archaeology isn’t an Indiana Jones movie. It’s a lot of hard work and dirt, as shown at Indiana Jones Meets Reality. This excellent explains what archaeology is and has numerous video clips to illustrate their points. Find out what life is really like for paleontologists in the field at Going Gobi: The Hunt for Fossils in Mongolia (American Museum of Natural History). The hour-by-hour diary is particularly fun.

Free fun. Many archaeological projects welcome volunteers, both adult and child, and will give you the training you need to perform basic tasks. Find out if there’s a site in your area where your students can get volunteer experience.

Use the search box below to perform a Google search within any of the specifc sites or general domains mentioned in this Activities section.

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