Archaeologists at Texas State field school seek out clues about prehistoric nomadic tribes.
By Roy Bragg
rbragg@express-news.netUpdated 01:22 p.m., Sunday, July 3, 2011
COMSTOCK — Near the end of another brutally hot day in the desert of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, there finally was something to cheer about among the crew digging at the Little Sotol archaeological site, hidden in a far-flung corner of a ranch north of here.
For a month, students under the guidance of Texas State University archaeologist Stephen Black and his two grad students had been nosing around in a pair of holes at the bottom of Dead Man's Creek Canyon in search of food scraps in an earthen oven more than 5,000 years old.
After seven hours of delicately wielding brushes, dustpans and trowels in a choreographed dance of discovery, Jacob Combs hit prehistoric pay dirt: a wafer-thin piece of charcoal, found near the Little Sotol oven.
A tiny sliver of charcoal doesn't seem like much, but in the world of archaeology, it's huge. When that piece of charcoal — possibly petrified food — is catalogued and carbon-dated, it will work in concert with other items found here, as well as finds from other sites in this region, to help fill major holes in the story of nomadic tribes in prehistoric North America.
Black climbed into the small, square hole — roughly a meter wide and a meter deep — with Combs and surveyed the walls. He asked Combs pointed questions about the precise moment he found the matchbook-size piece of coal. After they discussed the find, they bagged it, gingerly climbed out, gathered up their tools and knocked off 30 minutes early.
For decades, archaeologists and tourists have come to this region, located just this side of the Trans-Pecos, to marvel at ancient paintings that dot cave walls in some of the roughest landscape in Texas.
While cave art is a breathtaking representation of early life, these scientists say Little Sotol — which gets its name from the plant most often cooked in the ovens — represents the nuts and bolts of everyday life.
“Cave art is sexy,” said Charles Koenig, a graduate student surveying the lands around the Little Sotol site. “But we're trying to see how they worked the landscape.”
Tiffany Osburn, a Texas Historical Commission archaeologist who came to visit Black's field school, agreed.
“People tend to go for ritual and mystical stuff,” she said. “And cave art captures the imagination more than the practical domestic matters.”
The prevailing story, Black said, is that groups of hunter-gatherers roamed this landscape 7,000 years ago, subsisting on berries and venison. They moved from canyon to canyon, seeking locations where shelter, water and food were easily accessible. When one site was depleted, they moved to the next. They cooked when they had to do so because it was labor-intensive and took a long time.
But at some point, cooked plants took over as the mainstay of their diet. And a large part of that diet was sotol, a desert shrub that grows in West Texas canyons.
The earthen ovens were rings of elaborately stacked stones. Hot stones were placed in the bottom, cooking the plant underneath layers of plants and dirt.
The question, to be determined by what Black's students uncovered in a monthlong field school that ended Friday, is how often the Little Sotol oven was used, which radiocarbon dating will help pin down.
One theory, Black said, holds that a major drought decimated the easily gathered berries and deer populations, which in turn forced the tribes to eat more sotol. Another holds that the population outgrew the surroundings, which also would explain more sotol cooking.
And that's why finds such as Combs' piece of charcoal are important.
This is the life of an archaeologist, where work always is painstakingly slow, small items have large implications and success is measured in tiny increments.
“The depth of prehistory and the way we have to piece it together is the only way we have to fill in the blanks in history,” said Osburn, who visited the site in mid-June. “Archaeology is incremental and cumulative.”
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Archaeologists-reassemble-the-past-one-piece-of-1450799.php
