It was on the plains of West Texas and eastern New Mexico that archeologists first found evidence of the continent’s earliest people. And what they found shaped our image of those people. From Clovis to the Monahans dunes, “kill sites” testified to the hunting of big animals — mammoths, and Ice-Age bison. The “Paleoindians,” archeologists concluded, were big-game hunters, who traveled vast distances in small bands.
No “kill sites” are known in Big Bend region, which for some suggested the Ice Age Trans-Pecos was uninhabited. But Paleoindians did leave their traces here. Now, those traces are shifting our understanding of the Big Bend’s deep history, and the continent’s.
Dr. Bryon Schroeder is director of Alpine’s Center for Big Bend Studies.
“We're exporting the wrong models,” Schroeder said, “because we built this idea of what these people are. They're supposed to be highly mobile big-game hunters, and if they're not highly mobile big-game hunters, it doesn't fit with the expectations that we have for them.”
In a contribution to “Earth Ovens and Desert Lifeways,” a new volume from the University of Utah Press, Schroeder reports on surprising Big Bend archeological sites.
These sites are earth ovens, where ancient people slow-roast agaves and other succulents, transforming the otherwise inedible plants into sweet food. Agave-roasting was, and is, a touchstone of Indigenous desert traditions. But these ovens are among North America’s oldest, and they upend expectations about Paleoindian life.
The first is literally underfoot in one of Big Bend’s busiest spots. In 1992, crews were repairing a storm drain at the Chisos Basin Visitor Center, when they found the earth oven. It was reburied, but not before samples were dated. The oven was more than 10,000 years old.
Then, in 2010, O2 ranch manager Homer Mills detected charcoal along a tributary of Terlingua Creek. Multiple earth ovens were ultimately found in the area — dating from 8,500 to 10,500 years old.
Collectively, these features buck the image of Paleoindians as solely focused on big game. Even as the Ice Age drew to a close, people here knew the landscape intimately, and they’d mastered techniques for maximizing desert resources.
“And I think part of what this does,” Schroeder said, “is show that certainly by 10,500 [years ago], people are pretty comfortably using earth ovens and know exactly what to do with that technology. It’s possible that the earliest expression of human use here is people using roasting features to roast plants, and we just haven't focused on that, because that's not what we think.”
Schroeder said agave-roasting was never simply a matter of subsistence. Earth ovens were built collectively, and they produced an abundance of food. These were places of feasting.
“It's communal,” Schroeder said. “There's an aspect of community with these things which really adds a personal touch to the past. These things aren't people ‘eking it out.’ These are people getting together and creating ties, and this is not how we think about this early period at all.”
The millennia of agave-roasting along Terlingua Creek suggests this could have been a special place, where generations of people congregated and celebrated.
Big Bend probably wasn’t the only place Paleoindians were roasting plants. In their focus on spearpoints and mammoth bones, archeologists may overlooked ancient earth ovens elsewhere.
There’s more to learn about the earliest Big Bend people. Mammoth bones have been found here, and Paleoindians may have hunted those animals on the Marfa Plateau. And near Terlingua Creek, Schroeder and his colleagues recently discovered the interior space of a small structure that was occupied almost 13,000 years ago.
But the earth ovens have already broadened our view — reminding us of the unexpected complexities of the deep past.
