How does archeological discovery happen? Excavation is the obvious answer, but it’s not the only one. As archeological techniques and perspectives evolve, artifacts collected decades ago can be as revelatory as new finds.
That’s the principle behind a new study of artifacts at Alpine’s Museum of the Big Bend. The items were collected almost a century ago. But in the coming months, they could provide fresh insights into our region’s ancient hunters.
Bryon Schroeder is the director of Alpine’s Center for Big Bend Studies.
“I want to show what I think this region shows,” Schroeder said, “which is that the stone is such an afterthought to the part that's not preserved. People have called it the ‘missing majority.’ The missing majority of the archeological record is under-theorized, and we don't know what we can do with it.”
Our view of the past is shaped by what endures, and when it comes to the deep human past, most of what endures is stone. That’s contributed to an image of prehistoric life as defined by stone tools, as the “Stone Age.”
But, as Schroeder noted, wood, fiber and bone implements were just as important in prehistory as stone – though they’ve mostly been lost to the elements. In arctic climes, climate change is revealing vivid examples of this “missing majority.” Delicate objects — from ancient textiles and arrows to animal and human remains — are being revealed by melting ice.
The desert equivalents of ice are dry caves, which preserve fragile, perishable artifacts. The Museum of the Big Bend holds a host of such objects, collected by Victor Smith. The pioneering Big Bend scientist excavated caves in Sunny Glen, near Alpine, in the early 1930s.
Smith’s Sunny Glen finds are enigmatic to the untrained eye. Some were simply identified as “sticks.”
Fortunately, Schroeder said, the Center has a staffer, Devin Pettigrew, who specializes in ancient weaponry.
“I opened the same drawers he did,” Schroeder said of Pettigrew, “and I didn't look at it and go, ‘Oh my God, look at all these bows!’ He opened it up and was like, ‘These are bow pieces!’ And I was just like, ‘Ah, it’s a bundle of sticks’ – close. And whoever saw it before me thought they were a bundle of sticks. You just don’t know.”
Pettigrew identified a range of wooden weapons, including bows, darts and straight-flying boomerangs. Through a Sul Ross State University grant, the weapons will be analyzed, to determine their ages, the types of wood used and, potentially, where the wood came from. Such analysis, which requires only a tiny fragment of each artifact, was unknown in Smith’s time.
Hunting was a mainstay of Indigenous life here for more than 10,000 years. But archeologists are only beginning to glimpse the complexity of that hunting tradition. Archaic hunters would have used different weapons for different purposes. Straight-flying boomerangs, for example, served for small animals, while hardwood darts would have been superior to stone for big game. Archaic hunters may have tended stands of choice trees, to insure the wood they needed.
The new study will help fill out the picture of ancient hunting, which the focus on stone has obscured, Schroeder said.
“It'll be part of a much bigger effort,” he said, “to show the rest of the archeological community how important and how fine-tuned and how much Indigenous knowledge there is in these parts that don't preserve.”
It’s a reminder of the importance of museums, not only in sharing the story of the past, but of opening new vistas for understanding.
