![]() ![]() Now, the work has moved to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at UT’s J.J. The excavation area has been mapped and filled in today it looks like a grassy flood plain. For the next decade, archeologists and volunteers from around the world excavated about 3% of the site and extracted 2.6 million artifacts. “I was just flabbergasted.” Collins formed the nonprofit Gault School and donated the site to The Archaeological Conservancy. It was one of “the biggest nests of Clovis artifacts I’d ever seen,” he later recalled. In 2007, Michael Collins, a UT archeologist, used his own money to acquire the site to preserve it. This continued into the 1980s and ’90s, as a former property owner allowed people to pay $25 a day to dig up artifacts to collect or sell on the antiquities market. ![]() He also lamented the site was being “destroyed” by looters and people digging up specimens to sell. Pearce found numerous artifacts at the site and conducted field work. Named for Henry Gault, who bought the land outside Florence in 1904, the property remained in private hands until 15 years ago. ![]() The incised stones are “the oldest art in the Americas so far,” Ayala says.Īrcheologists have been studying the Gault Site for about 100 years. The artifacts uncovered at Gault indicate “many different hunter-gatherer groups, not a single group or culture,” Ayala says.Įarly artifacts also show the inhabitants incised some of their chert and limestone, scratching delicate fine lines, pyramids, and spirals. But stone tools predating the Clovis by thousands of years have also been discovered at Gault and other sites, presenting contradictions to the Clovis First theory. And they kept returning for the reliable sources of water, food, and stone.Īrcheologists believe people of the prehistoric Clovis culture occupied the Gault Site, in part because they’ve found Clovis artifacts, including distinctive fluted stone points. They also harvested chert, which they broke and chipped-in a process known as flintknapping-into sharp-edged knives, points, scrapers, and other tools. The ancient pioneers at Gault hunted and butchered birds, frogs, turtles, small mammals, bison, and mammoth. “Gault is helping archeologists understand the story of who the earliest humans were in North America, and when and why they arrived.” “It’s not a race to have the oldest thing, it’s a race to understand the human story better,” he adds. We tend to try to make them more primitive, but these were all people just like us.” “It was the right place with the right stuff. ![]() “This place was regularly occupied,” he says. The perennial springs and abundant chert in this area-known by archeologists as the Gault Site-made an ideal setting for early humans, says Clark Wernecke, a research associate with the Gault School of Archaeological Research at the University of Texas. The limestone wall is streaked by a seam of chert-a sedimentary stone used by North America’s earliest residents to make tools. 18,000 B.C.”Ī few miles away, near Williamson County’s northern border, a rocky outcrop along the clear, spring-fed pools of Buttermilk Creek reveals the reason why people have been gathering in this place for thousands of years. A water tower looms into view, announcing a town with unusually deep roots: “Florence: Est. Heading west from Georgetown, away from the crowded Interstate 35 corridor, the countryside turns green with meadows and woodlands along State Highway 195. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |