Sunday, August 6, 2000

Amateur's work guides expedition

While her husband, Edward, and the rest of the Knolle men tended to the Knolle Jersey Farms they successfully pioneered in the 1920s, Mary Margaret Knolle meticulously combed her family's vast ranch near Sandia.
   To the untrained eye, what she collected and annotated looked nothing more than ordinary, if jagged-edged or odd-shaped rocks. But to Mary Margaret, an archaeologist at heart, the finds were precious pieces of a puzzle scattered and buried over time.
   "She and my aunt Florence shared a love for it," recalled Mary Margaret's daughter, Louise Pettigrove. "I think the men were looking at the land more from a productive side, but they were also stewards of the land, always taking care of it. But when it came to the land's place in history, the occupation of it over time, she was the one that had a connection to it more than any of us did."
   Mary Margaret died at the age of 75 in 1996. But not even death has loosened her connection to the land. The enormous collection of arrow points, scrapers, awls, hammer stones, and dart, spear and Perdiz points that Mary Margaret left behind, coupled with her journals containing the location of her finds, today are helping advance the work of an archaeological survey in the area. The work, spearheaded by Robert P. Drolet, a Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History archaeologist, is a collaboration between Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and the museum.
   'Believer in perspective'
   That her vast assortment of points and stone tools collected through five decades is now guiding Drolet and his team to promising archaeological sites south of Lake Corpus Christi does not surprise Mary Margaret's grandson, Geordie Schimmel, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas.
   "She was an ardent believer in perspective," Schimmel said. "And in a way that is what arrow points were to her. Which is to say, she didn't live only on a dairy in the Coastal Bend, but in fields peopled by the ghosts of the Karankawa whose artifacts were testament to a radiant and wholly co-existent culture."
   A self-taught archaeologist, Mary Margaret read voluminously on the subject, consulted experts, invited knowledgeable sources to her home, and amassed her own personal library related to her interest. She not only contributed to a few published abstracts about Paleo-Indian projectile points, she wrote poetry and was a nature enthusiast.
   'Making things relevant'
   Four years after her mother's death, Pettigrove continues to find handwritten notes that Mary Margaret stuffed into every container that holds her artifacts. The notes inform examiners of what they are holding, be it a Clovis point or a fossilized mammoth molar, and when and where it was found.
   "As soon as we could walk, she had us out there looking in red ant beds . . . for Perdiz arrowheads," Schimmel said. "Her living room looked like an archaeological excavation.
   "She was a natural teacher, explaining in great detail the significance of the things we were hunting for out there and doing. She had a real gift for making things relevant."
  
  
 

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