Tuesday, February 22, 2000

Excavation of Karankawa site is planned

How you can learn more For more information about the archaeological summer field school, call Bob Drolet after March 1 at 883-2862.

NEW information about the history of human occupation in the Coastal Bend could come out of a collaboration between Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History.
   Beginning June 5, students enrolled in the university's first archaeological summer field school will begin excavation of a site on the James McGloin homestead near the town of Old San Patricio along the Nueces River. The homestead, a designated state landmark today owned by the Corpus Christi Area Heritage Society and managed by Geraldine McGloin, once belonged to James McGloin, who together with John McMullen founded Old San Patricio in 1829.
   Although McGloin had alluded to Karankawan encounters in his papers, evidence of their settlements on the site did not surface until 1985 when a team of archaeologists looking for artifacts pertaining to McGloin's settlers unearthed Karankawan artifacts. The collaboration between the museum and the university will allow museum archaeologist Robert P. Drolet to pick up the trail of this old Karankawan territory and uncover other as-of-yet-unknown Native American settlements in the region.
   "Up until now most of the Karankawan archaeological sites have been shoreline sites with a few exceptions," said Drolet, who specializes in American Indians.
   "But we don't know much about what their interior life was like. Part of the field school objective is to excavate these sites and determine what their settlements looked like, what they ate, how many inhabited them, and ultimately better understand the relationship between them and the newly arrived settlers."
   For now, the field school's goals are twofold, Drolet said.
   "The research goal is to document the distribution and density of Native American settlements along a principal river in South Texas, which has never been done before, while the educational goal would be to train university students in the methods and techniques used in archaeology and anthropology."
   The field school will be limited to 15 students for the first six-week summer course. Youth groups, Scouts and gifted and talented students also will be welcome for one-day or one-week participation.
   Drolet expects the archaeological field school to be an annual summer course. And what will begin with intensive investigation of sites up and down the Nueces River will eventually lead to excavation work along other rivers, such as the San Antonio and Guadalupe rivers.
   There is much about the region's early human occupation that we don't know about and archaeology holds the key, Drolet said. "What we'll eventually demonstrate is that we have a cultural tradition that dates further than 150 years ago. Our history didn't begin with the establishment of Corpus Christi. It started 5,000 years ago when the early Americans colonized this area. Those were the original settlers."
  
  
 

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