Tuesday, July 4, 2000

Area archaeologists unearth American Indian relics to understand their culture

David Adame/Caller-Times

Will Weaver (left), Beth Moore (middle), and Jeff Snyder use a screen to help them search for American Indian artifacts at the James McGloin house near Old San Patricio. A team of archeologists is uncovering clues about early encounters between Indians and settlers.

From sunup to sundown, a team of a dozen university students and volunteers have spent the last three weeks meticulously excavating chert flakes, pottery and other early American Indian artifacts from a site along the Nueces River.
   Theirs is an ambitious plan - to unearth evidence of prehistoric Indians that will ultimately better our understanding of human occupation in the area. Among the team's most exciting finds so far is a site on Round Lake where early inland dwellers once mined a rich supply of chert, a type of rock, for the making of arrowheads, knives and other tools.
   "This is such an exciting find, a piece of the puzzle that corresponds to early Karankawan culture," said Robert P. Drolet, a Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History archaeologist. "Groups on the other side of the river appear to be their predecessors, human populations that go back 5,000 years."
   Drolet's archaeological team is surveying land from Calallen to near Lake Corpus Christi, all part of a summer field school sponsored by the museum and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Excavation of a site near the historic James McGloin homestead (McGloin was one of the town founders of San Patricio in 1829) already has yielded Indian artifacts made of glass and metal, treasures holding centuries-old clues about the first encounters between American Indians here and colonists and settlers.
   "These artifacts mark that transition, when Indians were trading for materials to replace their flint," Drolet said, "while Europeans were trading glass and metal for bison, deer meat and other resources.
   "There must have been a very positive alliance that developed early on between them. These artifacts in time will tell us much about those early relationships and how those relationships developed."
   Reconstructing that history is of particular interest to Tracy Jasman, a 28-year-old A&M-CC student on Drolet's summer archaeological team.
   "There's so much that isn't in the textbooks," said Jasman, who plans a career as a high school history teacher. "And that's exactly why I decided to do this. This is an area still so unexplored in Texas history."
   Jasman's interest, Drolet said, isn't isolated.
   "People understand that American history is important," Drolet said. "And there has been a shadow over the role that Native Americans contributed to that history. People are becoming aware of that and they are demanding that we pursue those issues."
  
  
 

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