Posted on 11/14/2004 2:33:59 PM PST by blam
5,000-Year-Old Artifacts Near Texas Coast
By LYNN BREZOSKY
The Associated Press
Saturday, November 13, 2004; 8:50 PM
HARLINGEN, Texas - Archaeologists have discovered a cache of artifacts near South Padre Island that they say could be up to 5,000 years old, potentially providing new clues about early peoples of the Texas coast.
Ricklis said the find is significant because so little is known about the ancient Rio Grande Valley. Most early manmade items would have been eroded by sand and sea air, or washed out by the ever-changing course of the waterways of the Rio Grande basin near the Mexican border.
"We don't have a chronology for the Rio Grande Delta," said Ricklis, who works for the Corpus Christi office of Coastal Environments Inc., an archaeological research company based in Baton Rouge, La. "We really have no idea of what the culture's prehistory was."
The artifacts were found in May during the environmental company's archaeological survey of the Bahia Grande, a 6,000-acre lowland between Brownsville and Port Isabel. The survey was required before the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service proceeds with plans to restore wetlands lost to the digging of the Brownsville Ship Channel during the 1930s.
Geologists say the Gulf of Mexico once reached as far west as Starr County and the Mexican state of Coahuila. Paleo-Indians - the term for ancient peoples who roamed the Southwest - may have seen the Gulf's final rise and retreat about 10,000 years ago, said Tony Zavaleta, an anthropologist at the University of Texas-Brownsville.
Ricklis said he believes the artifacts come from a later group of peoples who belonged to the archaic period, 7,500 B.C. to A.D. 750, which is characterized by grinding tools and certain types of projectile points.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Yes! The Solutreians and the same spear points as Clovis.
Ojibwa carry DNA that is only found in a minority population in Europe as I recall -- you no doubt have that information at your fingertips, blam.
Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked on the Texas coast (probably Galveston Island) in 1528 and survived to write an account of his experiences. The Indians of that era seem to have led a wretched existence and were often hungry. A couple of tribes had the custom of killing their newborn daughters, and acquiring wives by buying women from other tribes.
BTTT
Probably related to the Red-Paint-People who have recently been connected to the Scandanavian countries.
South Padre Island...Great camping on the beach! Did that last spring.
Whatever her age, Clinton would like to date her!
Lived in Texas for 20 years, went there once. I usually went east to Alabama or Florida for the beach scene, much better beaches.
"The people living in America prior to 6,000 years ago were different people than the people we (today) call American Indian/Native Americans."
Just curious but why wouldn't these Paleo-Americans be the Native-Americans (or Indians) grandparents ?
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
During my short stay in Corpus we spent a lot of time hunting small critters and fishing - found mastodons literally dripping out of river banks.
There's a lot of old stuff out there and 35 or so years ago there was darn little being done about it.
Probably same to be said about the immediate off-coast regions but they are so sandy that only sonar would work.
They were a different race of people...there may have been some 'mixing' though.
Are there any sketches or pictures of these artifacts? Some of the best points I have ever found came from up river from this spot, on the Mexican side.
Sorry, haven't seen any. Keep your eye on the Houston Chronicle for updates on this story.
Bull-headed fellow, wasn't he?
There's a fairly new Penguin edition of Alvar Nun~ez Cabeza de Vaca, Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition.
Ilan Stavans in the introduction comments that the surname, literally meaning Cow's Head, is one of the stranger surnames in literary and cultural history. Supposedly it dates back to an ancestor's exploit in 1212 at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa...the ancestor used a cow's skull to mark a path which allowed the Christian forces to escape destruction.
Stavans calls the story "probably apocryphal" since it is not recorded until much later. So the cow's head story is probably b.s.
Cabeza de Vaca seems to have been a pretty decent guy, at least in comparison to most of the early explorers of the New World.
Some people are "Ainu" retemtive.
Perhaps even you and me, huh?
. . . it was an absentee vote for Al Gore.
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