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<< Text Pages >> Gault Site - Ancient Village or Settlement in United States in Texas

Submitted by bat400 on Saturday, 19 June 2010  Page Views: 26916

Multi-periodSite Name: Gault Site Alternative Name: Buttermilk Creek
Country: United States State: Texas Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Austin, TX  Nearest Village: Killeen, TX
Latitude: 30.887000N  Longitude: 97.651W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 3
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Ancient Settlement in Bell County, Texas.
The Gault Site lies on Buttermilk Creek in central Texas. Here, some of the oldest tool finds in North America have resulted in a re-examination of the Clovis people. At Gault they appear to have settled in 10,900 - 10,550 BC instead of continually roaming as nomadic hunters.

Finds have included stone tools and the debris of flint knapping, middens full of a wide variety of animal bone, fire pits, and unique inscribed stones. Most interesting are the pre-Clovis artifacts - few in number compared to the large number of Clovis and post-Clovis.

Tool finds have been made by random collectors for years, until the most recent owners turned to the University of Texas. Since then documented digs have been run by the Texas Archaeology Research Laboratory. The site is not open to the public, but finds have been documented and published research is available. See This link to find more.

The location given is only approximate for the site.

Note: Archaeologist publishes first complete look at technology of Clovis culture. See comment.
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"Gault Site" | Login/Create an Account | 5 News and Comments
  
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Dig yields evidence of ancient Texans by bat400 on Saturday, 23 July 2011
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A local news report for the 2011 dig season at the Gault - Buttermilk Creek site. See it at http://www.wfaa.com.
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Archaeologist publishes first complete look at technology of Clovis culture by bat400 on Saturday, 19 June 2010
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Submitted by coldrum ---


A new book on the stone and bone tool technologies of Clovis culture of 13,500 years ago, published by faculty at Texas State University, is the first complete examination of the tools themselves and how the Clovis culture used them and transmitted their production.

The book, “Clovis Technology (International Monographs in Prehistory, Archaeological Series 17),” covers the Clovis culture's making and use of stone blades, bi-faces and small tools as well as artifacts such as projectile points, rods, daggers, awls, needles, handles, hooks and ornaments made from bone, ivory, antler and teeth.

It examines the tools used to make other tools, such as billets, wrenches, gravers and anvils, and explores how Clovis culture acquired and transmitted stone tool production.

It is co-authored by Texas State archaeologist Michael B. Collins, who also directs the renowned Gault archaeological site in Central Texas, the world's largest Clovis excavation.

It is estimated that more than 60 percent of known Clovis artifacts have come from the Gault site near Florence.

For more, see http://www.sanmarcosrecord.com.
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Oldest known Central Texans might teach textbook writers a thing or two by bat400 on Tuesday, 13 October 2009
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Submitted by coldrum ---

In a big white tent pitched near Buttermilk Creek, archaeologists and volunteers are on their knees, scraping away sticky black clay a few tablespoons at a time. They wash the dirt and screen it for stone shards, spearpoints and flakes from some 13,000 years ago. Little by little, those bits of stone are chipping away at long-held pictures of the earliest Americans, wiping away images that are still depicted in high school textbooks and museum dioramas.

The Gault Site is about 70 acres in a valley between Florence and Salado, about an hour from Waco. It remains unknown to many Central Texans, though it’s now open for tours and is the subject of a daylong event Thursday at McLennan Community College.

But it’s renowned among archaeologists worldwide as the continent’s biggest trove of knowledge about the Clovis people, nomadic hunters who overran the Americas some 13,500 years ago.
“It’s such a well-kept secret,” said Linda Pelon, an MCC anthropology instructor who is helping organize the Thursday event and whose students have volunteered at the site. “This is an internationally significant site that may help rewrite the story of the peopling of the Americas.”

The Gault Site is an ancient rock quarry that yielded a flintlike chert of such high quality that it’s found in Paleolithic tools and weapons throughout the Midwest. It was inhabited off and on for thousands of years, even into Spanish colonial times, archaeologists say. It was plundered by fossil hunters through most of the 20th century.

In the past two decades, the Gault Site has yielded some 600,000 Clovis-era artifacts, including etched rock plates that represent the only Paleolithic artwork yet discovered in the New World. There’s also what appears to be a square stone foundation, which might be the earliest house ruins ever found in the Americas. And there is a range of tools used for tasks such as knapping chert, butchering animals or cutting grass.

These finds are interesting in themselves, but combined with other finds at Gault, they undermine old assumptions that Clovis people were specialized mammoth hunters who swept across the New World and never stopped moving, Gault School archaeologist Michael Collins said.

“When you find a site like Gault — it’s Clovis, and the site is enormous, and the thickness of layers suggests they were there 400 years or so — you see they’re not just rapidly moving across the landscape,” Collins said. “They’re staying there for days or weeks.”

The site off Farm-to-Market Road 2843 is a green oasis, shaded by pecan and burr oak trees and centered on a spring-fed creek. Even in the Clovis age, the access to springs and a variety of food would have been attractive to settlers, said Clark Wernecke, executive director of the Gault School of Archaeological Research.

This picture of settlement conflicts with the old textbook accounts. For more than half a century after Clovis remains were first identified and named in New Mexico in the 1930s, the accepted view was that Clovis people were the first American immigrants.

According to the “Clovis First” theory, hardy tribes of Asian hunters followed big game into the Americas about 13,500 years ago, when Ice Age glaciers supposedly began to melt enough to create an ice-free corridor. The hunters then spread like wildfire across the Americas.
The Clovis First theory has been undermined in the past few decades by human artifacts dated more than 1,000 years before the supposed Clovis migration, found as farflung as Chile, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The latest evidence to debunk this theory may come from the Gault site. In the dig site now covered by the big white tent, archaeologists took a core sample in 2007 and found something startling: what appear to be manmade stone artifacts that differ from Clovis technology. That could mean Gault was inhabited some 14,500 years ago, Gault School officials said.

“That would be the nail in the coffin of Clovis First,” said Collins, the University of Texas archaeologist who has been the site’s chief excavator.


Today, the question of the first Americans is a wide-open debate, with scientists such as Collins suggesting Asian and even European colonization by boat between 15,000 and 24,000 years ago.

The Gault Site confirmed Collins’ doubts about Clovis First.
Collins’ crew identified a juvenile mammoth jaw and parts of ancient horse and bison, along with hundreds of Clovis-era stone tools and points at the same level.

“There were so many Clovis artifacts, we knew this had to be one of the major Clovis sites in the New World,” he said. “It turned out to exceed our expectations.”

From 1999 to 2002, Collins’ crew and hundreds of volunteers painstakingly excavated the site. The top layers had been disrupted, but most treasure hunters had not dug down to the Clovis level, often more than 10 feet deep.

“The guys who were collecting dug wide, shallow holes,” Wernecke said. “The smarter guys knew there were Paleoindians here, but it wasn’t worth their while to try.”

Collins tried for years to raise money to buy the land from the Lindseys but with no luck. In 2007, he gave up and bought the land with his own savings, then donated it to the nonprofit Archaeological Conservancy.

The Gault School was created in 2006 to care for and explore the site, and to educate the public about it. Wernecke said the school is hoping to raise money to build an interpretive center there. In the meantime, the Bell County Museum offers a Gault Site exhibit and coordinates with the Williamson County Museum to offer monthly tours of the site. Students and other volunteers are still needed for weekend excavations.

“Ten years from now, they’ll be able to pick up a textbook and see the Gault site, and they can say, ‘I was a part of that,’ ” Wernecke said.

For more, see Waco Tribune-Herald.
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Unearthing Texas' past and details of volunteering at the site by Andy B on Tuesday, 19 February 2008
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I'm crouched in a hole, raking a trowel over a one-meter-square patch of clay, hoping the next clump of dirt will expose something incredible, like a prehistoric arrowhead. Instead, there's just more clay, which I scrape into shavings the color of dark chocolate. A few snail shells liven up the mix, but otherwise nothing but dirt and stone.

Still, it could happen. Just a week before my visit, Ashley Lemke, a University of Texas student who also is digging today, uncovered a perfect projectile point in this same pit. So I keep toiling, sifting through the earth in one of the oldest, most important continuing archaeology sites to reveal traces of North America's earliest humans.

Work like this goes on week after week at the Gault site near Florence, where nearly 1.5 million artifacts have been uncovered since 1998. Theroughly35-acresite in an area rich with springs was first excavated in 1929. Projectile points of all sizes, stone tools and bits of chert (flintlike stone chipped off in the point-making process) are the most common finds, but mammoth bones and other ancient fossils have also turned up.

It's slow, tedious labor, but for volunteers like me — and some 4,000 of us have channeled our inner archaeologists at Gault in the past decade — it's a chance to learn more about the people who lived here 130 centuries before European explorers encountered Native American tribes.

The thermometer reads 28 degrees when we pull into the pasture above the dig site last month. My dad and his wife are volunteering too, and we walk down a slope and past a spring-fed creek to a white Quonset hut surrounded by electric wire to keep out the resident cows that graze the property under a lease agreement.

"Archaeology sites are like snowflakes — each is unique," Michael Collins, head of the Gault Project and a research associate of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas, tells us. Collins recently purchased this land with his own money and donated it to the New Mexico-based, nonprofit Archaeological Conservancy, which will preserve the site and regulate future research here. Through his work at UT, Collins will continue to lead excavations at the site.

The pasture, named for the Gault family who once farmed the land, made its debut into professional archaeology in 1929 when J.E. Pearce, founder of the UT archaeology department, excavated here. Over the years, visitors could pay a fee to dig at the farm, hauling off what they found and leaving behind shallow craters.

Today, it's considered the most prolific site of its kind. Gault has generated more than half of the excavated artifacts from the Clovis people, long considered the first human culture in America. Until recently, most archaeologists believed the Clovis came from Asia across the Bering Strait land bridge at the end of the last ice age about 13,500 years ago, walked down the ice-free corridor of Western Canada and slowly spread across the Americas.

Collins and others believe people arrived in the Americas much earlier, probably by boat along the North Atlantic and North Pacific shores. And they believe this site will help prove it. "What we're trying to do here is expand on our knowledge of the peopling of the Americas," Collins says.

Even though the Gault site was dug and looted for years, archaeologists can still learn from it. Researchers come from around the world to dig, and the artifacts they've turned up are changing what experts believe about our pre-history.

Archaeologists once thought the Clovis were strictly mammoth hunters, following their prey across the prairies. Now they believe the Clovis were more a domestic and less nomadic people who also hunted turtles, alligators, fox, opossum and bison. They lived in small foraging groups that periodically gathered at this site, attractive for its springs, available food and supply of chert to make stone tools.

While the site is known for its artifacts from the Clovis period, an early Paleoindian culture generally believed to date between 13,000 and 13,500 years ago, it's what may be buried even deeper that excites Collins and the rest of the Gault Project staff.

UT leased the site from 1998 to 2002 to conduct excavations. The water table was high at the time, and didn't drop until near the end of the dig. When a small test plot was excavated down about nine feet during those final days, it produced a sample of chert flakes — a promising sign that pre-Clovis artifacts could be uncovered. Last spring, the Gault Project returned and dug in the same vicinity, until rains stopped work. Now that the dig is resuming, Collins and other scientists are eager to see if they will find more than flakes as they lower the level of their pit. This time they'll dig until they hit solid rock, or deposits far greater in age than the likely time of human presence. They're not sure how deep that will be.

Collins holds up photos of last year's promising test dig, pointing at layers of dirt that look like layers of a cake. The disturbed soil at the top coughed up the likes of cigarette filters, gloves and beer cans. The five feet of gray clay below that dates back 9,000 to 13,000 years. That's where archaeologists found broken bits of tools and projectile points. But it's what lies lower that's most intriguing — it could hold artifacts deposited there up to 16,000 years ago, well before the time of the Clovis, who lived in most of the United States, as well as Mexico, Central America and even parts of South America.

If the archaeologists can find artifacts in that older layer of soil, it will help prove that another culture lived in this area before the Clovis. That would add ammunition to Collins' argument that humans spread out from Africa, Europe and Asia, making their way along the food-rich coastlines and into North America some 20,000 years ago.

"We had hints and wisps of pre-Clovis in several areas, but this (area) was the best expression of it," Collins says.

Our task today is to lower the floor of our plot by 10 centimeters, or about 4 inches.

We sweep the dirt and rock we scrape from the bottom of the plot into buckets, which we'll spread on a screen and hose off later. We're working in a layer that holds cultural material dating back about 9,000 years. Here lies a layer of burned rock midden. Tribes that lived here cooked their food in rock-lined ovens dug into the ground. The remains of those old ovens long ago crumbled and mixed into the dirt, and we find lots of blackened rocks to prove it.

"It's always really exciting," says Lemke, the UT student. "You sit in a classroom and read about this for four years, but this is totally different."

Indeed. I've never looked at dirt this way before.

As we dig, someone on the other side of the hole plucks a broken projectile point out of the edge of his plot. My little crew digs more furiously, hoping to make a similar discovery. A few minutes later, someone who found the point pulls out an ancient rabbit bone.

The staff is encouraging. Sometimes you don't see the artifacts until they're spread on a screen and washed out, we're reminded.

"You never know what might turn up on the screen," Collins says. "That's where we get eureka moments."

After lunch, staff paleontologist and volunteer coordinator Cinda Timperley hands us a soil color chart. We flip through pages to match the color of the soil in our pit with the samples on the pages. She jots down the information in a record book. A soil's color, along with its texture, composition and structure, help archaeologists interpret its origins, age and condition.

Then the exciting part — we haul our buckets outside the tent to sift for any finds. We top off the dirt-filled pails with water pumped from a nearby pond, then dump the contents onto a waist-high screen. I aim the hose at the screen of debris and water belches slowly out, washing away the sticky mud. Within a few minutes, I look like someone's fired a cannon full of pond s***** at me.

After 15 minutes of mud wrestling, we're left with a tray full of stones and snail shells — the payoff of a day's work. "Sometimes you look at what you find in the screen and think 'How could I have missed that?'" Timperley says.

We sort further, retrieving shapeless bits of chert and dropping them into resealable plastic bagsto be sent to the lab for closer inspection. We toss most of the limestone — except the blackened bits that could be parts of rock ovens. On this day, no carefully carved projectile points or impressively ancient bones appear.

But they are there, somewhere. Probably just a centimeter or two deeper in that hole we were digging.

Gault volunteers

To volunteer at the Gault site, contact Cinda Timperley at [email protected]. Membership in the Gault School of Archaeological Research is not required to volunteer, but members have priority. Membership is $10 for students; $45 for adults; and $65 for families. The school also needs non-monetary donations of everything from equipment to electrical work. For more information, call 471-5982.

http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/other/02/17/0217dig.html
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Peopling of the Americas by bat400 on Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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Submitted by coldrum ---

People have always been interested in the question of when American Indians first arrived in the Americas. Was it 10,000 years ago across a frozen bridge of land, or perhaps via small boats from Japan, eastern Asia, and Siberia 20,000 to 35,000 years ago?

Answers to these questions have always tended towards the frozen land bridge theory, which postulated that people first arrived in the Americas at the beginning of the Holocene epoch (12,500-9,000 calendar years before present). In the last twenty years or so, new archaeological and genetic evidence has challenged this long held theory, completely revolutionizing our understanding of when people first arrived in the Americas.

The genetic evidence has been fairly compelling, pushing back the entry of American Indians into the Americas approximately 15-20 thousand years to the late Pleistocene. The archaeological evidence, on the other hand, has been slower at revealing a human presence older than the early Holocene in either North or South America. Newly emerging information from Texas, however, is providing compelling archaeological evidence for a late Pleistocene (25,000-12,500 calendar years before present) peopling of the Americas, bringing the archaeological evidence in line with the genetic evidence.

One of the most important, and perhaps intriguing sites that have recently come to light is Gault, a large site more than 800 meters long and 200 meters across. Excavated and analyzed under the leadership of the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin, the site occupies the constricted head of a small stream valley where reliable springs flow and abundant chert of extraordinary quality crops out. Clovis technology, historically thought to be the technology used by the first American Indians, is abundantly represented at the site, with several hundred thousand pieces of stone, bone, ivory, and teeth having been found and dating to the late Pleistocene/early Holocene boundary (12,900-12,550 calendar years before present). Most artifacts recovered are debris from stone tool manufacturing processes, but a diverse array of tools occurs as well, along with bones of several kinds of animals.

Along with the Gault site, several other Clovis sites have also been found along the Balcones Ecotone in Central Texas. Each of these sites were near good springs at outcrops of abundant, high-quality chert, and were strategically situated in relation to diverse floral and faunal resources. The location of these sites, along with evidence from prey choice patterns found across the Great Plains of North America argues that the first American Indians were highly sophisticated hunters and gatherers who utilized a wide variety of resources, and who had a knowledge of the seasonal dynamics of their environment.

More importantly in terms of the peopling of the Americas, there are a few areas of the Gault site that excavations have revealed small numbers of artifacts in strata beneath well-defined layers of Clovis artifacts. It is not clear at this time whether the underlying materials are early and sparse Clovis manifestations or if they represent a human presence at the site prior to the Clovis technology time period. This evidence ... strongly argues for a late Pleistocene peopling of the Americas.



For more, see this article at American Chronicle.
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