<< Text Pages >> Little Sotol - Ancient Village or Settlement in United States in The Southwest

Submitted by bat400 on Friday, 26 August 2011  Page Views: 5091

Multi-periodSite Name: Little Sotol
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 15.388 km away from the location you searched for.
Region: The Southwest Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Del Rio, TX  Nearest Village: Comstock, TX
Latitude: 29.817000N  Longitude: 101.284W
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
 2
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Ancient Settlement in Val Verde County, Texas.
A group of earthen ovens used to prepare plant foods, notably, Sotol, a desert shrub. The sites dates to roughly 5000BC, although current digs sponsored by Texas State University are collecting further samples for radio carbon dating.

Note: the site location given is general for the area and does not reflect the exact site.

Note: Texas State University Students Digging Into Prehistoric Food. See comment.
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"Little Sotol" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment
  
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Texas State field school seeks prehistoric nomads by bat400 on Friday, 26 August 2011
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Near the end of another brutally hot day in the desert of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, there finally was something to cheer about among the crew digging at the Little Sotol archaeological site, hidden in a far-flung corner of a ranch north of here.

For a month, students under the guidance of Texas State University archaeologist Stephen Black and his two grad students had been nosing around in a pair of holes at the bottom of Dead Man's Creek Canyon in search of food scraps in an earthen oven more than 5,000 years old.

After hours of wielding brushes, dustpans and trowels in a choreographed dance of discovery, Jacob Combs hit prehistoric pay dirt: a wafer-thin piece of charcoal, found near the Little Sotol oven.

A tiny sliver of charcoal doesn't seem like much, but in the world of archaeology, it's huge. When that piece of charcoal — possibly petrified food — is catalogued and carbon-dated, it will work in concert with other items found here, as well as finds from other sites in this region, to help fill major holes in the story of nomadic tribes in prehistoric North America.

For decades, archaeologists and tourists have come to this region, located just this side of the Trans-Pecos, to marvel at ancient paintings that dot cave walls in some of the roughest landscape in Texas.

While cave art is a breathtaking representation of early life, these scientists say Little Sotol — which gets its name from the plant most often cooked in the ovens — represents the nuts and bolts of everyday life.

“Cave art is sexy,” said Charles Koenig, a graduate student surveying the lands around the Little Sotol site. “But we're trying to see how they worked the landscape.”

Tiffany Osburn, a Texas Historical Commission archaeologist visiting Black's field school, agreed. “People tend to go for ritual and mystical stuff,” she said. “And cave art captures the imagination more than the practical domestic matters.”

The prevailing story, Black said, is that groups of hunter-gatherers roamed this landscape 7,000 years ago. They moved from canyon to canyon, seeking locations where shelter, water and food were easily accessible. When one site was depleted, they moved to the next. They cooked when they had to do so because it was labor-intensive and took a long time.

But at some point, cooked plants took over as the mainstay of their diet. And a large part of that diet was sotol, a desert shrub that grows in West Texas canyons.

The earthen ovens were rings of elaborately stacked stones. Hot stones were placed in the bottom, cooking the plant underneath layers of plants and dirt. The question, to be determined by what Black's students uncovered in a monthlong field school that ended Friday, is how often the Little Sotol oven was used, which radiocarbon dating will help pin down. One theory, Black said, holds that a major drought decimated the easily gathered berries and deer populations, which in turn forced the tribes to eat more sotol. Another holds that the population outgrew the surroundings, which also would explain more sotol cooking.

This is the life of an archaeologist, where work always is painstakingly slow, small items have large implications and success is measured in tiny increments. “The depth of prehistory and the way we have to piece it together is the only way we have to fill in the blanks in history,” said Osburn, who visited the site in mid-June. “Archaeology is incremental and cumulative.”

Little Sotol was discovered in January when the ranch owner was using a front-end loader to scoop dirt to fix potholes. After grabbing one load, he noticed a ring of black rock. He recognized the significance — black rock indicates stone that was burned — and called Black, a specialist in this region. That site was too damaged to study, but within minutes, Koenig stumbled upon Little Sotol, a ring of blackened stone, at the entrance of a low-hanging cave, on the banks of a dry creek bed.

Than

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