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

Submitted by bat400 on Saturday, 19 June 2010  Page Views: 24997

Multi-periodSite Name: Gault Site Alternative Name: Buttermilk Creek
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 37.019 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: The Southwest 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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Roseate Skimmer
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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 Scho

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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 s

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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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