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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