Lower Pecos Canyonlands

In the dry climate and protected rockshelters of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, everyday things are extraordinary just because they still exist today. Many, perhaps most of the region's rockshelters have been dug into by artifact collectors, treasure hunters, and vandals, wrecking most of the upper deposits where perishable items are present. Archeologists have partially excavated fewer than two dozen shelters in the area, but these have yielded very important scientific collections. Proper excavation of a rockshelter is tremendously time-consuming because there are so many fragile and informative things present in the deposits. And once the fieldwork is over, much more remains to be done. Everything important must be cleaned, catalogued, studied, identified, described, reported, and then conserved and stored for posterity. Barring the unimaginable, 100 years from now the items you see here will still be available to researchers for study.

As you look through the items here, think about the fact that in most archeological sites in Texas, only things made of stone survive. That is one reason why the surviving Lower Pecos Canyonlands rockshelter deposits and the excavated samples are so important—they preserve the details of prehistoric life that are otherwise completely lost to us. Future Texas Beyond History exhibits will take a detailed look at various types of perishable artifacts from the Lower Pecos and explain how they were made and used in the daily lives of the gathering and hunting peoples of the region.

Painted pebble from the ANRA-NPS collections at TARL.	Painted pebble from the ANRA-NPS collections at TARL.
Painted pebbles are common in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands but examples are also known from the South Texas Plains and Edwards Plateau. They are almost always made on smooth, flat, rounded pebbles that are elongated or oval in outline. Although they share some elements with pictographs, they are usually painted in black only. Archeologist Mark Parsons believes these objects represent stylized human beings (or human-like mythical beings) with the smaller, pointed ends representing the head. Most likely, these are female figures. He has defined six design styles and believes these evolved over time through a tradition that began around 8,500 years ago.
Painted pebble from the ANRA-NPS collections at TARL.	Painted pebble from the ANRA-NPS collections at TARL.

Fiber artifacts: Tough plant fibers from plants such as yucca, lechuguilla, sotol, and beargrass were used to make all sorts of everyday items. Sandals were essential in this rocky land with cactus and thorns everywhere. Woven mats were used as sleeping mats and to keep foodstuffs off the dusty cave floors. Woven baskets were used as containers. Twined cord was used for many purposes including net bags and long nets used to catch rabbits as shown in the above mural scene.

Wooden Artifacts: Although the Lower Pecos landscape is largely treeless except in draws and riverine corridors, most of the tools used in prehistory were made of wood or had substantial wooden components. Tiny wood shavings — recovered in the thousands by flotation of matrix samples from dry shelters — attest to manufacture of wooden tools in sheltered base camps, using nothing more elaborate than a sharp chert flake. There are also chopped billet sections, grooved and snapped sticks, split sticks, trimmed sections of native cane, split and sawn flower stalk sections, tenoned sticks, wooden pitch daubers, and wooden wedges (for splitting larger pieces of wood). These represent manufacturing waste or tools for making other artifacts. In addition to cutting with sharp flakes, woodworking techniques included chopping, splitting, grooving and snapping, snapping without grooving, planing, drilling, incising, abrasion, burning, and firehardening. Stone adzes and reduction of wood by adzing seem to have been quite rare.

There are extractive (or food-getting) wooden tools such as unspecialized digging sticks; hammered digging sticks (“mescal chisels”) used to sever the rootstocks of sotol, lechuguilla, or yucca plants and pry them up; rabbit sticks (including impact-split or amputated fragments); atlatl fragments (complete ones are very rare); hardwood atlatl dart foreshafts and mainshaft fragments (native cane or flower stalks); bow fragments; hardwood arrow foreshafts (often impact-splintered); arrow mainshaft fragments (made of native cane); scissors snares (made of wood and fiber cordage), and pointed sticks which could possibly represent parts of trigger assemblies for stone slab deadfalls. There were netted pack frames (conical wooden frameworks with fiber cord netting and woven backmats, rare but occasionally found in mortuary contexts) used for collecting and transporting goods. A wooden mortar and pestle found in a cave near Pandale represents a unique item. Fashioned from a section of tree trunk by charring and scraping, it contained some cactus seeds lodged in cracks in the wood. “Mescal knives,” large ovate to triangular unifacially retouched flakes used for cutting rootstocks of sotol, lechuguilla, or yucca, have occasionally been found hafted in sturdy wooden handles.

Among the wooden artifacts are also maintenance tools (fire drills and fire drill hearths, scoops, stakes, awls) as well as items that may have served social or ritual functions — musical rasps, cane flute or flageolet fragments, wooden beads, possibly wooden bullroarers, and painted sticks. Mineral pigments such as pyrolusite (black manganese dioxide), limonite (yellow hydrous iron oxide), and possibly hematite (red iron oxide) have been identified on paint sticks from the Shumla area in the Witte Museum collections. Tubes made of native cane, packed with juniper needles and scorched on the end, seem to resemble the cane tube cigarettes known from Arizona and New Mexico. Uncommon, but present, are some small items that were probably made by adults for children as devices for economic training — miniature scissors snares, bows, and conical netted pack frames, the first two presumably used by boys and the last by girls. There are also infant cradles made of wood and cordage.

Although a few wooden artifacts (like the mortar and pestle) are known to archeologists because they were cached in shelters for future use or were left as mortuary items, many more are present in sheltered base camps because they failed. Impact-shattered arrows, snapped digging sticks, smashed deadfall bait sticks, broken atlatls, and scissors snares with broken draw cords are examples. Many of these failed during field use, but were returned to base camps because they had salvageable parts or could be recycled into some other kind of artifact. Because wood is so much more impressionable than stone, many of these items have extensive usewear histories embedded on their surfaces. Digging sticks have hand polish and discoloration from use as walking sticks while traveling to forage areas. There are scars on the tip from contact with rocky soil, and “fulcrum dents” showing where the sticks were levered against rocks to pry plants out of the ground.  Impact splinters are common, and the scars left sometimes bear dirt and bits of plant tissue embedded when the stick was last used. Clues like these furnish details of prehistoric behavior that are difficult to glean from stone tools.

To see many more images of artifacts from the Amistad National Recreation Area, visit the National Park Service Museum Collections.