The deep deposits at the Oblate site were formed by the repeated floods of the Guadalupe River. In this 1959 photo, burned cooking rocks and other debris can be seen in the gray sediments. The black and white scale in the corner is marked in one-foot intervals, giving an idea of how deep the hand excavations went. Based on what we now know, there were probably much deeper and older artifact-bearing deposits the archeologists never reached. TARL archives.