Sunday, September 17, 2017

Celebrate Austin Museum Day Sunday, Sept. 17 with free admission to dozens of area museums

Sunday, Sept. 17 marks the twentieth year of Austinites celebrating Austin Museum Day with free admission to dozens of area museums. In addition, there are special activities and prizes at many of the venues. Here are our five top picks for Austin Museum Day. See a list of the rest of the participating museums here.
1. The Blanton Museum of Art on The University of Texas campus is holding multiple activities for Austin Museum Day. Besides free admission and free parking at Brazos Garage, visitors can enjoy a community art project, traditional Indian dance and storytelling, organic paletas and special sales items in the museum store. 1-5 p.m. The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Austin. 512-471-5482. www.blantonmuseum.org
2. Founded by Caleb Zammit, a lifelong toy collector and special needs teacher, the Austin Toy Museum is a nonprofit that showcases about 20,000 different toys. A number of classic arcade games and video games consoles are available for play. Noon-7 p.m. The Austin Toy Museum, 1108 E Cesar Chavez St., Austin. 512-220-9582. www.austintoymuseum.org
3. At the Bullock Texas State History Museum, native Texans and transplants alike can learn all about the heritage of the Lone Star State through the museum’s collection, such as 14,000-year-old American Indian artifacts and objects belonging to Spanish and French settlers. The museum also shows how development in Texas affected global politics and major events in American history, such as the American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase and the fight for Mexican independence from Spain. For Austin Museum Day, activities inspired by a special exhibit, Pong to Pokémon: The Evolution of Electronic Gaming, will be available. Noon-5 p.m. Bullock Texas State History Museum, 1800 Congress Ave., Austin. www.thestoryoftexas.com
4. The Elisabet Ney Museum, run by Austin’s parks and recreation department, is housed in the former studio of Ney herself, called Formosa. The nineteenth-century artist, a woman ahead of her time, painted portraits and sculpted busts of European intellectuals and kings as well as Texas heroes, many of which are still on display in the Texas Capitol. Also housed at the museum are photographs and memorabilia of Ney herself. Noon-5 p.m. The Elisabet Ney Museum, 304 E. 44th St., Austin. 512-974-1625. www.austintexas.gov/Elizabetney
5. In 1982, former first lady Lady Bird Johnson helped organize what is now known as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to protect and preserve North America’s native plants and natural landscapes. The center features public gardens, woodlands, sweeping meadows and is the site of internationally influential research. For Austin Museum Day, visitors can enjoy story time in the outdoor classroom, seed-planting demonstrations, scavenger hunts in the gardens, and see insects on display as well as take tours throughout the day, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 4801 La Crosse Ave., Austin. 512-232-0200. www.wildflower.org

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Two prehistoric Indian sites found in path of FM diversion route

By Patrick Springer on Sep 11, 2017 at 12:45 p.m.

FARGO—Two campsites used by prehistoric Indians for butchering animals lie in the path of the diversion channel designed to provide flood protection for Fargo-Moorhead.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is well aware of the sites and is hiring a firm to conduct extensive archeological studies of the locations in consultation with area American Indian tribes.
One of the sites, with a surface area of about 15 acres, is along the Sheyenne River near Argusville in northern Cass County. The other, with a surface area of about 20 acres, is along the Maple River in southern Cass County.
John Strand, a Fargo city commissioner, briefed the city's Native American Commission on the two sites. Corps representatives have been invited to present their findings to the Native American Commission in October.
The two sites don't appear to pose a threat to the $2.2 billion diversion project, Strand said.
"I think the intent is to open the communication clearly, up front," he added. Although the tribes are concerned, "I didn't get the impression it was anything like Standing Rock," a reference to massive protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in central North Dakota.
Federal law requires the corps to identify cultural sites and, when possible, to build around them. When that isn't possible, the corps is required to mitigate the loss through extensive study and documentation, including photographs.
"In the case of these two sites, they are in the path of destruction," said Susan Malin-Boyce, an archeologist for the corps in St. Paul.
About 330 sites have been identified by the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Office within the diversion project area. The route of the 36-mile diversion channel has been surveyed, but not all of the upstream staging area has been reviewed, she said.
Walking surveys along the diversion route include those by representatives of area tribes, Malin-Boyce said.
"They walked the relevant sections of the diversion channel looking for cultural properties," she said.
Consultations with both Ojibwe and Dakota-Lakota tribes from the region started in 2009, and the walking investigations were performed in 2011 by American Indians, who searched for potential burials and other sacred sites.
Archeologists have surveyed more than 26,000 acres of project land, looking for artifacts and remnants of historical buildings visible on the surface. A second phase of surveys in 2013, focusing on areas where artifacts were found, identified the two campsites, apparently used by hunting parties.

The site along the Sheyenne River, near Argusville, which has been known since 1939, has yielded thousands of bone fragments as well as arrowheads and other points made from Knife River flint, quarried from western North Dakota and traded over a vast area.
Also, three feet below the surface, it contains an area with evidence that a large mammal carcass was burned, she said.

The actual archeological sites are probably much smaller than 15 or 20 acres. Bone fragments and stone artifacts have been spread out over time by frost upheavals, animals burrowing and farming, Malin-Boyce said.
Both sites are about 2,000 years old, placing them within the Middle Woodland era, a period when seminomadic ancient Indians occupied much of the eastern United States, including the Red River Valley. The Woodland Indians can't be traced to individual contemporary tribes, but likely have descendants among many tribes today, Malin-Boyce said.
The two campsite locations, both along rivers, apparently offered advantages in hunting, primarily buffalo and deer, she said. It's likely the sites were occupied seasonally for weeks or perhaps even months at a time.

Teams of specialists will begin investigating and documenting the sites soon, with field work to be completed by Veterans Day, Malin-Boyce said. The teams will include archeologists as well as paleo ethnobotanists, ceramicists and professional photographers, she said.
Following the field work, laboratory analysis likely will take a year.
On the surface, the two campsites, long obscured by time and the elements, are unremarkable.
"They just look like fields," Malin-Boyce said. "They don't look like anything."

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

50 million artifacts from Texas’ past kept at UT lab

More than 50 million artifacts from Texas’ past kept at UT lab

Texas Archeological Research Laboratory is a museum that is not a museum at all.

Posted: 12:00 a.m. Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Highlights

The trove from the laboratory reminds us that one of Austin’s best museums is not a museum at all.

Access to more than 50 million artifacts at the research laboratory is tightly restricted.

The drawer opens wide to reveal its prize: scores of woven sandals, each hundreds of years old.
The astonishingly well-preserved shoes, tucked away in a North Austin archive, were discovered inside the Ceremonial Cave at Fort Bliss in West Texas. Scholars suggest that they were left behind in the dry rock shelter as gifts from the faithful. There, desert conditions have ensured that this Native American apparel survives to tell a concrete story about a little-known Texas past.
The leathery trove also reminds us that one of Austin’s best museums is not a museum at all.
Although the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory contains more than 50 million precious objects, access is tightly restricted. Very few people even know where on the grounds of the J.J. Pickle Research Campus this University of Texas facility is located.
Yet the public can view some of its wonders, which go back 13,000 years, on its educational websites, such as the grown-up TARL Blog and the family-friendly Texas Beyond History, or visit them in person at public venues, including the Bullock Texas State History Museum and the LBJ Presidential Library, where selections of artifacts are now on view.
One also can enjoy a selection of sumptuous images from the lab’s archive in the recently published book “The Collections: The University of Texas at Austin,” edited by Andrée Bober, or browse the free digital edition at thecollections.utexas.edu.
Additionally, the lab, which is part of UT’s College of Liberal Arts, co-hosts an onsite fair with the Texas Historical Commission during October, which is Texas Archeology Month.
“TARL is an invaluable resource that preserves the history — and prehistory — of the people of Texas,” says Drew Sitters, archaeologist with AmaTerra Environmental Inc., an Austin-based consultant. “With its wealth of data, TARL facilitates research studies to help answer the many questions about our past.”
How it began
The Pickle campus, which sits on 475 restricted acres of prairie just south of the Domain development, was a magnesium processing facility in the years leading up to and during World War II. Magnesium is used in munitions, including luminous flares, tracer rounds and incendiary devices, and as an alloy in certain bomb casings.
In 1946, UT engineers petitioned to lease it as an applied research center, and then U.S. Rep. Lyndon Baines Johnson helped the university purchase the land three years later. Among other things, it has served as a key incubator for Austin’s tech industry, one reason so many companies are located in this area north of U.S. 183, originally miles from any residential neighborhoods.
“There was a quarry right here on the grounds of the research campus,” says Jonathan Jarvis, associate director of the lab. “I suspect that Quarry Lake on Braker Lane just west of MoPac may have also been part of the operation, but I don’t have any evidence for that readily at hand. Presumably the building that currently houses TARL was used for extracting the magnesium after the initial mechanical processing of the source rock was done elsewhere on the campus.”
The lab’s collection didn’t move to this campus until the 1960s, but systematic archaeological research in Texas goes back to the 1910s, then entered a golden age in the 1930s when federal New Deal projects put crowds of men and women to work on Texas archaeology.
“It began with J.E. Pearce, a professor of anthropology here at UT,” Jarvis explains. “Professor Pearce, who was himself a former principal of Austin High School, sent a questionnaire about artifact finds to school principals throughout the state, which was the first attempt to gather what is — for lack of a better term — a database of Texas archaeology.”
Pearce’s ultimate goal was to establish a museum of Texas anthropology for the university. For some time, many artifacts were stored at UT’s Little Campus; others at the Texas Memorial Museum.
The lab has undergone permutations through the years, but since its founding in the 1960s, it become the central repository for Texas archaeology at the university, from Pearce’s day to the present.
“I would contend that there has been more than one golden age of archaeology in Texas,” Jarvis says. “During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration conducted tremendous archaeological excavations across the state under the supervision of UT archaeologists. The program put a lot of unemployed local men to work, advanced our understanding of Texas archaeology and resulted in a truly amazing collection of artifacts.”
Archaeology for what now is called “cultural resource management” purposes — in compliance with laws and regulations applying mainly to government-controlled lands like roadways and military bases — began in earnest in the 1970s, which drastically increased the number of archaeological investigations and began a shift away from archaeology being a strictly academic exercise.
“In the present day, cutting-edge technologies allow for new discoveries and provide fresh insights on the existing body of knowledge,” Jarvis says. “So, another golden age, so to speak.”
What is here
After threading through offices resembling the set of a World War II-era movie about remotely stationed scientists, the lucky visitor, accompanied by multiple guides, first encounters maps. Tens of thousands of maps shelved in horizontal files.
“TARL maintains the archaeological site records for the state of Texas,” Javis says. “There are roughly 80,000 documented archaeological sites in Texas, each of which is plotted on a 7.5-minute United States Geological Survey topographic map, meaning they each cover an area 7.5 minutes of latitude by 7.5 minutes of longitude. There are about 4,440 of those maps covering Texas; it’s a big place.”
Geography is important for archaeological research in general, Jarvis says, and specific site locations are of critical importance. Vandalism and the looting of artifacts are unfortunately common occurrences, so specific site location information is restricted by state and federal laws.
“Many of the sites in Texas are on private land, so trespassing and privacy concerns are another consideration,” Jarvis says. “In any case, we can only disclose site location information to qualified researchers with a legitimate need to know.”
Besides identifying, cataloging and making available to scholars all the artifacts — as small as minuscule pot shards — a crucial lab function is preservation. A good portion of artifacts are kept in chilly lockers not unlike those in a food warehouse.
“The materials range from exceptionally durable stone to the most delicate of perishable organic material and everything in between,” Jarvis says. “Providing the appropriate environmental conditions for a collection of that volume and diversity is indeed a challenge.”
Many of the artifacts are stone tools and the like, which can tolerate normal fluctuations in temperature and humidity.
“So, no, we don’t necessarily need to store the entire volume of material in climate-controlled museum cabinets,” Jarvis says. “The cost of doing so would be exorbitant, approaching astronomic.”
The American Indian legacy
It is hard to exaggerate the excitement and pleasure felt by a visiting history buff allowed to hold a gallon-size plastic bag full of colorful shards extracted from the site of Fort St. Louis, the ill-fated camp of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s lost party of Frenchmen in the 1680s.
The Texas Archeological Research Laboratory covers the full range of human habitation and activity in Texas, from the Paleo-Indian period — about 13,000 years ago, depending on whom you ask — to the early 20th century. Nearly all the collections are from Texas, along with a small amount of material from elsewhere around the world.
Virtually all the Texas material is American Indian, which comes with legal and theoretical challenges.
“If I had to guess, I would put it in the ballpark of 90 percent to 95 percent,” Jarvis says. “The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is the most directly applicable law in terms of collection management. Much has been written about the conflict between scientific analysis and the wishes of descendant communities. While we are a scientific research lab first and foremost, our approach is to treat objects that are sacred to Native Americans with the respect and dignity they deserve, and we try to engage tribes as partners where possible.”
Paleo-Indians, the earliest inhabitants of North America, present another nettlesome issue. Their close genetic relationship to today’s American Indians was established through improved DNA testing during a nine-year court case related to the Kennewick Man, whose remains were found near the Columbia River in Washington state. Yet some still theorize, with less convincing scientific evidence, that Paleo-Indians were instead migrants from Europe or elsewhere.
“Exactly when they arrived has not yet been entirely resolved, but there is solid evidence for their presence in Central Texas at least 11,000 years ago or so, based on radiocarbon dating from carefully excavated sites such as Wilson-Leonard,” Jarvis says. “The Wilson-Leonard burial site along Brushy Creek in Williamson County is perhaps best known for an ancient burial popularly called the Leander Lady or Leanne.”
Leanne?
“She was buried along with a sandstone tool and beneath a limestone slab,” reported Dahlia Dandashi in the American-Statesman. “It is presumed that she was around the age of 30 at her death and measured about (5 feet 3 inches) in height. … Her burial is one of the earliest and most intact uncovered sites in North America.”
Paleo-Indians were long thought of as big-game hunters who followed Pleistocene megafauna, such as woolly mammoths, across the ice age landscape, Jarvis explains. Research conducted by the lab’s archaeologists and others paints a more complex picture of their subsistence strategy and culture.
What should ordinary people do when they encounter what they think might be a remnant of an earlier time, even if not from 11,000 years ago?
“There are local archaeological societies in just about every region and major metropolitan area in Texas,” Jarvis says, “and those groups are a good place to start for anyone interested in Texas archaeology. Similarly, the Texas Archeological Society is a venerable statewide organization that promotes responsible investigation. And the Texas Historical Commission has a network of volunteer archaeological stewards who are available to assist with documenting and interpreting possible sites.”

Monday, August 28, 2017

The well-preserved remains offer a glimpse into the rapidly shifting world that surrounded Naia, a girl who died around 13,000 years ago.

Ice Age Predators Found Alongside Oldest Human in Americas

The well-preserved remains offer a glimpse into the rapidly shifting world that surrounded Naia, a girl who died around 13,000 years ago.

bigger than a modern grizzly.
Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic Creative

The skull and bones of an ancient puma lie on the floor of the flooded cave.
Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic CreativeDivers explore Hoyo Negro. The cave previously yielded the oldest and most complete skeleton of a human in the AmericaPhotograph by Paul Nicklen, NatioBy MichaPUBLISHED August 25, 2017CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADASome 13,000 years ago in what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a deep pit inside a cave became the final resting place for a menagerie of exotic animalNow, their exquisitely preserved bones, trapped for centuries under water, are offering some of the first solid clues to large Ice Age beasts were mixing and migrating between North and South America after the Isthmus of Panama connected the two contine“We’re going to go from a place with no records to having the best records for a lot of megafauna from Mexico, Central America, and northern South America,” says East Tennessee State University’s Blaine Schubert, who presented the findings this week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in CalgaryThe animal bones are also painting a more detailed picture of the strange world inhabited by Naia, an Ice Age girl found in the cave who is the oldest, most complete human skeleton yet discovered in the Americas. (See how humans first entered the Americas.

Giant Underwater Cave Was Hiding Oldest Human Skeleton in the Americas In a deep underwater cave, three divers make a stunning discovery: the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in the Americas. See the ancient remains, venture through the remarkable deep-water chamber, and see how a skeleton belonging to a teenage girl from 13,000 years ago led scientists to a major revelation about the earliest Americans.

Like the saber-toothed cats, giant sloths, and other wild creatures trapped in the cave, Naia most likely wandered in looking for fresh water and took a fatal fall into the 90-foot-deep pit. Later, rising seas brought on by melting glaciers raised the Yucatán Peninsula’s water table by hundreds of feet, flooding the caves and entombing the skeletons.

Cave divers first came across Hoyo Negro—Spanish for “black hole”—in 2007, and were stunned to find a massive water-filled chamber rife with articulated animal remains and the skeleton of Naia. Expeditions through the years have mapped at least 28 animal skeletons within the pit, only a handful of which have been fully excavated.

Carnivore Complexity

Now some of those bones have been recovered, and the latest fossil examinations are giving paleontologists crucial new insight into the Great American Interchange, a dizzying migration of ancient animals between North and South America.

After the Isthmus of Panama tectonically rose from the sea some 3 to 5 million years ago, the ecosystems that existed on the two continents—left to stew in their own evolutionary juices for tens of millions of years—were at last able to mix and mingle.

This complex exchange of life settled into the Americas’ modern ecosystems: South America gave North America armadillos, and North America gave South America llamas. But paleontologists still know very little about this massive interchange, since fossils are notoriously hard to come by in the tropical forests that cover the region.

By contrast, Hoyo Negro is a fossil bonanza. The underwater cave preserved entire animals, because the carcasses had nowhere to go, and the low-oxygen waters ensured that the remains laid undisturbed for more than ten thousand years.

Paleontologists and cave divers have found the remains of saber-toothed cats, peccaries, mountain lions, tapirs, and elephant-like animals called gomphotheres within Hoyo Negro’s depths. Some parts of the underwater cave even preserved the footprints of ancient bears, crusted over in a film of calcite.

Earlier this year, the joint U.S.-Mexico team identified a new species of ground sloth in the cave, which they named Nohochichak xibalbahkah, Mayan for “great-clawed dweller of the underworld.” (Read about another ancient sloth found elsewhere in the Yucatán.)

At the paleontology meeting, Schubert revealed that bears also entered these caves—and, in the case of Hoyo Negro, sometimes never exited. Divers have found three exquisitely preserved skulls of the extinct bear species Arctotherium wingei. A cousin of the Andean spectacled bear, the ancient species was slightly smaller than today’s grizzly bear. (Read more about its sister species—the biggest bear that ever lived.)

The skulls are so well-preserved, Schubert says, that visitors to his lab often mistake them for high-quality reconstructions. Divers also found the skull of a stocky, coyote-like canid previously only known from South America.

Together, the remains represent the first hard evidence of carnivores leaving North America for South America, diversifying into new South American species, and then returning northward—adding greater complexity to the Great American Interchange.

It’s likely that Hoyo Negro will turn up yet more surprises: Schubert recently received a National Geographic grant for further fieldwork at the site. The team hopes to collect more bones—and venture deeper into the darkness.

“When you start out with a little bit of data, it’s easy to spin a simple scenario,” says Greg McDonald, a U.S. Bureau of Land Management paleontologist and a member of the Hoyo Negro team. “We are now recognizing that it is much more complicated, and this is the real fun of paleontology.”

A diver picks up an ancient bear skull found on the floor of Hoyo Negro.
Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic Creative

Three bear skulls found in the cave belong to an extinct species of short-faced bear that would have been bigger than a modern grizzly.
Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic Creative

Carnivore Complexity

Thursday, August 10, 2017

NEW FIND

A friend of mine found this one today.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Archaeology Day coming to Serpent Mound

Features

Submitted story

Atlatl demonstrations will be given throughout the day during Archaeology Day on Aug. 19 at Serpent Mound.

Serpent Mound stands as one of the state’s most well-known examples of the prolific earthen artwork of Ohio’s ancient cultures. It is, in fact, one of the largest effigy mounds in the world. On Saturday, Aug. 19, visitors will be given an opportunity to learn about these ancient peoples and their works during Archaeology Day from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Moundbuilders of Native North America, Before the Pyramids

The earthen monuments on exhibit is a glimpse at Native American construction over the last 5,000 years

Rick Kearns • July 27, 2017

Marvels of the ancient world include the extraordinary earthen mounds built by Native people in North America. There is a new exhibition that highlights these achievements: Moundbuilders: Ancient Architects of North America opened June 24 at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. It tells part of the story of more than 5,000 years of Native American moundbuilding through photographs, archival excavation records, and more than 60 artifacts excavated at mound sites throughout the eastern United States. The exhibition runs through December 2017.
“Places don’t make it into museum exhibits as often as objects do, but Moundbuilders highlights the amazing earthen monuments constructed by Native American populations over the course of the last 5,000-plus years,” said Dr. Megan Kassabaum, Weingarten Assistant Curator for North America at the Penn Museum and an archaeologist who directs the Smith Creek Archaeological Project, curator of the exhibition.
“By opening visitors’ eyes to these incredible engineering achievements and the people who built them, the exhibit emphasizes the complexity and variation of pre-contact Native cultures across the eastern United States and ties these places, people, and practices to contemporary groups.”

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Many thousands of mounds were built across the U.S. over the last several millennia. They include the Watson Brake site in northeast Louisiana from 3500 BCE—built 1,000 years before the Great Pyramid at Giza—to Cahokia, a city of well over 10,000 people by the 1050 CE located near St. Louis, Missouri as well as the ancient mounds and complex community of Poverty Point in southern Louisiana.
The exhibition includes excavated artifacts made from a variety of materials such as a carved underwater panther boatstone believed to be used as a spear weight along with pots and pendants, some bearing sacred designs associated with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex; that site featured a system of signs and symbols shared among different groups living hundreds of miles apart ca. 1000-1500 CE.
Photos of the mounds include those of Cahokia, Poverty Point and other spots in the eastern part of the country but mainly from the Mississippi Valley.
The Cahokia site was set amid the “largest prehistoric concentration of people and monumental architecture north of Mexico,” according to Dr. Kassabaum. The entire city had approximately 120 mounds and the ceremonial core of the city spans about five square miles.
One of Cahokia’s important features is Monk’s Mound, the largest site discovered so far, which stood at 100 feet and included five separate terraces and spans across 14 acres.
The Poverty Point site consisted of one 70 feet-tall mound, four smaller mounds and six concentric earthen ridges surrounding a central open area. Artifacts collected from the site indicate the presence of skilled artisans and extensive long-distance trade extending from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Penn Museum staff reported that they are working on other Native American projects for the future

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Two prehistoric Indian sites found in path of FM diversion route

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Highlights

Monday, August 28, 2017

Ice Age Predators Found Alongside Oldest Human in Americas

The well-preserved remains offer a glimpse into the rapidly shifting world that surrounded Naia, a girl who died around 13,000 years ago.

Carnivore Complexity

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Thursday, August 10, 2017

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Archaeology Day coming to Serpent Mound

The earthen monuments on exhibit is a glimpse at Native American construction over the last 5,000 years