CBBS Fall E-Newsletter

Photo: Dr. Severin Fowles, Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and the CBBS 30th Annual Conference Banquet Speaker.

The 30th annual Center for Big Bend Studies Conference (Friday and Saturday, Nov. 8–9) will feature dozens of presenters: historians, archaeologists, folklorists and other researchers studying the past and present of the Big Bend region and northern Mexico. A Friday evening reception at the Emmett and Miriam McCoy Cultural Events Center at the Museum of the Big Bend kicks it off, followed by Saturday’s presentations and an evening banquet with Dr. Severin Fowles’ keynote address (separate registration required). 

A leading voice in archaeology, Dr. Fowles (Barnard College) will provide an enlightening and thought-provoking exploration of ancient Southwestern cultures, aligning perfectly with our conference's mission to promote and preserve the rich history of the Big Bend region.

Dr. Fowles’ uses an interdisciplinary approach, bridging archaeology, anthropology, and history to reconstruct the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in New Mexico and Colorado. His numerous publications, including An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion, have significantly advanced our understanding of the Southwest's cultural heritage

CBBS members receive a registration form in the mail several weeks before the conference that offers discounts or you can register at the CBBS store. Non-members may register after Sept. 1.

Presenting at the conference: If you would like to make a 30-minute presentation, please complete the Call for Papers form and send materials to the Center for Big Bend Studies. For detailed instructions for presenters, see the Instructions page. Abstracts for the 2024 conference are due Oct. 3. 

Photos: Caiti Carvajal today (left) and Caiti's mom (who is pregnant with Caiti) and sister on a camping trip in the Davis Mountains.

CBBS’ newest team member has deep roots in Alpine. Program Coordinator Caiti Carvajal’s parents met while attending Sul Ross State University and chose to stay in the area, regularly taking their growing family camping and on day trips to the surrounding state and national parks. A love of nature and conservation runs deep in her family. 

“If I threw a straw wrapper out the window, my dad would stop the truck,” she says, laughing.  

Both Carvajal daughters developed a passion for West Texas from those memorable outings. Caiti’s sister has been a longtime Sul Ross employee.  

Although she was a local, Caiti says she didn’t hear much about CBBS until recently. That’s something she’d like to change in her new role, which started in May. 

“This is something totally different from my passion for biology in my previous work in the medical field, so I’m a little out of my element,” she says. “It’s all so interesting and fascinating to just listen to these experts because they are all so passionate about what they do. I've already learned so much and feel truly inspired by Dr. Schroeder's vision for the Center. Alongside the rest of the staff, I’m committed to making that vision a reality by sharing these incredible stories and working together to grow the Center into what it should be." 

Caiti handles a myriad of administrative duties from the home office that enables the CBBS team to focus more time on field research. Beyond that, she wants to take the initiative to increase awareness of the Center.  

“One of my goals is to make better use of the cool merch we have,” she says. “I’d love to expand its reach by getting it into the parks' gift shops and into stores in nearby tourist-driven towns." 

Caiti hopes to find innovative ways to reach out to a younger crowd for the master’s program and to get the Center featured on popular podcasts that cater to this field.  

In her role, Caiti is likely to be your first contact for just about everything at CBBS. She wants you to know that she is eager to help. 

“I’m truly grateful to be a part of everything happening at CBBS,” she says. “It’s all endlessly fascinating to me —I’m a huge history buff!” 

Photos: Wooden and cane arrow shafts from Tranquil Rockshelter (above) and the 2008 crew working inside the Rockshelter (below).

Work begins in earnest this fall to properly record, curate and store an important set of artifacts, thanks to grants from the Summerlee Foundation and the Texas Historical Fund (THF).

CBBS excavations at the Tranquil Rockshelter (02 Ranch, Brewster County) have uncovered incredible preservation of a diverse organic and stone artifact assemblage dating from A.D. 800 to 1600. The collection has the potential to shed light on cultural interactions (otherwise difficult to discern) between foragers at Tranquil and farmers on the river.

Tranquil’s basketry, matting, cordage, sandals, and arrow shaft fragments represent a remarkable record of forager and agricultural lifeways in the region. During this dynamic time, the 12-millenia-long pattern of Indigenous peoples living a hunter-gatherer-fisher lifestyle shifted to include the cultivation of Mesoamerican domesticates like corn, beans, and squash. The presence of so many cultigens at one site allows us to think about how these groups were producing food or maintaining trade relations.

The Summerlee grant will ensure that the Tranquil Rockshelter artifacts are rehoused and brought to modern curation standards, organized and prepared for future research, and provide students with opportunities to work with legacy collections. The grants fund curatorial supplies and three semesters of student support to inventory, organize, label, tag and protect the more than 20,000 artifacts. 

The second part of the project includes minor but important fieldwork at the rockshelter. Current CBBS staff and SRSU faculty did not work on the original excavations in 2007 and 2008, so revisiting the site will help with understanding the materials’ locational information. Thorough documentation of the rock art and surrounding bedrock features, not performed during the original fieldwork, will be conducted. 

THF-provided funds will purchase a mirrorless camera, macro lens, tripod and lighting for high-resolution 3D modeling and photography of these perishable artifacts. Once they are inventoried and photographed, Drs. Devin Pettigrew and Bryon Schroeder will begin a detailed analysis of their morphology, manufacture, and use-wear, and begin selecting artifacts for direct radiocarbon dating, wood/material identification, residue analysis, and ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) analysis of sinew wrappings (to determine the animal of origin). This will shed light on the technological sophistication and histories of the artifacts and the people who made and used them. 

Photo: (Above) GLD 2024 crew, including SRSU field school students, KU students/Odyssey crew, and SRSU/CBBS faculty and staff (above). A fragmented piece of bone found in the 12,800-year-old buried surface at the GLD site (below).

Many hands working hard together made some impactful progress at CBBS sites this summer. While the Odyssey/University of Kansas collaboration dug deeper into the Genevieve Lykes Duncan (GLD) site and explored the San Esteban Rockshelter, our summer field school students were busy learning the lessons of Spirit Eye Cave while helping move along the excavation at GLD. 

“We all work at the same sites but we’re doing different things,” CBBS Director Bryon Schroeder says. “Field school students learn the basics of archaeology at Spirit Eye — how to dig, take notes, take photographs, survey, record rock art, read maps, use equipment and how methods change at different types of sites.” 

The work at San Esteban found wonderfully preserved occupational surfaces with the promise of more findings to come. At GLD, what seems to be a giant “game” of Battleship seeks out the parameters of a possible living structure eight feet underground. Even when you hit part of it — which they did — the future direction of the dig must be determined. Is this a west wall of buried structure? Only digging to the east can provide the answer. Strike out, try again. There are no shortcuts, as other occupations occurred above the Clovis occupation leaving their own artifacts. 

The CBBS and KU/Odyssey crew puts in 20 days every summer, digging one-by-one-meter cubes, usually finishing six blocks. 

 “They doubled their output this year: six of the blocks were a bust and six of them were phenomenal,” Schroeder says. “It took us basically 20 days to learn that we went the wrong way. By the last day we got exactly where we wanted to be and sealed up the site, but we didn't feel great about leaving such an old site preserved under 2 inches of sediment. With the support of KU and the blessing of the ranch, we did another week to take it through the final level.” 

Schroeder says they’ll spend the interim time to figure out how to go about discovering what’s under 8 feet of dirt to the north and east. 

“These kinds of sites take forever,” Schroeder says. He recalls a site in Wyoming where it took researchers years to find a single mammoth rib bone. 

 “So many students out there digging in holes with nothing in them,” he says. “Spirits were low. At least we know roughly where the artifacts are now. We didn’t find a dead critter, but we might not, if it’s a camp. That would be even cooler because those sites are rare.”

It's quite worth the Herculean effort and the agonizingly slow pace. What was already officially the oldest site in the Big Bend at 11,000 years has now been pushed back by almost 2,000 years, verified by work this summer and last. That places it right at the end of the Clovis period. 

“At GLD, we found exactly what we were looking for — a 12,800-year-old camp — and it’s beyond expectations,” Schroeder says. “Last year we had some very tantalizing stuff but this year we found it, and it’s covered in red ochre.” 

Red ochre was commonly used by the Clovis people, so it connects populations across the country. The researchers found extremely degraded bones that were still red from ochre. 

“It’s really greasy, and it streaks well,” Schroeder says. “They crushed it and turned it into a pigment, then used it everywhere, on their artifacts, on tool caches, in glues. What’s very clear is that they loved it.” 

The next step is to figure out if this is a camp or a kill site — is there a big dead animal somewhere to be found here? 

The answers will remain buried for now, but they are too important to be ignored.  

“It literally proves that the earliest populations of North America were in West Texas, and that’s never been done,” Schroeder says.  

Want to be a part of this historic work? The late Homer Mills (O2 Ranch manager and CBBS board member) thought he’d found a possible Clovis site and lived long enough to learn he might be right. In a lovely moment of timing, his endowment fund match was met right at the time of this summer’s dig, which proved Homer’s theory was correct. The Homer Mills Research Fund ensures the continuation of his dream and the uncovering of our rich history. Donations can be directed to the Friends of the Center for Big Bend Studies—Homer Mills Research Fund via check or online donations through our store.

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