“It’s sort of a box canyon,” I tell my wife when I describe the topography, cupping my hands to give her a crude visual. “Anything that comes into the hills from the east will ultimately need to climb out to keep going west. But they can obviously enter the canyon just as they can exit.”
She nods and looks at the landscape with an understanding glance. “That makes sense,” she says. “Is that why we found the point on the main trail along the creek?”
“I think so. I think they used the area to hunt game, maybe even corral it,” I tell her, coming to the realization as I say it aloud. She pulls out the chert scraper we found that morning from her backpack and shakes her head in disbelief.
When we first purchased property just north of the Balcones Escarpment, it was for the views. As our neighbor likes to say, “It’s the Hill Country on steroids.” And he didn’t miss the mark by much as the southern portion of the Texas Hill Country includes the jarring uplift of what was once the southernmost part of the ancient Ouachita Mountains. Over the course of millions of years, erosion has created the craggy limestone landscape we know today. And on the tail-end of that timeline, hunter-gatherers entered the region and attuned themselves with the diversity of resources that Central Texas provided.
“I showed the adz you found to the archeologist that spoke to our class,” I tell her. “He thinks it’s 4,000 to 5,000 years old.”
“4,000 years old?” she asks, astonished.
“Yeah,” I say, still astounded myself. “He said that they likely used it for harvesting sotol.”
“Wow. I never would have thought that,” she says.
“Me either,” I tell her, and we look at one another like a secret has been revealed to us.
The first evidence we found of early hunter-gatherers began with a broken point. A heavy rainfall revealed its angular shape along a heavily traveled game trail. And while the trail is now traversed by feral hogs to a large extent, we knew that the valleys and canyons of distant years included great quantities of whitetail deer, turkeys, black bears and many other mammals that were aware of the artesian spring discharges that allowed life to persist and flourish.
We also knew that where there would be one point, there would likely be more. We scoured the places we determined would make for the best seasonal camps, campsites that exhibited all the characteristics of level ground, a water source, and a location near resources.
And when another heavy rainfall alerted us of an unknown spring in our seasonal creek, we knew we were on to something, a clue as to why we were finding chert flakes in unusually high quantities, a clue as to why we were fortunate enough to find multiple points in a relatively small area. Deep in these hills, this little hollow hidden from view was most certainly a campsite for early humans. The area provided them with a refuge from the summer heat and a windbreak from winter winds. It provided them with plentiful amounts of chert for tools and an abundance of flora and fauna for food and resources. We knew humans had been in the Central Texas region for over 10,000 years but finding evidence of their existence somehow connected us to something greater.
When we now make our way into this mysterious riparian area, beyond the rocky hillsides peppered with ashe juniper and into a valley that is shaded by a variety of towering oaks and cedar elms, we can take a moment to appreciate and honor the hardship of survival for those that came before us. We can take a moment and imagine the conversations that spoke of potential danger, changing weather, or the excitement of a hunt gone well. We can take a moment to reflect upon the intimacy of a nomadic lifestyle and its relationship to the Earth. We can also take a moment and understand that we’ve found our place in the spectrum of time.
