Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Unearthing Texas' past
I'm crouched in a hole, raking a trowel over a one-meter-square patch of clay, hoping the next clump of dirt will expose something incredible, like a prehistoric arrowhead. Instead, there's just more clay, which I scrape into shavings the color of dark chocolate. A few snail shells liven up the mix, but otherwise nothing but dirt and stone.

Still, it could happen. Just a week before my visit, Ashley Lemke, a University of Texas student who also is digging today, uncovered a perfect projectile point in this same pit. So I keep toiling, sifting through the earth in one of the oldest, most important continuing archaeology sites to reveal traces of North America's earliest humans.


It's about the Gault site.