Artifacts May Shed Light on Early People Along Texas Coast

Archeologists have discovered a cache of artifacts near South Padre Island that they say could be up to 5,000 years old, potentially providing new clues about the Texas coast’s early peoples.

The items, found in a protective clay dune about 6 feet underground, appear to be part of a fishing camp for a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers, archeologist Robert Ricklis said. They include fragments of shell tools and a fish ear bone, or otolith, that can be analyzed for information about the bay environment of the time.

Ricklis said the find was significant because so little was known about the ancient Rio Grande Valley. Most early manmade items would have been eroded by sand and sea air, or washed out by the ever-changing course of the waterways of the Rio Grande basin near the Mexican border.

“We don’t have a chronology for the Rio Grande Delta,” said Ricklis, who works for the Corpus Christi office of Coastal Environments Inc., an archeological research company. “We really have no idea of what the culture’s prehistory was.”

The artifacts were found in May during the environmental company’s archeological survey of the Bahia Grande, a 6,000-acre lowland between Brownsville and Port Isabel. The survey was required before the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service proceeds with plans to restore wetlands lost to the digging of the Brownsville Ship Channel during the 1930s.

Geologists say the Gulf of Mexico once reached as far west as Starr County and the Mexican state of Coahuila. Paleo-Indians -- the term for ancient peoples who roamed the Southwest -- may have seen the Gulf’s final rise and retreat about 10,000 years ago, said Tony Zavaleta, an anthropologist at the University of Texas-Brownsville.

Ricklis said he believed the artifacts came from a later group of peoples who belonged to the archaic period, 7500 BC to AD 750, which was characterized by grinding tools and certain types of projectile points.

The artifacts have not yet been carbon dated, so Ricklis bases his estimate on the shape of the projectile point and what’s known about the Laguna Madre, the bay between South Padre Island and the mainland. He said the items were at least 1,000 years old.

Zavaleta agreed that the area was one of the most historically significant, yet neglected, sites in Texas.

Anthropologists know roaming groups such as the Coahuiltecans regularly visited the area to hunt, fish and gather fruits and berries, and that by the time Spanish explorers arrived, there were thriving villages. But scientists know little about earlier peoples.