A Prehistory of Houston and Southeast Texas

A Prehistory of Houston and Southeast Texas

Author: Dan M. Worrall

Publisher: Concertina Press (www.concertinapressbooks.com)

Published: 2021-01-02

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 0982599633

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Houston and Southeast Texas have an ancient, storied prehistory. Using data from hundreds of archeological site reports, a changing coastal landscape modeled through time in 3D, historical information on Native Americans taken from the accounts of the earliest European visitors, and digital GIS mapping to weave it all together, this book recounts the development of the physical landscape of this region and the cultures of its Native American inhabitants from the peak of the last ice age until the Spanish colonial era. Its 504 pages are illustrated with nearly 350 full color maps, charts, drawings and photographs.


Historic Native Peoples of Texas

Historic Native Peoples of Texas

Author: William C. Foster

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2009-02-17

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0292781911

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An incredibly detailed account of Indigenous lifeways during the initial rounds of European exploration in south-central North America. Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas’s Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas’s Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722). Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that extended into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas’s Native peoples, as well as data on the various regions’ animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indigenous tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes. “A very useful encyclopedic regional account of the Europeans and Native peoples of Texas who encountered one another during the relatively unexamined two hundred years before the Spanish occupation of Texas and the French establishment of Louisiana.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly


The Formation and Future of the Upper Texas Coast

The Formation and Future of the Upper Texas Coast

Author: John B. Anderson

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2007-05-24

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9781585445615

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With strong personal and professional ties to the Gulf of Mexico, marine geologist John B. Anderson has spent two decades studying the Texas coastline and continental shelf. In this book, he sets out to answer fundamental questions that are frequently asked about the coast—how it evolved; how it operates; how natural processes affect it and why it is ever changing; and, finally, how human development can be managed to help preserve it. The book provides an amply illustrated look at ocean waves and currents, beach formation and erosion, barrier island evolution, hurricanes, and sea level changes. With an abundance of visual material—including aerial photos, historical maps, simple figures, and satellite images—the author presents a lively, interesting lesson in coastal geography that readers will remember and appreciate the next time they are at the beach and want to know: What happens to the sand that erodes from our beaches? Can beach erosion be stopped—and should we try? How much sand will be needed to stabilize our beaches? Does a hurricane have any positive impacts? How much development can the coast withstand? This entertaining and instructive book provides authoritative answers to these and other questions that are essential to our understanding of coastal change.


Exploring the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail

Exploring the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail

Author: Mel White

Publisher: Falcon Guides

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780762727124

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This birding guide profiles more than 80 of the best sites and attractions along this approximately 2,110-mile trail which covers more over 41 counties along Texas's Gulf Coast, and hosts half of the 600 species found in the state.


The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes

The Archaeology of Maritime Landscapes

Author: Ben Ford

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-05-21

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1441982108

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Maritime cultural landscapes are collections of submerged archaeological sites, or combinations of terrestrial and submerged sites that reflect the relationship between humans and the water. These landscapes can range in size from a single beach to an entire coastline and can include areas of terrestrial sites now inundated as well as underwater sites that are now desiccated. However, what binds all of these sites together is the premise that each aspect of the landscape –cultural, political, environmental, technological, and physical – is interrelated and can not be understood without reference to the others. In this maritime cultural landscape approach, individual sites are treated as features within the larger landscape and the interpretation of single sites add to a larger analysis of a region or culture. This approach provides physical and theoretical links between terrestrial and underwater archaeology as well as prehistoric and historic archaeology; consequently, providing a framework for integrating such diverse topics as trade, resource procurement, habitation, industrial production, and warfare into a holistic study of the past. Landscape studies foster broader perspectives and approaches, extending the study of maritime cultures beyond the shoreline. Despite this potential, the archaeological study of maritime landscapes is a relatively untried approach with many questions regarding the methods and perspectives needed to effectively analyze these landscapes. The chapters in this volume, which include contributions from the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Australia, address many of the theoretical and methodological questions surrounding maritime cultural landscapes. The authors comprise established scholars as well as archaeologists at the beginning of their careers, providing a healthy balance of experience and innovation. The chapters also demonstrate parity between method and theory, where the varying interpretations of culture and space are given equal weight with the challenges of investigating both wet and dry sites across large areas.


La Belle, the Ship That Changed History

La Belle, the Ship That Changed History

Author: Bullock Texas State History Museum

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2014-11-01

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1623490847

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After two decades of searching for La Salle’s lost ship La Belle, Texas Historical Commission (THC) divers in 1995 located a shipwreck containing historic artifacts of European origin in the silty bottom of Matagorda Bay, off the coast of Texas. The first cannon lifted from the waters bore late seventeenth-century French insignias. The ill-fated La Belle had been found. Under the direction of then-THC Archeology Division Director James Bruseth, the THC conducted a full excavation of the water-logged La Belle. The conservation was subsequently completed at Texas A&M University’s Conservation Research Laboratory, resulting in preservation of more than one million artifacts from the wreck. An official naval vessel granted to La Salle by the king of France in 1684, La Belle is still considered a sovereign naval vessel belonging to the French government under international maritime law. A formal agreement negotiated by the French Republic, the Musée national de la Marine, the US Department of State, and the THC allows the ship and artifacts to remain in Texas permanently and to be housed in an exhibit at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, opening October 2014. This richly illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibit.


Pleasant Bend

Pleasant Bend

Author: Dan Worrall

Publisher: Dan Michael Worrall

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0982599625

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Today’s Greater Houston is a vast urban place. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Houston was a small town – a dot in a vast frontier. Extant written histories of Houston largely confine themselves to the small area within the city limits of the day, leaving nearly forgotten the history of large rural areas that later fell beneath the city’s late twentieth century urban sprawl. One such area is that of upper Buffalo Bayou, extending westward from downtown Houston to Katy. European settlement here began at Piney Point in 1824, over a decade before Houston was founded. Ox wagons full of cotton traveled across a seemingly endless tallgrass prairie from the Brazos River east to Harrisburg (and later to Houston) along the San Felipe Trail, built in 1830. Also here, Texan families fled eastward during the Runaway Scrape of 1836, immigrant German settlers trekked westward to new farms along the north bank of the bayou in the 1840s, and newly freed African American families walked east toward Houston from Brazos plantations after Emancipation. Pioneer settlers operated farms, ranches and sawmills. Near present-day Shepherd Drive, Reconstruction-era cowboys assembled herds of longhorns and headed north along a southeastern branch of the Chisholm Trail. Little physical evidence remains today of this former frontier world.


New Directions in American Indian History

New Directions in American Indian History

Author: Colin Gordon Calloway

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780806122335

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Each year more than five hundred new books appear in the field of North American Indian history. There exists, however, no means by which scholars can easily judge which are most significant, which explore new fields of inquiry and ask new questions, and which areas are the subject of especially strong inquiry or are being overlooked. New Directions in American Indian History provides some answers to these questions by bringing together a collection of bibliographic essays by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, religionists, linguists, economists, and legal scholars who are working at the cutting edge of Indian history. This volume responds to the label "new directions" in two ways. First, it describes what new directions have been pursued recently by historians of the Indian experience. Second, it points out some new directions that remain to be pursued. Part One, "Recent Trends," contains six essays reviewing the following six areas where there has been significant interest and activity: quantitative methods in Native American history, by Melissa L. Meyer and Russell Thornton; American Indian women, by Deborah Welch; new developments in Métis history, by Dennis F.K. Madill; recent developments in southern plains Indian history, by Willard Rollings; Indians and the law, by George S. Grossman; and twentieth-century Indian history, by James Riding In. Part Two, "Emerging Trends," contains essays on aspects of Indian history that remain undeveloped: language study and Plains Indian history, by Douglas R. Parks; economics and American Indian history, by Ronald L. Trosper; and religious changes in Native American societies, by Robert A. Brightman. These latter essays present a critique of current scholarship and sketch an agenda for future inquiry. Taken together, the nine essays in this book will help students at all levels to evaluate recent scholarship and tap the immense contemporary literature on American Indian history.