Abstract: "Between January 31-March 9, 2001, the Center for Big Bend Studies of Sul Ross University (SRSU) conducted an archeological data recovery program for the Texas Department of Transportation at the Arroyo de la Presa site (41PS800) in southern Presidio County, Texas. The site, situated between the Rio Grande and Farm-to-Market Road 170 within the La Junta archeological district, is an open campsite containing stratified cultural deposits. Intact and partially intact prehistoric features and material culture primarily dating to the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric periods were uncovered, providing important information on archeological manifestations in the area during these times. Materials recovered during the excavation are curated at the Museum of the Big Bend of SRSU."--page iii
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 La Salle Expedition on the Mississippi River presents the definitive English translation of Nicolas de La Salle's diary account of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle's 1682 discovery expedition of the Mississippi River from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This previously unknown manuscript copy was discovered recently in the collection of rare books in the Texas State Archives. It provides the most complete and authoritative account available of this historic North American adventure and territorial claim. By careful cross- document analysis, Foster projects an extended expedition chronology that adds about two weeks to the journey, corrects the date that La Salle's claim was announced, and revises erroneous interpretations made by most contemporary French and American scholars. The work includes maps prepared by the noted Southwest cartographer John V. Cotter
La Junta de Los Rios chronicles La Junta;s story from prehistory through the 1830s. Woven into the context of the exploration and occupation of the central corridor of northern New Spain, this is a tale of three distinct cultures--La Juntan, Spanish and Apache--competing for possession of a desert oasis.
In this volume, author J. Charles Kelley uses historical, linguistic, and archaeological data to compare two indigenous North American cultures: the Patarabueyes and the Jumanos.
Why and when human societies shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture engages the interest of scholars around the world. One of the most fruitful areas in which to study this issue is the North American Southwest, where Late Archaic inhabitants of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico turned to farming while their counterparts in Trans-Pecos and South Texas continued to forage. By investigating the environmental, biological, and cultural factors that led to these differing patterns of development, we can identify some of the necessary conditions for the rise of agriculture and the corresponding evolution of village life. The twelve papers in this volume synthesize previous and ongoing research and offer new theoretical models to provide the most up-to-date picture of life during the Late Archaic (from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago) across the entire North American Borderlands. Some of the papers focus on specific research topics such as stone tool technology and mobility patterns. Others study the development of agriculture across whole regions within the Borderlands. The two concluding papers trace pan-regional patterns in the adoption of farming and also link them to the growth of agriculture in other parts of the world.
Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003 Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City. The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca. This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.
In the late sixteenth century, Spanish explorers described encounters with North American people they called "Jumanos." Although widespread contact with Jumanos is evident in accounts of exploration and colonization in New Mexico, Texas, and adjacent regions, their scattered distribution and scant documentation have led to long-standing disagreements: was "Jumano" simply a generic name loosely applied to a number of tribes, or were they an authentic, vanished people? In the first full-length study of the Jumanos, anthropologist Nancy Hickerson proposes that they were indeed a distinctive tribe, their wide travel pattern linked over well-established itineraries. Drawing on extensive primary sources, Hickerson also explores their crucial role as traders in a network extending from the Rio Grande to the Caddoan tribes' confederacies of East Texas and Oklahoma. Hickerson further concludes that the Jumanos eventually became agents for the Spanish colonies, drafted as mercenary fighters and intelligence-gatherers. Her findings reinterpret the cultural history of the South Plains region, bridging numerous gaps in the area's comprehensive history and in the chronicle of these elusive people.
Examines the processes of disappearance during the late 16th and 17th centuries--through assimilation or extermination--of the native Indians encountered by Spaniards in present-day Chihuahua, Mexico.
