They Found A Creek Bank In Texas Sealed 18,500 Years - And What Was Inside Matched Nothing On Earth

They Found A Creek Bank In Texas Sealed 18,500 Years - And What Was Inside Matched Nothing On Earth

For about fifty years you could pay twenty five dollars, walk onto a field near Florence, Texas with your own shovel, and keep whatever you dug up. Weekend after weekend, artifacts leaving in buckets and coffee cans and car boots, and nobody involved was doing anything wrong, it was just an ordinary pay to dig business that happened to be sitting on one of the richest archaeological deposits in North America. In this one I follow what Michael Collins did about it, and honestly the shape of his sixteen years is the thing that stayed with me. Driving up in ninety one to look at some strangely crosshatched stones and finding the biggest nest of Clovis material he had ever seen. A three year lease in ninety eight that simply expired, so he backfilled a metres deep excavation with his own hands and drove home. Nine years of waiting with no legal standing to do anything. Then buying the thirty acres with his own money in two thousand and seven and immediately giving it away to a conservancy so nobody could ever sell it off in pieces again. Then the digging. Three percent of the property has produced two point six million artifacts. Below the Clovis layer, in the clay the whole discipline had treated as sterile for generations, another hundred and fifty thousand objects and ten projectile points that match nothing else ever found in either American continent. Luminescence dating puts that layer around eighteen and a half thousand years, though I am straight about the scatter in those dates because it is real. They call it the Gault assemblage, which is the polite professional way of saying nobody knows what this is. And then they filled it back in on purpose. Ninety seven percent still buried, waiting for tools nobody has built yet.
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