Floods, Muds, and Plant Baking: ASWT Excavations at Skiles Shelter

Summary

Skiles Shelter (41VV165) is a "wet" rockshelter situated approximately ½ kilometer upstream from the confluence of Eagle Nest Canyon and the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas. Due to the threat of inundation and damage due to extreme flooding events when Rio Grande flooding backs up from Amistad Reservoir, Skiles Shelter is the most-threatened site within Eagle Nest Canyon. Initial testing of Skiles was conducted during the 2013 Texas State field school. In 2014, the Ancient Southwest Texas (ASWT) Project greatly expanded on these preliminary excavations, focusing on four main research objectives: 1) understanding the site’s depositional history; 2) quantifying how much earth oven baking occurred there; 3) using ground based (e.g., hand-held digital cameras) Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry to document every excavation unit, layer, profile, or exposure; and 4) relating the prehistoric record at Skiles to the other sites within Eagle Nest Canyon. Combining the SfM data with Total Data Station shots, we have created an unparalleled 3D record of the site, as well as high resolution documentation of every sample collected for radiocarbon dating, geoarchaeology, archaeobotany, and zooarchaelogy. This presentation will highlight the investigative methodology and preliminary results of the ongoing analyses.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Low Impact, High Resolution: Ongoing Investigations in Eagle Nest Canyon

Keywords

Spatial Coverage