Preliminary Results of Geoarchaeological Investigations at the San Esteban Rockshelter (41PS20), Southwest Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The San Esteban Rockshelter is located in the Alamito Creek drainage of the Big Bend region, southwest Texas. The site is associated with a perennial tinaja, which made it an attractive location for human occupation in this arid region for at least the past 10,000 years. The shelter has been subject to undocumented collecting since the early 1900s, yet preliminary testing in 2000 revealed intact cultural deposits. In the summers of 2019 and 2020, the University of Kansas Odyssey Research Program launched a geoarchaeological investigation to determine the extent and age of sedimentary and cultural deposits in the shelter. Despite the magnitude of previous disturbances, the study revealed extensive intact cultural deposits dating from the late Holocene through the historic period. In addition, potential for older intact deposits is indicated by the recovery of mid-Holocene hafted bifaces retrieved from backfill. This poster presents the preliminary results of the 2019 and 2020 investigations. Continued research at San Esteban will address many questions of past lifeways in southwest Texas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32849