Synthesizing 50 Years of Data: A Spatial Analysis of Investigations at the Spring Lake Site, Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Spring Lake site, located in San Marcos, Texas, is a multicomponent site that contains artifacts dating from the Late Pleistocene to the Historic Era. Fluted points and the remains of Ice Age megafauna were discovered in the lake in the late 1970s. Since then, various institutions have conducted archaeological work around and within the lake utilizing excavation, remote sensing, and geoarchaeological approaches to understand the cultural deposits preserved there. In 2023, new archaeological excavations were conducted as part of a field school taught by the Anthropology Department at Texas State University. Using GIS, we are generating a digital map and database of the spatial distribution of all artifacts, features, and cultural strata documented at the site to date. The goal of this project is to develop a means to understand the spatial relationships among the cultural deposits discovered during decades of investigation at the site. Initial spatial analyses inform on the time periods preserved in the upper strata of the northeast area of the site, how they relate to Historic Era materials found in the central and southwest areas of the site, and how the location of activities changed through time around Spring Lake.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53631