The archeological field technician pushes dirt across a metal screen in the bottom of a sifting tray and then picks out something small and reddish, scraping away clods of clay to get a better look. He raises a hand and announces that he has found another projectile point – an arrowhead – and all work at the Rowlett Creek dig stops.

 

Everyone wants to see for him or herself the thing that has drawn them to the Garland location: fragments of the civilizations that made the area home between 400 and 3,500 years ago.

 

“The stuff that’s been here, we’re the first ones that get to see it again,” said field technician Steve Dunn. “That’s pretty spiffy.”

 

Dunn is part of a team of archeologists and technicians who are excavating a representative location in the path of the President George Bush Turnpike’s Eastern Extension. Before construction begins there, they will collect the artifacts, clean and catalogue them in an effort to discover how the area has changed through time and how civilization adapted to those changes.

 

“There is not good information on the Late Archaic period in Texas. This site could offer that,” says Duane E. Peter, vice president of Geo-Marine’s cultural resource division.

 

The Late Archaic period (1500 B.C. to 700 A.D.) is a prehistoric hunter-gatherer period. So far the team has found evidence of deer and bison as well as signs of trading – raw materials that could only have come from elsewhere.

 

They are also collecting information from the Late Prehistoric period (approximately 700 A.D. to 1600 A.D.).

 

“It’s good information,” Peter said. “It’s not as rich as would be ideal, but it’s good information.”

 

The team doesn’t expect to find stone architecture or other indications of a heavy presence.

 

“The people had such a light touch on the environment,” said Dr. Chris Dayton, project archeologist, who is also with Geo-Marine. The team is finding bones, turtle and mussel shells, plant remains, baked clay and charcoal from fire pits, and lithic flakes – the chipped stones that were used as cutting tools and projectile points. They will do radiocarbon dating on some of the items to confirm their age, but they can already be pretty confident based on how deep an item is found and whether it’s above or below a manmade feature, such as a hearth.

 

Team members meticulously examine dirt in 3.5-foot-square, five-centimeter-deep sections, and they will continue to peel away those sections until they reach a depth of nearly seven and a half feet.

 

The artifacts are then bagged and identified by several series of numbers and letters denoting where and when they were found. They will be curated according to guidelines established by the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, and a final report will be prepared for the NTTA and submitted to the Texas Historical Commission. Once that is complete, construction on that portion of the extension can commence.