Alpine
Last weekend’s Center for Big Bend Studies conference brought a small crowd of archaeology buffs to Far West Texas for its annual conference celebrating the Trans-Pecos and Northern Mexico. Twenty-eight presenters gave lectures on captivating topics from across the region, giving an opportunity for professionals in the field the opportunity to mingle with each other and the general public.
While many of the talks were given by researchers with many years of experience, the conference’s up-and-coming academics had groundbreaking work to share—suggesting that there’s a bright future ahead for a field that spends most of its time looking toward the past.
‘Migration palimpsests’
Dr. Laura Ng, assistant professor of anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa, kicked off the conference with Grinnell College senior Jorge Salinas on the overlap between 19th century Chinese railroad worker camps and sites frequented by more contemporary migrants crossing the United States-Mexico borderlands.
In the early 1880s, Chinese laborers played a brief but pivotal role in settling present-day towns along the Southern Pacific Railroad Line, which roughly follows Highway 90 west of Del Rio. Though this history has had more visibility in the past few years—most notably with Kenneth Tam’s 2022 Ballroom Marfa show Tender is the hand which holds the stone of memory, which was in direct response to these stories—it’s still an undersung chapter of local history.
Robert Reed Ellison—a cowboy also remembered by history as the first Anglo to report seeing the Marfa Lights—described Marfa in 1883: “Joe Buhl, a Frenchman, had a saloon in one tent, and off a little ways a Chinaman had a restaurant. No one was there except a Railroad agent and operator and two section crews, all Chinamen.”
Ng, who specializes in Chinese diaspora archaeology, was unable to find much in the way of oral histories or written testimonies to paint a clearer picture of what life was like for the men whose labor connected Far West Texas with the coasts. Her work follows in the footsteps of archaeologist Alton K. Briggs, who recorded a site near Langtry in 1969 on land owned by the Skiles family. Many of the features mapped by Briggs are no longer visible, so when she visited the same site this past year, she had to rely on Briggs’ research and artifacts collected by local landowners to get a clearer view.
Those artifacts included rice bowls, tea tins and objects called “opium lampshades,” used to consume the opiate. After her field visit, she teamed up with Salinas, who had done research on opium-related artifacts, which are often sensationalized and misinterpreted. “Looking past its association with addiction, opium was historically consumed as a means of mitigating joint pain and other physical ailments,” Salinas explained. “Grueling labor and harsh conditions were not uncommon for Chinese workers, and such forms of pain management most likely played a major role in their day-to-day survival.”
Ng also brought a more contemporary set of artifacts to Salinas for more context: backpacks, water bottles and other items brought across the border by undocumented migrants, likely during the large post-COVID spike in migration in 2021. Ng and Salinas had collaborated previously at Grinnell on Hostile Terrain 94, a documentary art piece tracking migrant deaths along the border in Arizona.
The duo felt it was necessary to include more contemporary migration in their research for context, as well as patterns of migration practiced by Indigenous people before colonization. “I think it’s important to keep these conversations going on migration today in the United States,” Salinas said.
‘Let the hypothesis die’
The conference closed with a presentation by Dr. Justin Garnett, a new addition to the Center for Big Bend Studies whose research focuses on “stone and bone” and how those materials were used in the manufacture and discard of tools. His presentation focused on the Basketmaker II period (from around 4000 to 1500 B.C.), testing out a hypothesis that these ancient people used curved sticks to defend against atlatl darts.
Weapons and projectile points are a big specialty field within archaeology, but researchers rarely get to test out prehistoric technologies for themselves. “People seem reluctant to do combat simulations,” Garnett explained, despite the fact that there are a number of contemporary sports that approximate old ways of fighting.
Garnett, CBBS Professor Devin Pettigrew and a team of resilient volunteers worked over the course of several years to perfect their simulation, experimenting with different ways to blunt the projectiles. (Golf club tips “were a disaster,” but an approximation of contemporary archery tag seemed to work.)
Even while wearing a significant amount of padding, the projectiles—propelled, for scientific realism, by enough force to kill a deer—made their mark. Learning how to brace so as not to flinch and sully the results took lots of practice and grit. “You’d get so sick of it,” Garnett said of being repeatedly shot at by high-speed darts.
The team was trying to figure out if the curved sticks they were finding at Basketmaker II sites were used to whack incoming projectiles out of the air during combat, but the team found—over the course of several years and innumerable bruises—that even with practice, they more often than not hurt themselves when attempting to fend off darts with the curved stick. Instead, it may be more likely that these sticks were used as boomerangs—when thrown, they can carry enough force to break the legs of animals as large as horses. “It might be time to let the fending stick hypothesis die,” Garnett said.