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Region 11

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Meet the Regional Director — Tim Roberts

Regional News — March 2009

As I write this report, 2009 is already off to a fast start.  The weather is warming and the spring winds of West Texas already seem to be upon us.  Various archeological projects and other activities in the region have already come and gone or are now getting into full swing.  The Big Bend Regional Academy was recently held in Study Butte.  It may be my bias as one of the presenters at the Academy, but it appeared that a good time was had by all, and I think we may have even learned something about the cultural history of the Big Bend in the process; I know that I did.  The Academy was a nice break, albeit brief, from a long string of small archeological assessments that I have been conducting for projects at Big Bend Ranch State Park, Presidio and Brewster counties, and a short stint with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Archeology Survey Team on a larger archeological survey in that park.  In March, I will be helping Rupestrian CyberServices, Flagstaff, Arizona, conduct an updated rock imagery inventory for Devils River State Natural Area, Val Verde County.  And, of course, there are the numerous reports that need to be completed for all of these projects.  Looking ahead to later this spring, I will be leading some pictograph tours at Big Bend Ranch State Park as part of their ‘La Fiesta’ event during the first weekend of May.

Others have been busy as well.  The Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS), Sul Ross State University, Alpine, is continuing to conduct archeological investigations and rock art documentation on some of the private ranches in the Big Bend region, and has recently started another season of archeological survey work at Big Bend National Park.  In addition, Reeda Peel, with the CBBS, is in the early stages of creating a rock imagery database for sites in the Trans-Pecos region.

The El Paso Archaeological Society (EPAS) meets the third Thursday of every month, and continue to sponsor an array of guest speakers.  Meade Kemrer, Las Cruces, New Mexico, will discuss archeological investigations in the southern San Andres Mountains, southcentral New Mexico, at the March meeting.  Five years of work in the Southern San Andres Mountains 60 miles north of El Paso produced a considerable amount of information regarding prehistoric occupation between A.D. 900- and 1400, including a new chronology that was developed for the area based on the pottery sequence and dendrochronology.

— Tim Roberts, Regional Director

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Tim Roberts     E-mail: region11@txarch.org

A while back, and for reasons unknown to me, I found myself pondering why so many astronauts seem to come from my home state of Kansas.  Do they pursue this career out of a need for adventure?  Is it a curiosity of the unknown?  Or, is it simply an escape from the slow-paced rural communities from which they come?  These thoughts made me wonder what motivated my decision to pursue a career in archeology.  I have always appreciated and, with a few exceptions, generally gravitated towards rural settings, and I do occasionally enjoy an adventure; but, I think it was ultimately the curiosity about how past people lived that guided my decision.

The connection between how people lived and the artifacts they left behind, however, was not immediate.  I remember digging a number of holes as a young child in the yard behind our old house in Topeka, Kansas, and finding many a square nail, or a piece of whiteware or bottle glass (to my mother's horror I am sure).  All of these things were treasures in my then young mind, and each find was as exciting as the last.  But, it wasn't until many years later that I truly appreciated that such items, and their prehistoric counterparts, could be examined for clues about the people that they represented.         

Along with a long-time interest in digging holes in the yard, I enjoyed, and still enjoy, trying to be artistic.  And, after a very brief period of scribbling on the walls of our living room, and several years of more traditional artistic expression, I was awarded a partial art scholarship to attend Bethany College, a small liberal arts college in the Swedish community of Lindsborg, Kansas.  Along with art courses, I took my first anthropology course during my first semester of college, and the rest, as they say, was history—and prehistory.  My first archeological research, of sorts, was conducted while an undergraduate at Bethany, when I did an independent research project on the Indian Hill petroglyph site in central Kansas.  Continuing both anthropology and art courses, in 1985 I received my Bachlors in art/anthropology, as well as a BA in sociology. 

From Bethany, after a semester of down time from academia, I went on to receive an Masters in archeology from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1988.  The emphasis of my graduate studies was the archeology of the American Southwest and pottery analysis, and my thesis topic was the analysis and comparison of El Paso Brown pottery assemblages from middle and late Mesilla phase pithouse features at the Turquoise Ridge site on Fort Bliss.  The work that I did on the Turquoise Ridge site in 1986 was my first excavating experience as a true archeologist and my first visit to west Texas.  And, despite temperatures as high as 117 degrees during the project that summer, sleepless nights camped out behind the night fire range on Fort Bliss, Texas-sized dust devils, doses of tear gas as we drove by 'the hill' every Friday morning, and almost getting run over by a tank during an outing to see the pictographs at nearby Picture Cave, I would, after allowing several years for such memories to diminish, eventually make the decision to return to live and work in west Texas.           

My return to west Texas, however, was by a very circuitous route.  I spent the second summer of my graduate career with 31 other archeologists near Williston, North Dakota, excavating the remains of Fort Union, an early to mid-nineteenth century fur trading post.  I could tell some wild stories about this particular project during a perhaps somewhat less reserved stage of my life, but perhaps such stories are better told after my retirement from archeology and after there is no thought of ever returning for a visit to the town of Williston.  I will say, however, that tequila and table top dancing would be key words in such a story.  

Regardless, I did survive my graduate years, and three days after receiving my degree from the University of Tulsa, I was packed and off to Puerto Rico to analyze pottery and illustrate artifacts recovered from an early ceramic village site along the north central coast of the island.  Funded by one of the newspaper tycoons in San Juan, it was immediately apparent that this project was much different than my aforementioned west Texas experience.  The laboratory was a converted penthouse apartment on the top floor of a high rise apartment building near downtown San Juan.  And, the sliding doors of the laboratory led out to a private rooftop swimming pool, the inviting cool waters of which not even our toes, as laboratory technicians, would ever be allowed to enjoy (the setting was nice, but we were unfortunately still expected to work).  After a year, my role in the project was done and I was off to the next location and the next archeological experience.    

From the warm Caribbean, I made my way to the Northeast and started an all too-long trend of working in places where long, cold winters were the norm.  Working for a private cultural resource management firm out of New Jersey, I divided the next six months of my time between the excavation of an Iroquois Indian village in upstate New York, an archeological survey of the Susquehanna River valley in central Pennsylvania, and the excavation of a slave quarters near Washington, D.C.

I was soon pulled westward again, hoping to see more vegetation and less concrete.  I worked for various private cultural resource companies in Iowa, Minnesota, and Montana, participating in and directing projects in those states and the surrounding areas.  During this time, between 1989 and 1996, I worked on more projects than I can remember, and certainly more than can be listed here without the threat of putting the reader into a seriously deep sleep, the kind of which an insomniac such as me only dreams.  A couple of projects are worthy of note, however, due to their sheer size.  First, in 1993, was the mitigation of a large Oneota village site, the Weaver site, in southeastern Iowa.  Field work on this site, which overlooked the Mississippi River valley, continued over three field seasons, but I worked on this site for only one summer—the summer that the entire Midwest flooded.  Ultimately, 1,600 features, most of them deep pit features, would be excavated on this site; I remember not only excavating a number of these features, but also bailing water out of many of them.  If there had been any justice in the world, I should have received an honorary degree in underwater archeology that year. 

The second project of note was the mitigation of 5 x 5 meter area of an Initial Woodland/Terminal Woodland village site, the McKinstry site, in northern Minnesota, near International Falls.  This site, situated at the confluence of two rivers, had considerable depth to it, and is the first and only excavation that I have been involved with that required a monorail, per OSHA, to be constructed across the top of the excavation so that archeologists could be hoisted out of the excavation in an emergency (Thankfully, severe hangovers, none of which I claim as my own, were the closest thing to emergencies that we experienced on the project.).  Anticipating a winter excavation, a metal building, with heating, lighting, and hot water (for water screening the clay matrix) was constructed over the excavation area.  With various delays, however, it was mid-summer of the following year before the excavation got started, and we completed the excavation in early October, before the snow and cold set in.  But, the hot water was still great for breaking-down that clay.  

As often occurs in cultural resource management, projects eventually end, contracts dry up, and it comes time to move on to the next place.  At the invitation of a good friend, and now retired archeologist, Dr. Dale Henning, I moved to central Illinois to work for the Illinois State Museum Society.  It was in the Illinois River valley that I developed my as yet unpublished theory that Middle Woodland groups sought out the most poison-ivy infested locations within which to settle.  With the exception of a severe, summer-long case of poison-ivy that I received while surveying part of the Susquehanna River valley near Three-Mile Island (I truly came to believe that radiation is to poison ivy what cow manure is to our vegetable garden.), I have never been graced with such an all-encompassing case of the itchy, watery blisters as when I worked along the Illinois.  The only positive spin I can give to such an experience is that it took my mind off of the mosquito bites.     

After a couple of years of the poison ivy, mosquitoes, heat and humidity, snow and cold, I left these things behind, to take a dream job with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department as the Cultural Resources Coordinator of state lands in west Texas, a job that I continue to enjoy today, five and a half years later.  I have been married to my lovely wife, Karen, for almost three years, and we live in Fort Davis, Texas with our dog, Pete, and a kitten, Luci (short for Lucifer, a moniker that was quickly earned by the demonic little beast).  And, as I look out our front window towards a Mitre Peak that is glowing in the setting sun, I have to say that I am perfectly happy to have never become an astronaut; being an archeologist in west Texas suits me just fine.

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