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Region 11

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Meet the Regional Director — Tim Roberts

Regional News — June 2010

Activities for me over the last couple of months have been all about writing reports and preparing presentations to give to various groups, with very little time spent enjoying the mild spring weather of west Texas.  In May, I was scheduled to give an El Paso Archaeological Society (EPAS)-sponsored presentation at the El Paso Museum of Archaeology on the rock imagery of Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site, El Paso County.  Unfortunately, I had to cancel the presentation due to unforeseen circumstances. I hope to give this talk in El Paso at some future date.  If all goes as planned, I am also scheduled to give a rock art presentation at the Jeff Davis County Historical Society’s monthly meeting in Fort Davis on June 21st.  The topic of this presentation will be ‘The History of the Horse in Rock Art’, a history that is known to go back at least 32,000 years to the Paleolithic cave paintings of Europe and extends well into the 19th century in west Texas.

Nancy Komulainen-Dillenburg will be the guest speaker at the EPAS meeting on June 20th.  Her presentation, entitled ‘The Classic Maya of the Southern Lowlands—A Glimpse into the Roadways of the Past and Snapshots of the Present’, will examine the role of roadways in ancient Maya culture, which was the topic of Ms. Komulainen-Dillenburg’s master’s thesis at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.  The presentation will include photographs from Mayan sites in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.

Also in El Paso, the El Paso Museum of Archaeology will hold the 2010 Archaeology Summer Day Camps.  Camps for various age groups will be held June 22-25; July 13-16; July 27-30; and August 10-13.  These camps will include interactive, hands-on courses during the first three days of the four-day sessions, and will wrap-up with a field trip to Hueco Tanks State Park and Historic Site.

The Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS), Sul Ross State University, Alpine, has completed the fieldwork phase of their long-term survey project in Big Bend National Park (BBNP).  Initiated in 1995, the project languished through a 5-year funding hiatus (1999–2003) before being resurrected in 2004.  Designed originally as a stratified sampling of the entire park, it was subsequently modified to focus on the extensive basin zone.  The Spring 2010 fieldwork session—intensive survey of 3,400 acres and the recording of 135 sites—was designed to test a predictive model of campsite locations.  The model was developed through the combined efforts of BBNP and the CBBS, utilizing the park's powerful GIS.  Key personnel on this project consist of BBNP's Tom and Betty Alex, and Bob Mallouf, Andy Cloud, and David Keller of the CBBS.  Project totals: ca. 68,000 acres surveyed and 1,550 sites recorded.

— 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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