Brad Jones is Director of the THC’s Archeology Division and the State Archeologist, with over 25 years of experience in archeology and ethnohistory of Texas and the Americas. His research has focused on all periods of Texas, but Jones specializes in the articulation of Native American communities with European colonial empires and their material cultural expression. He has been involved in the exhibit of the French ship La Belle and publication about it, and he is currently working on a report on the THC excavations of Fort St. Louis and Presidio La Bahía.

Dr. Leland Bement currently works as a senior researcher for the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Archeological Survey.  Dr. Bement is primarily interested in the development of New World hunting technologies. He specializes in animal bone archaeology, particularly as represented in Plains bison kill sites of all ages. His first bison kill site excavation was at Bonfire Shelter under the guidance of Drs. David Dibble, Solveig Turpin, and Ernie Lundelius. It was under their tutelage that he learned to look beyond artifacts and to place material culture, including animal bones, within constructs of social organization. Reconstructing herd demographics is as important as reconstructing the butchering programs employed after a successful kill. The interplay between people, prey animals, landscape features, and the environment reveals social as well as technological developments in hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies.

Born in the Great Depression and following Texas archeology and the TAS since I was a kid, I have witnessed and participated in the growth and changes over the past seventy years. My first encounter was with the very TAS pioneer generation who established the society, mentored by the second generation of professional archaeologists who established the first state-wide systematic chronological and regional frameworks, and a member of the third who began to fill in the gaps of knowledge across the state and challenge the established order, and passed the tourch to the current generations. Major changes in interpretative frameworks or paradigms have occurred during my life-time time and these were often driven by personalities among both professional and avocational fields. I will highlight some good archeological discoveries that has led to how we know what we know, and some bad mistakes along the way. Furthermore, the free reign of pay-digs across the state is destroying national register quality sites an enormous rate. With the now restrictive federal mandate that puts the clamp on the science of archaeology and the willful destruction of archaeological sites, the role of the TAS as a steward of the past becomes more important now than ever.