Texas Tidbits: Prehistoric Texas

Granado Cave

On this very blog, I regularly write about Texas History. To me at least, it's a fascinating topic and I am always on the lookout for new sites that cover some kind of Texas History. Today, I bingo'ed when I found a site called Texas Beyond History. I have always been curious as to who lived in Texas thousands of years ago, before the Europeans and Indians from other parts of the New World made it into Texas and Prehistoric Texas filled in the blanks for me.what really got my attention about ancient peoples in general, was the discovery of human remains in Israel that are believed to be 200,000 years old. Enter my curiosity and Texas Beyond History, TBH courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin.

Yesterday, I published an article about the recent discovery of the biggest cave in the world in Viet Nam. That got me to thinking about the caves in Texas and the history associated with them,, Then, like a lightning bolt out of the blue, I found Texas Beyond History. Ask and ye shall receive! I navigated my way around the site in search of caves and I came up with a cave in the Rustler Hills of  West Texas called "Granado Cave". Following is what I learned.

For more than 1200 years, Indians in this area used Granado Cave as a seasonal or temporary home. These early inhabitants left behind a treasure trove of artifacts and evidence of the activities of their daily lives. For archeologists, "Granado Cave provides a window into the past and small glimpses of innovative and caring peoples trying to make a living in this harsh desert area. The cave's protective shelter and the region's dry climate have preserved fragile artifacts and other remains of prehistoric life that would not have survived in most other areas of the state".The early inhabitants of Granado Cave also left behind "fragments of meals, cooking "appliances," tools, mats and basketry. They also left haunting reminders of tragic events long ago—the deaths of loved ones."


Click on over and give the entire article a look-see. You'll find a wealth of information in such a short piece, but more importantly, you'll be able to visualize in your mind a movie of almost exactly what it was like to be one the Ancient Ones of West Texas. Your mental motion picture will take you through the daily lives of the Rustlers Hills people, or Castile culture, as they hunt and gather, prepare meals, weave baskets and shoes from local plants and other fascinating things that will make the movie playing in your thoughts as real as the people who performed these tasks so long ago.

This is Texas History.

Colorado Chronicles : The Ancient Ones

Some of the most stunning vistas in the world are in Colorado - Pike's Peak, Rocky Mountain National Park, Mesa Verde National Park....wait! Did I say Mesa Verde? Why, yes I did. Those stunning vistas I mentioned a few words back are truly astounding...villages built into the sides of sheer cliffs, indicating, for the times, an advanced civilization. Rock engravings, or petroglyphs,  and pictographs (rock drawings) on the stone walls of the village give us insights regarding the daily lives of these early Americans such as how they saw the world around them and what they hunted for food.

The story of the Ancient Ones is believed to have begun around 1200 B.C. They flourished for many years, then all of the sudden (or so it seems), disappeared. How and why the Anasazi suddenly vanished is a mystery still in need of a solution today. Although the Spanish explored the area in and around Mesa Verde (Spanish for "green table") in the 1700's, it appears that the first outsiders to see the cliff dwellings did so in the last half of the 19th Century. These magnificent structures were regularly vandalized, therefore in order to help protect them from such destruction, President Teddy Roosevelt declared Mesa Verde to become a National Park in 1906.

What an incredible, if not spiritual, place Mesa Verde is and it stands as a Monument to the ingenuity and engineering skills of The Ancient Ones.