Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

Texas Parks and Wildlife archaeologist, Chris Lintz, has to make decisions about artifacts from Texas’ distant past; the significance of these items varies.

09— You’re right that not every single artifact on the ground out there shares equal importance. The important ones are the ones that have context and integrity.

Soil surrounding artifacts provides context, and associating artifacts with integrity – or pristine surroundings—allows archaeologists to interpret past lifeways.

29— Archaeological sites that are buried and sealed by flood deposits contain artifacts related to a single time period and a single event. And those are the best kinds of sites that we would love to try to preserve. Those that occur on mountaintops and hilltops might have artifacts from the entire 11-thousand years of pre-history, and we can’t separate the different occupations out, so they’re very difficult to interpret and contribute to the scientific base of the area.

But Chris Lintz cannot do that if the public disturbs sites or remove artifacts from parks or Wildlife Management Areas.

14—Please leave them alone. Leave them in place. But we’d also appreciate if you’d go back and talk to the people managing the resource, because you never know what’s really going to be an important artifact that might help us interpret the resource we have out there.

That’s our show…For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.