Archaeology on the Comanche National Grasslands

Today hikers, tourists and nature enthusiasts are the only denizens of the Comanche National Grasslands. But for the last several centuries it's namesakes, the Comanche lived there. You can still find the stone rings from teepees scattered across the landscape. Before them were the Apache. The Comanche pushed them south during the 18th century. When the Spanish explorers came through the area during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Apache were the people that they would have encountered in the region. Before the Apache, a people that archaeologists call the Apishipa -we have no record of what they called themselves- farmed and hunted across the prairies. They lived in semi-permenant campsites, moving with the seasons. They lived in rock shelters near rivers at on the floors of canyons that run like folds across the landscape. ​The Apishipa culture developed around A.D. 1050, and remained for three and a half centuries before the Apache surplanted them around the year 1400. 

I spent a week there in August of 2015 as part of an archaeological crew with PaleoCultural Research Group, a nonprofit. There were about fifteen of us, far fewer than the windswept forest service campsite was meant to accomodate. I pitched my tent in the half-shade of a rotting wooden fence. The lone tree at the east end of camp had already been claimed by three other tents. Staking my tent down proved a challenge, the ground was so pockmarked by rodent burrows. While I had come inspired by images of the Comanche, Apache, and Apishipa roaming the landscape, we were there to investigate a much earlier site. The site had been affectionately christened "The Dry Creek Site," which was unsurprisingly due to the old dusty riverbed that cut through the field on which we worked. It dated to around A.D. 400, which probably made it one of the first archaeological examples in the region after archery and pottery spread west from the Mississippi. 

The site had been discovered on an old forest service dirt road winding across the prairie, when potsherds and flakes from stone tools began to erode out of the banks. 

It was hot enough that the air shimmered over the distant hills, and the grass grew in patches around a soil as dry as sand. We worked without shade, boring down in a scattered set of grid units, hoping to find hearths from the ancient ground's surface (which was a few feet lower than the modern surface). The dig proved less fruitful than we had hoped. There were no bones, no ceramics, only a handful of stone tools and a couple patches of charcoal from ancient fires. Still, I remember imagining, as I stood over one of those dark stains, what it would have been like to sit with my family around that fire, dressed in animal skins, as a storm flicked lightning along the distant horizon. 

The dig was made more exciting by the discovery that tarantulas live on the grassland. They were not molting when the excavations took place, meaning that they spent most of their time underground in partially collapsed burrows. There were several instances of excavators suddenly yelping and jumping out of their grid units, having just realized that the abandoned rodent runs they thought they were digging through were occupied tarantula nests.

​There is an austerity to harsh landscapes that captures me in a way green medows and mountain streams cannot. The Comanche National Grassland is a hot, dry, treeless place. Distant mountains and canyons taunt the eye through waves of heat, or hide just beyond the horizon. Cacti, dust, sunburns, each of them a small jab that forces a presence of mind too easily abandoned.