Epitaph, the end of an era

It was several thousand years in the making, the Langtry. It was for man a series of steps in the halls of history, But it was only a inch or so of limestone dust to mark it's end. Like a toad turned to a princess the millenniums had witnessed the development of the graceful lines of a dart point of the early and middle eras of early man. As it was possible to place in the books of history the many faces this beautiful point had shown, it would seem that if evolution or development could be seen at the start it could be no less evident at the end. Yes the Langtry came to an end. The work of art that had evolved as man evolved had come to an end. But what kind of end? What had caused man to abandon what must surely have been the perfect point. What did the craftsman of several thousand years in the past discover that made him abandon it. The Pecos, even with the thousands of stone artifacts recovered from the Zueberbueler shelter, can not offer a suggestion. It can only tell of what was found to replace it. There was a mystery at the site, the era that marked the passing of the Langtry was missing. All that marked the event was a band of dust. Below the line in the wall, of the excavations, the Langtry had been telling her story, above the line, it was obvious man had abandoned the site for some unknown reason. For how long, is unknown, but he did return. Was this man that returned the same as the one that left? Obviously no, but still the other crafts had not changed. The forms of weaving, the tools, the painting of the shelter walls continued without apparent change. There are any number of theories one could dream up. If it were man of the twentieth century we were researching, such terms as war, famine, disease, are but a few. But there is one possibility the Pecos can offer. The Zueberbueler shelter was not the only location where man had lived, disappeared and then returned. A thousand miles to the east, along the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico, man also flourished during the Archaic period. Here to he was leaving his mark in the sands, the beach sands, of time. The Pecos invested twenty plus years in the learning of how man in this area had developed during the later part of the Archaic era. Here it was not the recovery of fiber, bone or wood that helped tell their story, it was clay. Here among the sand dunes and along the river banks the excavations would tell the same story as was seen in the caves of west Texas. Man had disappeared, only to return with his crafts changed. If the visitor has been to the display on art and visited the page on "clay use" you have met the early residents of the Gulf Coast. In the future we hope that more will be added to this display, the history of pottery in America. The story of clay use and pottery of early man will have more displays added, as we expand the Museum. It was clear that man had been forced to leave the sites of the coast. The pit worked by the Pecos, in the delta area of south Mississippi, showed man had been compelled to leave. At a site, where it was common to find the evidence of man's presence completely undisturbed, cooking hearths, trash, flint working sites, as man last used them, a story was offered. At a time that paralleled the last era of the Langtry, between three and four thousand years BP, the habitation zone of man had been disrupted, as if a great surge of power had swept though it. This was very clear by the condition the artifacts were recovered in, that and the several feet of silt that lay above them. It was on this layer of silt that man returned. As the Texas site told of change so did the Mississippi site. It would be easy to suggest that a great storm surge had swept over the coastal site. But this same surge would not have forced man of west Texas to abandon his home of several millennium.

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