Digging into our past: Archeology group will celebrate 25 years of unearthing local history

The Hill Country Archeological Association is celebrating 25 years. HCAA will host an anniversary celebration at the Riverside Nature Center, 150 Francisco Lemos St. at 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 21, offering demonstrations in flintknapping, cording, paintmaking and atlatl throwing.

A variety of children’s activities will also be availble, including stone painting, artifact finding and a cave wall to decorate.

Cake and other refreshments will be offered. All proceeds from hourly raffles and a silent auction will benefit HCAA and its work to document and preserve our history.

In 1999, Robert “Bobby” Rector formed a group of 14 amateur and professional archeologists in Kerr County. Their first field site was on the banks of the Guadalupe River at Kerrville-Schreiner Park. Since then, the association has grown to 100 members, about half them Kerr County locals.

“We are one of the most active avocational archeology organizations in the state,” said Mike McBride, past president of HCAA. “There’s over a dozen regional societies like us, but we are very active working with the local landowners to do archeological surveys and research on their land. We’re also very active in public outreach and education.”

The association does all of its own analysis, documentation and publishing, which helps to make their discoveries readily available to the public.

HCAA’s current fieldwork — a large project they’ve been working on for the past six years — is on Crying Woman Ranch, which sits on the North Fork of the Guadalupe River.

“What this project has shown is evidence of some of the oldest Native American occupation in the Hill Country,” McBride said. “Some of the radio carbon dating that we have on bones and campfire charcoal at the site are greater than 10,000 years old.”

The recent excavation of cooking hearths at the site show how Paleo Indians changed their eating habits and learned to cook existing plants, allowing for a more stable society as they began to move away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

“A big part of what we do is help landowners understand the significance of whatever land they’ve got, and helping them preserve it. Anything we take from the land goes back to the landowner,” McBride said.

HCAA has also recovered several types of projectile points and stone tools, such as arrowheads and spears, from the site. These artifacts help them understand which groups of ancient foragers most likely camped at Crying Woman Ranch.

“The creation of stone tools was a requisite for civilization. It allowed organized groups to survive,” McBride said.

Flintknapping, or the reproduction of these stone tools, will be demonstrated at the Sept. 21 anniversary celebration.

“The techniques involved in creating these tools have not changed in human history. It’s the same technology that has been a part of human development for millennia,” McBride said.

To learn more about the Hill Country Archeological Association, visit www.hcarcheology.org or email connect@hcarcheology.org.

This article was originally published in the Sept. 14, 2024 edition of The Kerrville Daily Times