Spearpoints and arrowheads are vivid emblems of the Indigenous past. But stone tools hardly tell the whole story. Across time, the vast majority of what Native peoples made and used was fashioned of fiber, as well as wood and bone. And these “perishable artifacts” have mostly been lost to time and the elements.
Yet there are exceptions – especially in arid regions like ours.
Lauren Bussiere is the head of collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, or TARL. She’s investigating more than 800 fiber artifacts collected in West Texas almost a century ago. Her project could shed new light on our region’s prehistory. It’s also opening new connections between her institution, which is charged with holding prehistoric artifacts, and the descendants of the people who made them.
“I picked a collection that not only is not super eye-catching,” Bussiere said, “that's why it's been here unstudied for so long – but also this part of Texas that is deeply overlooked. The question becomes: What can we do when we know so very little?”
The collection was excavated from five caves in the Rustler Hills, 70 miles northeast of Van Horn in Culberson County, in the 1930s. It was then deposited at TARL. At UT-Austin, TARL is Texas’s largest archeological repository, housing more than 50 million artifacts.
Though they might not have been glamorous, Bussiere knew these artifacts – which include sandals, nets and bits of cordage from bags and pouches – had stories to tell. Now she’s painstakingly measuring their dimensions, noting warp and weft and the ply of each fiber strand. She’s working to identify the plants from which fibers were made.
Stone tools dominate archeology in part because, unlike fiber artifacts, they’ve lasted in great numbers. But the neglect of fiber artifacts may also be about who made them. Fiber traditions were largely women’s domain, passed down from mothers to daughters.
One of the collection’s most poignant items is a child’s sandal, 6 inches long, with diminutive toe and heel straps. The sandal could capture the transmission of knowledge between generations.
“You can start to learn those skills from the time you're 2 years old,” Bussiere said, “so one of the questions I'm really interested to see if I can identify is, are there signs of novice handiwork in some of these really little sandals?”
The collection includes nets that were probably used to catch rabbits. They were fashioned with what’s called a “sheet bend knot.” Archeologists have found the same knot across the globe, including in a 10,000-year-old fishing net from Finland. It appears to be part of a truly ancient human inheritance.
“That is a survival technology that probably predates even those examples that we know of by tens, if not a hundred thousand years,” Bussiere said. “It's incredible to think about. And it's the same exact technique that is used on these nets in these sites.”
People returned to these caves for at least a millennium, up to 1450 CE. These were clearly meaningful places, Bussiere said.
And their resonance continues. Bussiere is planning a workshop at TARL in early 2027 with archeologists and a leading Native fiber artist. Participants will explore the artifacts and the continuity of Indigenous fiber traditions, and Bussiere is eager for members of descendant tribal communities to attend.
It will be the first such event at a Texas archeological repository.
“I mean, as an archeologist, it's difficult to get access to these collections,” Bussiere said, “much less as a descendant. This project is designed to open the doors of the repository and invite those people back in and connect them back to their heritage in meaningful ways.”
To register for updates on the workshop at TARL, click this link: https://utexas.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bKOQGWSaUcphi3c
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