E. H. Schmiedlin

NOTES ON SOUTH TEXAS ARCHAEOLOGY 2002-2

Travels With Smitty and Bill: Archaeology in Karankaway Country

Thomas R. Hester

On March 27, 2002, Texas archaeology lost one of its most enthusiastic and active contributors. E. H. (Smitty) Schmiedlin was one of the founding members of the Southern Texas Ar­chaeological Association, long active in the Texas Archeological Society, and author of numerous archaeological studies (Figure 1).

At the STAA Quarterly Meeting on May 18, 2002, Smitty's memory was honored by the presentation of several papers dealing with the prehistory and early history of the central Gulf coastal plain, often referred to as "Karankaway Country" (Bedichek 1974). In their lectures, the presenters repeatedly called attention to the contributions of Smitty Schmiedlin to the ar­chaeology of this region. One speaker was Bill Birmingham, Smitty's long-time friend and collaborator. As I pointed out in my remarks at that meeting, "where Smitty went, you almost always saw Bill." To me, Smitty was the explorer, the contact-person, the persistent critic of agencies and archaeologists who failed to treat seriously the archaeology of the central coastal plain. Bill was the recorder, the meticulous keeper of notes and artifact catalogs. Bill is a fine excavator and craftsman of trowel-making; Smitty loved to work the screen and bring the beer. They were quite a team, and were jointly recognized by the STAA Avocational of the Year Award for 1998 (Figure 2).

On November 12, 1966, when I was a junior at The University of Texas at Austin, I gave a paper at the 37th annual meeting of the Texas Archeological Society, held at the Witte Museum in the same room in which we honored Smitty's memory on May 18. Unlike today's T AS meetings, there was only one session and a grand total of 12 papers were given. My talk was on "Evidence of the Paleo-Indian Period in Southwest Texas." After the talk, two fellows in their 30s approached me about sites in Victoria County, with photographs and specimens from sites like J-2 Ranch (see this volume). They were so eager to share their information and invited me to come down and let them show me "the sites." I did that off and on for 36 years, and never have/I traveled with better guides, hosts, and enthusiastic field companions.

Smitty and Bill kept tabs on some important Paleoindian sites in Victoria County. One of these is the Willeke site, a deeply buried terrace site on Coleto Creek. They, along with other Victoria avocationals, had done some testing at the site in the 1960s, and Gower and Golondrina were found near the base of the site. The Johnston-Heller site is on the Guadalupe River drainage, exposed by a deeply cut channel of Rocky Creek (Figure 3). It, too, is deeply buried in alluvium. Over the decades, Smitty and Bill have recorded a number of Paleoindian points and tools (Clovis, Golondrina, biface Clear Fork tools; see Birmingham and Hester 1976; Bour­bon 1997). They also carried out test excava­tions that provided information on the upper Archaic deposits at the site.

Smitty and Bill closely monitored 41 VT11, Mission Espiritu Santo's third location on the Guadalupe River above Victoria. For many years, they could only make brief forays into the brush-covered site, but they managed some mapping and basic recording. And, when new landowners permitted research, they got the Texas Historical Commission to the site, and later, facilitated the fieldwork by The University of Texas at Austin (1995) and the TAS field schools (1997-1998). Both made more contribu­tions to this research than can be related in the space allotted here (see Walter 2000). Suffice it to say that without Smitty and Bill, the work would never have begun. And during the period prior to the TAS field schools, while the land­owners built a new home, Smitty organized weekend "screening" events that led to the recovery of many important specimens from affected areas of the site periphery.

Smitty and Bill did not just record sites, or make collections from them, or publish them in La Tierra- they watched them like hawks. Many sites in Victoria and Goliad Counties today still survive because of their relationships with landowners. In 1997 STAA gave Smitty the 1996 Heizer Award for Outstanding Contributions to Archaeology, recognizing these and other efforts (see Figure 3).

Smitty and Bill also provided other entrees for scientific research, such as the work at 41 VT66 (the Burris site) by UT -Austin graduate student Jeff Huebner, and later, STAA field schools. Smitty greatly valued his appointment as a Steward for the Office of the State Archeol­ogist and worked very hard in this role. He, Kay Hindes and Bob Mallouf made many trips into the thorn brush of Garcitas Creek and its envi­rons in their on-going search for the first location of Mission Espiritu Santo.

In 1982, Bill and colleagues found a Scallorn-age cemetery on the DuPont property. Things were handled much better in those days when it came to such research, and a major site was studied, analyzed and published with the help of the people of Victoria and the DuPont Corporation (Huebner and Comuzzie 1992).

Occasionally, they strayed from their terri­tory. In 1969, Jim Corbin and I, with the encour­agement of Cecil A. Calhoun, launched an effort to test the Kirchmeyer Site, 41NU11-a clay dune on Oso Creek. We had applied to the Department of Anthropology at UT -Austin for $716 in student research funds, but were turned down. But thanks to the use of Dick Bowen's house as our "field camp," and Cecil and Smitty's hard work (Figure 4), we got the project done (Headrick 1993). Sometimes, I got Smitty and Bill to travel with me, as they did when Ken Brown and I worked at Baker Cave in Val Verde County in 1984 and 1985.

Smitty was highly vocal about his views on the importance of sites in Karankaway Country. He called the attention of the Texas Department of Transportation to the Smith Site, 4IDW270, near Yorktown, as he felt it had been largely written off for further work. Indeed, his "advocacy" got him banned from the site. Here, as in many other cases, to the regret of other federal, state, and local bureaucracies, had it not been for Smitty and for Bill, sites would surely have been lost. Both were active, and Bill continues to be so, on the seemingly never-ending 41 VT98 controversy (Buckeye Knoll, an Early Archaic cemetery excavated by Robert Ricklis on DuPont property near Victoria). Smitty raised hell, to put it mildly, with the Texas Historical Commission, the Corps of Engineers-Galveston (the contracting party), and anyone who would listen to him-while Bill set up meetings with DuPont, seeking to reason with them and to explain the tremendous significance ofthat site. I suspect that without their early intervention, in December 2001, that incredibly important and early cemetery would have been quickly and quietly reburied, without scientific study.

In closing, I would note one project that to me will forever epitomize the spirit of Smitty Schmiedlin. In August 1996, Falcon Lake on the Rio Grande was over 50 feet low. A team of archaeologists (from STAA, THC, TAS, and UT-Austin) and GPS experts (from the National Park Service) converged to do several days of site recording. The lake was so low that the only way to get to the sites was by boat. Our armada was mostly local fishing guides, but Smitty drove all the way from Victoria to Zapata with his boat. It was an important part of our trans­port up and down the lake. However, after one unfortunate incident-in which it nearly sank, along with UT-Austin's expensive EDM equipment-it became fondly known as "LaBelle II." Unlike the original LaBelle, it did not go under and no permanent damage occurred either to boat or skipper. Figure 5, showing Smitty, his boat, and its hardy crew, heading out onto Falcon Lake on an August morning, will always represent "Smitty" to me-heading not into the sunset, but into the dawn.

Bedichek, Roy
1974 Karankaway Country. 2nd Edition. The University of Texas Press, Austin.

Birmingham, William W. and Thomas R. Hester
1976 Late Pleistocene Archaeological Re­mains from the Johnston-Heller Site, Texas Coastal Plain. In Papers on Paleo-Indian Archaeology in Texas I.: 15-33. Special Report 3. Center for Archaeological Research, The Unier­sity of Texas at San Antonio.

Bourbon, Jacob T.
1997 Analysis of Artifacts from the Johnston-Heller Site, 41 VT15, Victo­ria County, in the Central Coastal Plain of Texas. Unpublished MA thesis, The University of Texas at Austin. 362 pp.

Headrick, Pamela
1993 The Archeology of 41NUll, The Kirchmeyer Site, Nueces County, Texas: Long-Term Utilization of a Coastal Clay Dune. Studies in Archeology 15. Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin.

Huebner, J. A. and A. G. Comuzzie
1992 The Archeology and Bioarcheology of Blue Bayou: A Late Archaic and Late Prehistoric Mortuary Locality in Vic­toria County, Texas. Studies in Archeology 9. Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin.

Walter, Tamara L.
2000 Archaeological Investigations at the Spanish Colonial Mission of Espiritu Santo de Zumga (41 VTll), Victoria County, Texas. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin. 258 pp.