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Meanwhile, in Texas: A Conversation with Dr. Bryon Schroeder - Ep 15
495 Plays6 years ago
On this episode of A Life in Ruins Podcast, we interview Dr. Bryon Schroeder. Dr. Schroeder is currently the director of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas. We discuss his early years "hunting" with his father and talk about both his thesis and dissertation research. We then transition into a crazy story involving paper mache, human bodies and terrible Texas laws.
Links
- Dr. Schroder
- Email: bryon.schroeder@sulross.edu
- Center for Big Bend Studies
- Website: https://cbbs.sulross.edu/index.php
- Faebook: http://www.facebook.com/CenterForBigBendStudies
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 15
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Do you think I could rock a Viking linen shirt in the field this season?
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to episode 15 of A Life in Ruins podcast. I'm your host, Carlton Gover. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Connor, the face tattooed Jonin and David Howe.
Introducing Dr. Brian Schroeder
00:00:27
Speaker
Our guest tonight is Dr. Brian Schroeder, who is currently the director of the Center for Big Ben Studies at Soul Ross University in Alpine, Texas, the Scholastic powerhouse of West Texas.
00:00:40
Speaker
He received his undergraduate and master's degree from the University of Wyoming and received his PhD from the University of Montana. Connor is extra excited for Brian to be on the show as Brian was one of the graduate assistants for his field school and helped him fall in love with archaeology. How cute!
00:00:58
Speaker
Brian has extensive experience in Wyoming archaeology, high altitude archaeology, and now extensive work in cave excavations in West Texas. He's now working on some super interesting research stemming from his excavations in Texas. We are so excited to have him on the podcast and to have him embarrass Connor. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Schroeder. How are you doing?
Challenges of Directorship and Texas Archaeology
00:01:21
Speaker
I'm great. Thanks for having me.
00:01:22
Speaker
No problem. If you don't mind, we'll start off by just introducing, I mean, we have that intro part, but introducing who you are and what you do as the director of the Center for Big Ben Studies. Well, I guess my name is Brian Schroeder, as you said, I'm the current director for the Center for Big Ben Studies. I have only been the director for about a little over two weeks now. So it's a new
00:01:50
Speaker
role for me. But in that role, I craft the research that we do here. I'm sort of the de facto head of the department, but I'm the only one who teaches so I just have to keep myself in check. And which isn't always easy to do. And I'm the lead fundraiser and we're pretty unique in that we have access to huge private ranches and
00:02:18
Speaker
We're allowed to research whatever we want on those ranches. We have literally 13,000 years of prehistory that we can do whatever we want with. I'm trying to keep that in check because I also have to fundraise. There's a financial side and a research side, and trying to make those two meet is really my day-to-day. You've figured that all out in two weeks, I'm assuming?
00:02:47
Speaker
We got it. We're on the road to success right now. I have a
Integrating into Texan Culture
00:02:55
Speaker
small staff and I have to keep them happy and they have their own pet interests. I'm not from Texas and there's a lot of, let's say... Xenophobia. Yes.
00:03:12
Speaker
I'm sort of an outsider to Texas archaeology. For the most part, everybody's very accommodating, but I still feel like I'm approached with a little bit of suspicion, like, well, you're not Texan. My partner's from Texas, and she's always talking about Texas, Texas, Texas. I'm like, what is so special about a failed state than part of a failed rebellion?
00:03:38
Speaker
Well, even in Texas, there's a incredible and this is like, in no way, like, meant to be condescending or anything. But there's a special and fierce love for West Texas in particular. But there's an even more diehard love for far West Texas. And this is a place where very few people are from, but then they move here and it becomes theirs. And they're like fiercely depend, they're like fiercely, not dependent, but fiercely
00:04:06
Speaker
like protective of this place, which is kind of interesting and it can make things rewarding. Interesting. Like far West Texas being like New Mexico, basically. They would never claim that. Like we were just talking with, I was just talking with some folks recently that aren't from here and West Texas seems to stop at Odessa in Midland and then two hours, we're two hours south of that and
00:04:35
Speaker
We're our own thing that's really the most famous for the art community in Marfa. And it's got huge installations from Donald Judd and that he made it really, really famous. So there's a huge art community, but other than that, I mean, that's why people are here. So, yeah. I just pictured Josh Brillen sitting on his porch, spitting into something. It's actually filmed on the ranch that I do most of my research. Oh, really?
00:05:07
Speaker
That's not an inappropriate stereotype to have. Speaking of a ranch is here a Wyoming boy.
Dr. Schroeder's Wyoming Roots
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah. You want to tell us a little about that? Yeah, I was raised in Wyoming and Casper. And I really never had any intention of leaving. Definitely didn't see myself moving to Texas, but I guess just like that Texans are fiercely protective.
00:05:37
Speaker
of Far West Texas. I'm the same way with Wyoming, but unlike, I guess, the love for Texas, I don't really know what I'm defending in Wyoming. I guess I love the scenery and the archaeology. It was a great place to be raised, a great place to get interested in archaeology, but I don't think I'd want to live there full time.
00:05:59
Speaker
Yeah, I remember you telling me about some of your childhood because you said that you, you and your father would go hunting, right? And you wouldn't be super good at the hunting part because you were looking for artifacts. Yeah, I never, I was a lousy hunter. My dad got so upset at me every single time we went because he, there was one time he pointed out a bunch of deer and said, do you see him? And I was like,
00:06:27
Speaker
I don't, but I see that arrowhead right there pointing at it and he was, we're hunting. There's an arrowhead right there, so that's really cool. Yeah, I mean, that's all I did. As a kid, I will absolutely admit it. I was a hardcore surface collector in Wyoming. I don't have a big collection by any means, but that was definitely my pastime.
00:06:57
Speaker
made me really bad at hiking and hunting and all the things that your dad wanted to do. So your face is just constantly at the ground? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're constantly behind all your friends when you're backpacking. You're like, no, I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming. There's just a sight back there. Oh, I'm just out of breath. That's why I'm way in the back. But yeah, I was up doing that. So you went to, I guess, your undergrad and master's at UW, right?
00:07:26
Speaker
Yeah, I did both of those at the University of Wyoming. Yeah, I did. I came from, no one in my family had gone to college. So I started at the community college in Casper and knew I wanted to do archaeology, and then kind of did two years at Casper College, and then I thought I would just keep doing the cultural resource management stuff.
00:07:53
Speaker
And then I never really had any end goal. Like I never had, definitely didn't have a PhD in mind, didn't really have grad school mind. It just kind of kept evolving as I kind of kept going through cultural resource management. Now, since you spent quite some time in Wyoming, do you have a Bob Kelly impression? My Bob Kelly impression would be abject silence.
00:08:26
Speaker
I just remember sitting there and staring at the hamster pitcher in his office while he sat there and looked out the window and I thought I had just insulted the man. Every time I had a question, I thought, I just said the dumbest thing in the world. And he would just sit there and he would just stare out the window.
00:08:45
Speaker
and kind of play with his beard and stare at the hamster and go, yes.
00:08:55
Speaker
I think you should do that. So for listeners, Robert L. Kelly, who's a famous archaeologist, is really thoughtful when he speaks and really thinks about his answer. And there's kind of this running joke of his students of you get to know all the books on his bookshelf while you wait for him to respond for that reason.
00:09:17
Speaker
ask him something and he just sits there like what Dr. Schroeder was saying, just he just strokes his beard and looks out the window or looks up and he just kind of sit there for like a minute or two, like, what the hell did I get myself into? And you're just kind of staring off, looking at the books on his shelf or the hamster picture. He's looking ahead from one of the rings. It just like takes forever to say something.
00:09:38
Speaker
It's amazing. I got really familiar with
Wyoming's Archaeological Significance
00:09:41
Speaker
the picture of his kids on his desk because I would always like kind of like look over there. But yeah, God, I love Bob. I miss him. Not coming from that background. I always just thought I just insulted him. I just wasted. I'm sorry. I'll take it back. I can leave. I can get out of here.
00:09:59
Speaker
I was sitting in his office one time trying to ask him about like my thesis was like my first year there. And I didn't know like that's what he did. So he just like said, I asked him something like, do you think that's a good idea? And then he like went, Hmm.
00:10:15
Speaker
turned around, looked out the window and there was like 30 seconds to a minute of just awkward silence. And then he turns back around and looks at me and he's like, what were we talking about? And I was like, Oh my God, this is brutal. He did that to me once too. And said, look at this car down here. This car is stuck.
00:10:35
Speaker
And I was like, oh, okay, I can just leave. I'll just leave. There was, there was, I was a TA my first semester at Wyoming for my masters. And I was at the classroom building and he too went to the anthro department, but you know, there's that cafe there and I went and got a sandwich. And I was walking back, the waterman had busted and Bob was just standing there, like staring at it with this big grin on his face. I was like, what's up, Dr. Kelly? He goes,
00:11:16
Speaker
Speaking of University of Wyoming, you also did some field work with Dr. Todd Surivel at the University of Wyoming. Is that correct? Yes. So his famous site, Dr. Surivel, that he published on his dissertation on, I think, or at least part of it, is Barger Gulch. And you actually worked there. You had a good time there, I hear.
00:11:27
Speaker
I don't think they meant to do that. And he's just smiling. And I was like, okay. It just kind of kept walking. And he was just fascinated. It was amazing.
00:11:46
Speaker
I spent, I believe 30 days there and helped Dr. Matty O'Brien now. I think he's in California. Yeah, he's at Chico. Yeah, at Chico and helped them set up the site. And it was the first five days where I'd never dug with a university. So it was my first time out and Todd asked me,
00:12:12
Speaker
because I had done a lot of consulting work up to that point. And Todd asked me, have you ever dug with a trowel? Yeah, yeah, I have one, I own one. It was a very interesting site. Yeah, there was a lot of a lot of the first cohort for PhD students at Wyoming were there. Patrick Mullen was there. That was interesting. And he ended up
00:12:40
Speaker
I think he ended up dying in a car crash in Alaska. And it was just a really, yeah, it was a really, it was a chaotic field session, but everybody there is teaching somewhere now. I mean, it was really, yeah, it was, I don't know, but there's a lot of stories there, but I don't really want to get into it or incriminate it. Yeah, I heard the after hours entertainment was especially good.
00:13:05
Speaker
especially good yes that's a fantastic way of putting it was it was always entertaining Todd had some very bizarre games he really likes golfing in the prairie there was a lot of golf and then there was a horseshoes but then it blended into I can't even remember what they called it but it was just you take the horseshoes and he'd have these like
00:13:28
Speaker
courses golf courses lined out and he would throw the horseshoes like you were golfing and he was just throwing the horseshoes until he got to the hole and people obviously threw out their shoulders all the time. It sounds like a rancher version of frisbee golf. I don't remember what he called it. It was yeah it was it was chaos and we didn't find
00:13:55
Speaker
Any archaeology, we found nothing, which was great for Todd because he had planted. He thought that they were central. They thought he thought that they were false structures. So he picked areas that should have been outside of the structures.
00:14:12
Speaker
And they were, which was fantastic for him. But yeah, we didn't, we didn't find a little heart wrenching and, or everybody was promised balsam points. Yeah. We got to hear about the years of amazing balsam stuff they had found. And I think, I think we found like 15 flakes that summer.
00:14:33
Speaker
And as quick as possible, can you explain like what Barger Gulch was, like why it's a famous site? Uh, it's a single occupation, a fulsome site and it's really shallowly, shallowly buried. So it's all fulsome and it's parked on top of a shirt formation, a troublesome shirt formation. So you get a really good expression of fulsome stuff there. And there seems to be fulsome structures there, just like the Mountaineer site. So.
00:15:02
Speaker
you have fulsome activity areas associated with probably structures and the hearth had eroded away. So they were using that based off of burn lithics. So some really cool stuff happening there and kind of an innovative way to figure it out. So cool. Yeah.
00:15:24
Speaker
And for our listeners, Folsom is an archeological culture. It's the second or third oldest, depending on which department you're in, in the country. And it was actually the first, and it's based on projectile points, spear points. There's a beautiful flute in the middle of them. And it was actually what confirmed that people were here with megafauna, because they were found and associated with some extinct bison antiguests, which are very large bison.
00:15:49
Speaker
And it kind of revolutionized how we thought of peopling in the Americas for its time. And since then, we've found Clovis, which is also a different projectile point. And then there are these Western stem points that are the cause of some fiery debates at SAAs now. But with that, it looks like we have a couple angry ranchers who are looking for shoes for their horses. We're going to get this wrapped up. We'll be back with segment two here in a moment. That could have been better. I'm trying to tie it back, dude. God damn it.
00:16:19
Speaker
Welcome back to segment two of episode 15 of a life in ruins podcast for the audience that might not be aware, Wyoming. And the reason why a lot of us go there for graduate school is it's like a giant, just Jurassic park of archeology and prehistory. Like the whole state is just littered with archeology and just geographic features. So it's just an awesome place to do archeology. Connor has a question for Brian cause they used to work together in the field, right?
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah, unfortunately, um, for him, of course. So when, uh, you had mentioned earlier that you, uh, you would go hunting and kind of with your father and you weren't very good at it because you liked looking for artifacts and you were nearby kind of the site that you did your, your master's research when you were doing that, right? Uh, yeah, I was looking for a site related to what I was doing my master's research on. Yeah.
00:17:16
Speaker
Oh, cool. So could you explain what the Shirley Basin site is in 10 words or less?
Unique Prehistoric Sites in Wyoming
00:17:25
Speaker
Really cool. The Shirley Basin site, it's a huge, huge prehistoric camp. I don't even know what the final limits of it ended up being, but what's really neat about it in particular is that on a small part of this giant
00:17:45
Speaker
site that takes up acres. I mean, it's a monster site littered with tons of occupational debris are these coarse structures that they're circular, summer square, but they're really stacked and they're really unique in the Wyoming landscape. There's a lot of single-core stone circles that a lot of people think are teepee rings and
00:18:13
Speaker
I would say that, you know, some are, some aren't. But this in particular, these are these really funky course things. And the site, the reason I, well, we were really near it when I was hunting with my dad as a kid, and I didn't know, I honestly didn't know that. And when I was doing my master's research, I did it on defensive sites in Wyoming, really late period, contact period, indigenous fortifications. And
00:18:41
Speaker
Uh, this site, the Shirley Basin Lodge site had been always talked about as being because of these walls, uh, a part of that fortification sites in Wyoming. And I was trying to find it and the location data for it was wrong. So I kind of gave up and said, you know what? I haven't been back to that site that we went to, that we found when, you know, we were hunting, when I was hunting with my dad and I went back there and accidentally stumbled across the Shirley Basin site and had the pictures with me and was like, no way.
00:19:10
Speaker
This is exactly what I was looking for. So it was really serendipitous. And I think I ended up working there for a long time, at least over five years.
00:19:24
Speaker
Yeah. A lot of field sessions, at least one of mine, uh, one of my, uh, field school sessions was there and you weren't joking. This is a, it was like crazy to walk through. And when you're describing the courses, courses are folks who might not know are, um, they're just different stacks of rocks. Uh, so one course being just a single stack of rocks, multiple courses are these kind of, um,
00:19:50
Speaker
They almost look like larger white man's fires. Is that accurate? Yeah, I would say they almost look like pueblo structures, except without masonry. They're these stacked houses, stone houses. And that site was actually recorded by Dr. Frison in 1967. And that's what they call them stone houses. They look like rectangular stone
00:20:16
Speaker
houses circular. So the Shirley Basin site was excavated over a July 4th weekend by Dr. Frison, is that correct? Yeah, yeah, it was a long weekend, three days. And it was the first it was the first collaborative effort from the Amateur Archaeological Society, the Wyoming Archaeological Society and the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist. So it was one of the first
00:20:43
Speaker
things where they came together and it was brought to the attention of Dr. Frison by a collector named Lucy. And yeah, they went out there over July 4th weekend and excavated. They found 21 of those coursed structures and they dug 17 of them and said that they were going to keep three for future researchers. And when we went out there, part of our work was focused on exactly what happened because
00:21:12
Speaker
there are no notes for the site. And it was a little bit hard to figure out what they did because they stored the artifacts in the basement of the arts and science building. And there was a pipe burst and all of the boxes melted together. So there's like zero context. Yeah, there was like zero. Everything just melted together. And it was like somebody went back and
00:21:37
Speaker
said. Yeah, this is what came from that one. And this is what's came from that one. And there was like concrete nails and stuff. It's like they shoveled stuff into boxes. And so we were trying to part of part of why we were there when we went is to figure out if we could find anything left.
00:21:55
Speaker
Anything that was in, Oh yeah, we found some things. You were also working with Dr. Richard Adams at high rise village and the wind river range. Is that, is that correct? Yeah. Yep.
00:22:15
Speaker
That's it, and I did a part of our, another segment of our field school was spent up there. This site is like, is it 11,000 feet or 10,000 feet? It's 10,200 to 11,000 feet, yeah. Yeah, and it's this kind of similar arrangement as the Shirley Basin site. You have these kind of, they're less obvious, less coerced.
00:22:43
Speaker
Um, then the Shirley basin site, but you have this kind of large, um, housing apartment complex, almost at 11 or 10 to 11,000 feet. Yeah. That is correct. Yeah. That is the end of my thought. Um, and that kind of, that was kind of similarities and your interest in high altitude archeology kind of led into your dissertation, right? Yeah. My.
00:23:14
Speaker
I mean, the sites are really similar. And there's this pervasive idea, especially in late in Wyoming archaeology, about this stuff being part of the Shoshonian migration out of California. And that always intrigued me. And I was always taught it. And I always thought, I mean, that's really neat that you could associate these artifacts with a specific ethnic group. And that's sort of what sparked everything. And
00:23:43
Speaker
I mean, there are obvious similarities in all of the tools and those structures at the two sites. I mean, there's real overlap. There's a lot of brownware pottery, and the arrowheads they're making are the same, and a lot of the same stone tools show up. So I started thinking, and my dissertation was very simple, is this part of a seasonal migration where they use the lowlands like Shirley Basin for a portion of the year, and high-rise village represents
00:24:13
Speaker
the high altitude portion of this and Shirley Basin represents the sort of the lower elevation adaptation by this similar group was kind of how I saw the overlap, which is a nice idea of an incredibly hard to prove is what I found out.
00:24:32
Speaker
It's only separated by, and you said these sites are like how many miles apart from each other? They're like 138 miles apart. So it's within. Theoretical kind of walking distance. And I think that there's a horse component to it too. I think that those, I think those groups probably using the, I think even at high rise village that horse, if it wasn't involved, it was like the last
00:25:02
Speaker
throws of not using it for increased mobility. The problem with high-rise villages is that all the radiocarbon dates are really hard to get. There's just no way to really radiocarbon date that site because that alpine environment preserves stuff too well. All of the wood they were burning is too old, so you get really old dates. There's just no way to really figure out the temporal overlap of them.
00:25:33
Speaker
We were, I think this is topical and it might be a little late for it, but what, didn't you post a map earlier, Carlton, about the horse kind of introduction?
Impact of Horses on Indigenous Cultures
00:25:42
Speaker
Yes, I did Connor. I did that. I did that today. I am this semester. I'm a research assistant for Dr. Will Taylor and his thing is horses. He worked with Todd in Mongolia, Todd Servo actually.
00:25:56
Speaker
I was at Boulder and he was like, read this book and gave me this big old book on Native American bridles and saddles and stuff. And then one of those maps was distribution of horses, which is not, I don't know a thing about horses that's out of my wheelhouse. So I'm just kind of learning all this stuff.
00:26:18
Speaker
But the map I am told is not like the mainstream or whatever, but it appears to actually be supported by current radiocarbon dates coming out of horse buns. But anyways, it shows horse distribution based on indigenous oral histories, as well as European accounts. And it's multiple data used to end it. And so basically why people are skeptical of this map is it shows horses earlier than previously thought. Now, of course, not earlier than 1492. That'd be frickin' ridiculous.
00:26:47
Speaker
Uh, but it just kind of shows like, yeah, you know, wasn't really the Pueblo. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So it basically just shows a lot of these tribes got horses earlier than we thought. And it wasn't just really the Pueblo revolts that really released them, but you know, people lose stuff and it's, you know, when you have hundreds of horses, a couple kind of wander away and
00:27:05
Speaker
During those trade networks back then, the new all-terrain animal that shows up, it's going to get spread pretty quickly. The relationships between tribes, like if you think Comanche and Shoshone, the related Pawnee or Rickor, they're trading with their neighbors and their allies and their families, so horses actually spread rather.
00:27:23
Speaker
rather quickly. Yeah. So yes, Connor, to answer your story, I shared a map today. Well, it says I was reading that and it looked like it did estimated like 1640 for the East Eastern Shoshone is what they have current Eastern Shoshone command. Yeah. So which is I mean, an interesting so this I'm trying to think of one of the radio carbon dates do they fall on that kind of
00:27:50
Speaker
area, Brian, are they a little? Yeah, well, Shirley Basin is that old. But the high rise village is the only date that's been rejected by everybody else who went up there was the date that dates to that period, which I think is the only date that's right. But I lost that date. So that that's, that's a whole other story. Yeah, but I mean, that's what I thought that there were a way to do it. And they just see really weird, you see,
00:28:20
Speaker
different. I mean, you just see there's huge amount of, um, tiger shirt up at high rise. And you see, you start to see soapstone get moved around. And I think, as you know, soapstone bowls are incredibly heavy. So you're not lugging those around. You're, you're, you're using something to move those around. And my thinking was that there were soapstone bowls down at Shirley basin. And there was a lot of the church from the mountains that Shirley basin, uh, initially in the sixties,
00:28:50
Speaker
And we would find that stuff, but we did not find that stuff. We found a whole nother conundrum as it was. Isn't it interesting? We did. Speaking of finding that stuff, did you go up into the mountains with Connor on his llama adventure? Was that you? I did not go with Connor's llama adventure, but it wasn't because I didn't want to. That's what he says. Okay. I thought maybe that was you.
00:29:19
Speaker
We did spend time in the mountains together at high rise, obviously, um, being a horse supported, which is like a whole nother kind of field work. Yes. We did. Uh, we went to the Tetons. Yeah.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Some broke back mountain level archeology going on. We skipped, we skipped the chair lift to the top. They didn't find artifacts, but they found love.
00:29:59
Speaker
All right. Well, that's, that's fun. Okay. Uh, let's, let's wrap this up when she pumped the brakes while we can and I'll take it in session 30. Welcome back.
00:30:16
Speaker
This is episode 15 of a life in ruins podcast. Uh, we're talking to Dr. Brian Schroeder and I want to start this section. I'm kind of talking about your current research while the giggling minstrels in the back keep giggling. So you had texted me at some point telling me about something you had found in someone's house. If you want to elaborate.
Discovering Human Remains in Texas
00:30:37
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, I can give you a little backstory to that too. And bringing, bringing up there, I got hired here to research on
00:30:44
Speaker
one of the ranches, one of a large private ranch, it's 70,000 acres. And the landowner has a large cave system, and no professional archaeologist had ever been to that cave system. But it's very obvious that had been looted for no one knew how long. So my research goals were to sort of
00:31:09
Speaker
one, figure out the history, see if there was anything left to do at the site, because it looks, I mean, it looks like a moonscape. You can tell people have been digging it for decades. And it was one of the few sites in Texas that has a trinomial, especially in West Texas, it costs money. So not a lot of professionals get registered the sites with the state of Texas. So this one had one. And that's sort of
00:31:39
Speaker
led me down a rabbit hole where I ended up finding out that among very many stories that I could tell you but one of the one that you're alluding to is there were four burials that were taken out of the cave one in 1960 and then two in well two in 1952 one in 1960 and then one in 1968 and the one in 1968 ended up in a private collection and that's
00:32:07
Speaker
I ended up calling everybody in the phone book with that particular person's last name to see if I could find that individual, and I found them, and I ended up finding out that they had donated the human remains, and they thought, but one of the other collectors had kept them, and the human remains are still in this private collection, and I still don't really know how to talk about it other than
00:32:35
Speaker
I relocated those human remains and they're in a fake paper mache cave behind a fake wall in a basically private house. And that's not where I thought this research in the ground would lead me. I thought we would be doing our own research and I certainly didn't think that we'd be tracking human burials into somebody's house. But I think that made it much more worthwhile.
00:33:02
Speaker
So part of that research was just figuring, like authenticating it, making sure it was associated with the site, and then starting a dialogue with what the person's, what is your end goal with these remains? What are your intentions? Exactly. Like, what are we doing here? And that's very much ongoing and, as you can imagine, pretty delicate. Yeah, to put it lightly.
00:33:31
Speaker
So they, they eventually, you did get permission from this person to research, research the body or the remains. Right. I got permission to initially come and look at them. They denied even owning them for about a year and a half. And, uh, I would call once a month and just say, Hey, look, I have paperwork that says that you have them. Do you have them? And.
00:33:59
Speaker
I got no every single time. And then I did my monthly call one time and they just said, you're not going to give up, are you? I was like, I'm not. Do you have them? And they said, yeah, yeah, I have them. And I was like, great. Can I come just see if it's what I think came out of the cave? Because I had a picture of them in front of the cave, the remains. And I went up there and she
00:34:29
Speaker
didn't seem that interested in me seeing them for about an hour and a half. And I thought that, well, maybe this isn't going to happen. And then it sort of switched. And she had mentioned that they were upstairs and they weren't, they were downstairs. And it's kind of a really weird, I mean, beyond owning the remains, she herself feels a real, cause they've owned them for over 50 years. She feels a real connection with these remains too.
00:34:58
Speaker
So they're Native American remains and I was given access to them but they're also part of this like family collection and they feel like they've taken care of them really well for half a century. So you have to also talk to that side of them the equation which was they don't they don't really teach you that in grad school.
00:35:25
Speaker
No, I don't think there's a class on that. I didn't want to be judgmental because the landowner who owned the cave, it was made it a paid to dig cave. For most of this history, he would charge B and you could come collect anything you wanted out of the cave. And that's 100% legal in Texas because of the private laws here. And we can sort of pass
00:35:53
Speaker
judgment on that, and I think we should, but how you can alienate them. If somebody had come to you in 1952, a world archaeologist, and said, hey, there's this cave on my land, and you can dig, dig it, and whatever you find is yours. I don't know if in 1952, I would have said no. Now, finding human remains, I definitely wanted to kept them and made a fake cave and put them in my house. But I don't know that I would have
00:36:22
Speaker
said no to that equation otherwise. So it's a really sticky situation. And I sort of know what I want the end goal to be. And I would like to get them out of the collection. And I'd like to get them back into the cave. And I'd like to do that in consultation with native groups. But at the same time, you sort of have to acknowledge that there's this these private property rights here, which
00:36:51
Speaker
it's not a great situation. And maybe the compromise, whatever happens, I don't think it's going to be a best case for any of us. So yeah, for the audience listening, we talked about a NAGPRA a couple podcasts ago, and maybe it's different in Texas, but in the rest of the country, it's highly frowned upon and more or less illegal to, to keep human remains in your private collection. It depends on
00:37:20
Speaker
State law varies, but either way, it's not really ethical. It's also just, I mean, yeah, just weird. Like those belong, they're not, you have a human body, like someone in your house that's like, it's just weird. Don't do that. This is a dry cave too, so they're fully fleshed. I mean, they're desiccated. Oh, yeah. They're mummies. Oh my God.
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah, they have fingernails, they have hair, they're fully fleshed, which to me makes it even weirder. And the collectors that didn't want to keep it, they wanted to donate it to a museum in San Antonio. The fact that they were so well preserved was, I mean, it was the line in the sand for them. They were, it really affected them, but not the person who owns it. And she's
00:38:18
Speaker
very candid about talking about that. So the museum was like, no, we don't want to? Well, no, that what actually happened was the person lied. They gave it to a student. Well, there's actually two sets of remains. And the one that we're talking about that's in a private collection, that one, the brothers just took it back with them. And they kept it and passed it through the family. It's been through several generations of brothers and
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah, that one's that one's another thing. But there was another one, the one that was supposed to go to the witty in San Antonio, that one, the guy who said he would take it there and said he had the connection kept it. And then he trafficked it on the black market. He sold it out of the back of a shotgun magazine to a buyer in Palm Springs, California. And that person in Palm Springs, California got busted 10 years after buying it for raising and taxidermying
00:39:16
Speaker
exotic species. And the Game and Fish let a bust on his house, and when they busted into his house, they saw a mummy in what the coroner described as a terrarium. And they immediately called the cops and said, this is creepy. This is a murder scene. That's some flourish shit. Yeah, yeah. The coroner figured out that it was a
00:39:46
Speaker
that was a prehistoric set of human remains. And it got brought back to Texas. And that one's actually in the University of Texas at Austin. The other one's still in a private collection. And they're both, they're both very delicate. And what's interesting, so my research that I'm doing now, to tie this all together, I got access to them.
DNA Research and Ethical Reinterment
00:40:08
Speaker
And those individuals are related after doing DNA. So they're related. And there's
00:40:16
Speaker
Because of radiocarbon dating, there's as much as 220 years between them and as little as 50 years, which means that a generation of matrilineally related hunter-gatherers were using this cave for at least 200 years. And so, I mean, from the research end, that's where we got. And now I'm still figuring out where to take that.
00:40:41
Speaker
That's, that's super insane. I mean, that's, that's the craziest story I've heard in archaeology in a long time. Yeah, that's pretty wild. Yeah, it's, it's, it's not what I, I started the cave because I thought we would find some baskets. That's really what I was looking for. I really wanted to find some good perishable material and I wanted to, that's where I wanted to go. And I certainly didn't think that I'd be talking to corners and Riverside County, California and yeah.
00:41:09
Speaker
a crazy thing. But I mean, at the same time, it was incredibly rewarding because they no one would ever know no one would ever tie those back. And at this no one would ever know that those human remains are from that cave. And now we can start this dialogue. And it's awkward. And it's cumbersome. But now now we can do it. And I hope that ends somewhere. That's kind of a good middle ground for all of us.
00:41:37
Speaker
Yeah. And it's, it's part of our profession and can be an unfortunate or good part of our profession that we're the middleman in this kind of, you know, we're kind of the people who have to talk to private collection, people who collect privately or looters and actual native communities themselves. We have to be that bridge because that's where we're placed ourselves.
00:42:04
Speaker
And here in particular, I mean, there's so much private land that you wouldn't know if, I mean, there isn't that liaison without a professional archaeologist. So we have to gain the trust of the landowner to get on the land, which is difficult to do. And then once we do that, so this case in particular, then I had to gain the trust of a collector that
00:42:29
Speaker
talk to a different landowner than owns the land now. And that landowner is very pro science, but the previous one wasn't. So they took it with a clear title from the landowner that they bought access to the cave with. And so you have to have that conversation. But then at the end of the day, we all know that those are native remains, and there needs to be a native at the table. And that's a very delicate situation to gain the trust of the landowner too with
00:42:59
Speaker
Everything it's, it's, it's complex, but it's incredibly rewarding. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're like a descendant community situation. Yeah. Yeah. And the end goals that go back into the cave in a ceremony that's befitting of what, what would be done for, um, the normal burial procedures or ceremonies. Yeah. Yeah. I would like to get them back in the cave in my, I mean,
00:43:27
Speaker
From a research standpoint, I feel like we've answered what we can answer at the cave right now. And I feel I have no problem walking away. I have no problem returning that to what it was. It was occupied for at least 6,000 years. And at the end of it, it very clearly became a burial cave. And I have no problem returning it to that. And walking away, I don't think the landowner has a problem with that. I mean, there's plenty of other stuff to do here.
00:43:57
Speaker
plenty of other collections to look at. And I think that's where it kind of needs to go. That's, you know, to be to be the final, hopefully the end to that story. But like you said, you don't know how that's going to end because of these balancing communities. Yeah. There's a lot of stakeholders. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, they're only stakeholders because the law is in Texas is
00:44:26
Speaker
fucked. At the end of the day, it's like other states like Colorado, Wyoming passed a law that's like, you find graves period, you leave them alone. And it's unfortunate that you have to cater to the property owner. And I mean, like morally and ethically, the whole situation, as we've stated, is just Titanic level bullshittery.
00:44:56
Speaker
Yes. That is definitely a good way of saying it.
Balancing Private Rights and Cultural Sensitivity
00:45:01
Speaker
I mean, it's incredibly complex. And yeah, I mean, here the way to do it would be to change the legislation. But here you're not going to do it because 95% of the state is private. So I don't agree with how
00:45:20
Speaker
uh, the law crafts it. But my hope is to start the dialogue and maybe appeal to people's morality. And that, that supersedes the law. And that's how we get things done because at the end of the day, they're not going to get in trouble. There's no trigger for anything. Yeah. As you've been talking, I've been like frantically searching Texas law regard regarding what the fuck is going on.
00:45:49
Speaker
And like, yeah, even it's not just natives. It's like anyone who's not on state or federal land. So the quickest way to change it is to start digging up white people. Well, no, that's actually what the law is for. The law protects Civil War graves. That's what the law is written for. It'd be easy to do an unmarked prehistoric burial. It'd be easy to exclude historic Native American graves and
00:46:15
Speaker
prehistoric burials from it and keep civil war cemeteries open. So what happens is the law triggers a civil war, like, it doesn't say civil war, but that's what it was for to make sure that if your civil war ancestors were buried on somebody else's private land, you could still have access to them. So that's why it opens, that's why it opens up the law. But because of that, all this other stuff gets ensnared in it. It's like,
00:46:43
Speaker
It's like three or four words that need to be changed. And I think that could be done. I'll say that. I think it could be done. Welcome to Texas, where you get four acres and a mule and some engine bones. Change that one. Damn, the Confederacy. Thanks for coming on, Brian. And hopefully we have a conversation with you in the future where this is
00:47:09
Speaker
all solved in an appropriate manner. And maybe even Texas laws changed, but you know, let's just burn the fucking state down. Like who needs Texas? Like, God damn them. They can't be their own country. They can't be part of a rebellion. Like who needs it? Give it back to Mexico. I don't know. He's any better there, man.
00:47:33
Speaker
On that note, thank you, Brian, for coming on. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So we just interviewed Dr. Brian Schroeder, who's the current director of the Center for Big Ben Studies at Soul Ross University in Alpine, Texas. This is the end of episode 15. We'll see you next time. Well, you ought to see us. You'll listen to us. If you can't see us, it's a podcast. Yeah.
00:48:01
Speaker
Get it right. No comment. Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So what's the difference between archaeology and grave robbing?
00:48:32
Speaker
archaeology is when you dig up Indians, grave robins, when you dig up white people. Brutal. I'm in a mood now. All right. All right. Episode 15. See you guys.
00:49:04
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com