SOUTHEAST TEXAS TALES
The next time you stroll down McFaddin Beach, you might be stepping on pieces of some of America's most ancient history.
The sandy 20-mile stretch from High Island to the edge of Sea Rim State Park is a depository of tools and relics dating back to what archeologists consider some of the earliest people to trek along the Texas coast.
The tides lapping the beach sometimes leave behind stone relics known as Clovis points that date back as far as 13,000 years, and the beach is the premier place in the state to find them. Clovis points, so named for Clovis, N.M., where they were first discovered in 1929, are thin, grooved projectiles. They are often leaf-shaped and have crescent bases for being attached to a handle.
As of 2009, more than 100 of the objects had been discovered along the Jefferson County beach. All these years later and experts still don't know exactly where they came from.
"There's certain areas of the beach that seem to have more," said Dr. Michael Waters, the director for Texas A&M's Center for the Study of the First Americans.
If everything is bigger in Texas, that's certainly true of the state's beaches tens of thousands of years ago. Research suggests that about 26,000 years ago, Southeast Texas' coast was more than 120 miles farther out than it is today, according to information about the beach from the University of Texas' Texas Beyond History website.
As ice sheets melted and the ocean swelled, the beach was slowly swallowed up. The sandy beach today would've been grass and marshland when the Clovis people were in the area, Waters said.
"They would've seen what we see today, it just would've been further out," he said.
The relics found along the beach these days seem to show up more often after storms churn up the sea floor, Waters said.
One of Water's students is working on a thesis about the McFaddin Beach Clovis points.
The project aims to take advantage of new mapping technologies to determine from where these artifacts originate. Figuring for the weight of the Clovis points, ocean currents and a myriad of other factors, Waters said the student hopes to pin down the journey from the sea to the shore, which opens up the next chapter in figuring out the story of early Americans.
"The question becomes what were people doing out there?" Waters said.
The culture responsible for Clovis points, referred to as the Clovis people, was apparently widespread around North and Central America. The points have been discovered nationwide.
"(Clovis technology) just comes out of nowhere and explodes onto the landscape," Waters said of the breadth of places the items have been discovered. "The big question is why did it emerge?"
The style of projectiles might have been developed to cope with a changing landscape and environment, he said. What archeologists and researchers gain from studying the points and where they come from is a better grasp on the history of some of the first people on the continent.
"McFaddin Beach is part of the story of what happened to these people of early America," Waters said.
Southeast Texas Tales is a weekly Enterprise feature that examines regional history. TMonzingo@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/thmonzingo