A late Spring 2005 Road Trip ending in Austin county, Texas.

Nothing like an arrowhead hunting road trip. We went up to a friend's ranch near Brenham but didn't have much luck finding any points. We did find a few snakes and other such interesting things. We had a good time exploring his ranch and seeing some new countryside.

Sorry I wasn't able to get any pictures of that part of the trip. I did get a picture of this Historical marker which was pretty impressive to me.

Europeans found this part of Texas quite a while back.

After striking out on finding any campsites on the Brenham ranch we stopped to weigh our options. Not having enough gas to make it to Hong Kong, we decided to head back toward the house.

Road trip or not, Hong Kong is out of the question!

Don't think we will be going to Frankfurt either.

Luckily we have permission from a friendly landowner to hunt a fairly productive creek in Austin county. Lots of points have been found around this creek, so we decide to detour a little on the way home.

Blaine points to a promising looking bit of grafitti!

Hiking down from the bridge Blaine and Travis spot an obvious sign that there are artifacts nearby.

Looking upstream we see an even more promising sign, recent floods have caused so much erosion of these banks that large trees have fell into the creekbottom. We know that whatever ancient artifacts were in those roots are now laying around somewhere in the creek bottom, waiting to be found.

Look at the size of those trees in the water.

Our anticipation is high as we arrive. And for good reason! The following are pictures of the artifacts we found below this thirty foot high bluff ...

An unidentified archaic point found by Clayton.

A beautiful Langtry like Pedernales point found by Travis.

A Cobalt Blue Poison Bottle found by David and Blaine.
This was quite an unexpected find!

Wow! What a day enjoying nature and history. Finding these artifacts connects us directly with people from the early archaic (5000 BP) through the historic Texas settlers who used this poison bottle in the 1800's. Remember the Historical marker shown above. I wonder what kind of ailments were treated with whatever concoction was held in this poison bottle?
Thank goodness for modern medicine!

Now that you have a feeling for the site let me show some other points that have been found in this area. I'll use almost any excuse to show some more arrowhead pictures!

Most of the Archaic points in this Austin county group were found by Brian.
The two on the bottom left were found by David.

This Scallorn was found by Tim very close to where the blue poison bottle was found.
It's an absolute screamer!

My favorite point from this site is this 10,000 year old Paleo Wilson point found by Marcus.
It came from the area shown above.

Quite a site, we know we are fortunate to have landowner permission to hunt it for artifacts in both places we visited. We need to make a trip back to Brenham sometime, that ranch may not have any obvious campsites but there sure were some happy cows on it.

I wish to thank everyone involved for making this trip a possibility and especially want to thank Zach for managing to keep Blaine interested all day!


References Cited:

Turner & Hester
“FIELD GUIDE TO STONE ARTIFACTS OF THE TEXAS INDIANS”

Timothy K Perttula
“THE PREHISTORY OF TEXAS”

Photos & Text (c) David Crain / Texasarrowheads.com


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