Secrets of the Dirt: Uncovering the Ancient People of Gault by Mary S. Black (review)

This is a lovely book. The word “lovely” is seldom coupled with archaeology, but the informal narrative here disguises some of the achievements of the work. Secrets in the Dirt tells the meandering and motley story of the Gault Site in Central Texas and is intended for a wide audience fascinated by archaeology and willing to learn. In a down-to-earth tone, the author uses Gault to speak of a dynasty of important researchers, many from Texas, and links them to the present array of professional and avocational archaeologists as well as to the large number of volunteers who have worked on the site. At the same time that it highlights the professional genealogy of those researchers and their work, the book traces important Texas sites, connecting the geographic dots among them to clarify where we have been and where we are now in understanding the material culture that the first Americans left behind. Importantly, study at Gault, in its various phases, has been masterminded by Mike Collins, chair of the Gault School of Archaeological Research and research associate with the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.

Along with this mapping of people and sites, the author subtly reveals the vitality of archaeological studies that are a result of the intersection of researchers from other scholarly disciplines with the intense curiosity and ingenuity of crafts people. It is good and necessary that people such as E. H. Sellars, J. E. Pearce, Glen Evans, Ernest Lundelius, and Don Crabtree, among others, are acknowledged for their impact on archaeology in Texas and in general. Although the author smooths the edges of many archaeological conundrums regarding the modes of arrival and dispersion of the first Americans on the continent, the questioning reader will find that some of the researchers mentioned in the book, then and now, continue to grapple with those questions.

Archaeology is about hypotheses and research, not certainties. Conversely, landowners’ prevalent practice of allowing pot-robbers to dig for a fee is not smoothed over, but neither is it stressed. Not unlike many other sites in Texas and around the world, Gault’s exploration had its beginning with those the author calls hobbyists, but this reviewer has issues with that description: having “a little fun in the dirt” (4) is also destruction, and one should not glamorize it. All archaeological sites are important, but the Gault Site spans about 16,000 years of human occupation and is unquestionably one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas. Gault has provided important clues about the behavior of the peoples who inhabited the site during Clovis time (about 12,000–10,000 years before present), although the more recent archaeological evidence (since about 8,000 CE) has been churned up by those so-called hobbyists.

As Clovis-age sites go, Gault is not unique; there are others, but Gault is among a selected few sites that produced pre-Clovis material culture. The Clovis-era materials at Gault have helped define the Clovis tool-kit and the pre-Clovis materials there have added some fascinating wrinkles to a complex picture. In fact, the pre-Clovis diversity is fascinating when considering the Clovis quasi uniformity followed by the heterogeneity of late Paleo tool traditions.

Although Secrets of the Dirt is unnecessarily fanciful at times, one hopes it and the example and importance of the Gault Site will convince some Texas landowners, and others elsewhere, that the preservation of cultural heritage is a better badge of honor than the few dollars to be gained from would-be treasure hunters. This is a battle many archeologists have long fought. Native Americans would certainly be gratified to have their history properly documented and not subsumed under a framed collection of projectile points hanging on a wall.