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Barbecuing At Lake Lewisville- 10,000 Years Ago

By Si and Connie Dunn |

Some of the deep mysteries of our prehistoric past are going to get deeper-underwater.

Several campsites that date back to the earliest days of man in North America already have slipped beneath the waves and waterskiers at Lake Lewisville. Meanwhile, the filling of Lake Ray Roberts will help raise the water level of Lake Lewisville by up to ten feet over the next four years. And new flood storage requirements for Lake Lewisville mean that the site may be lost to further scrutiny.

Lewisville’s famous site was discovered in 1951. Radiocarbon dating tests conducted in 1957 indicated that prehistoric hunters had built hearths and cooked their food there some 37,000 years ago-20,000 years earlier than previous evidence of man’s first appearance in North America. And members of the Dallas Archaeological Society had discovered a Clovis Fluted spear point at the site in 1956. The Clovis hunting culture is thought to have arrived in North America around 12,000 years ago. Some archaeologists accused the Dallas group of planting the spear point as a hoax.

New excavations were conducted in 1979 and 1980 by researchers from the Smithsonian Institution during a drought that had re-exposed the site. Those diggings revealed the real age was about 10,500 years, vintage Clovis but hardly a great leap backward in time.

“It’s still the oldest in Texas, and it’s still an interesting site,” says Duane Peter, an assistant director of SMU’s archaeology research program who worked as a volunteer during the Smithso-nian dig. “We did recover some flakes of the same material” that had been used to fashion Clovis spear points. Those flakes ab-solved the Dallas archaeologists of hoax charges. Tests on carbon samples, meanwhile, revealed that the 1957 datings had been conducted on pieces of burned coal, not wood. The hunters “had collected some natural lig-nite and burned it in the hearth,” Peter says. The coal had been formed millions of years ago, well beyond the measuring capabilities of the radiocarbon dating equipment.

The lignite cinders solved one archaeological mystery and raised a new one. Whoever staged those long-ago cookouts apparently were real innovators in the art of prehistoric barbecuing. Some encyclopedias credit the Chinese as being the first to burn coal-7,000 years later.

Ironically, placing Lewis-ville’s archaeological sites underwater may help preserve them for future researchers. They may be able to dig again during periods of drought or ex-tended maintenance to Lewis-ville Dam. “We have a problem with people who like to go out and dig up Indian sites,” says Larry Banks, an archaeologist for the U.S. Army Corps of En-gineers district headquarters in Dallas. “Their uncontrolled dig-ging destroys so much of our knowledge of the past.”

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