When SpaceX decided to build their rocket launch site at Boca Chica Beach, as good corporate citizens the company ordered an archeological survey of the entire area around the control facility and launch parcels. For Jack Keller, principal investigator for Southern Archeological Consultants Inc., the job was a short drive from his office in Bayview.
Two bridges once ran from Boca Chica Island to the mainland: Gen. Zachary Taylor’s wagon bridge was built in 1846 and Sheridan’s Bridge for trains was built 1866. Remnants of the bridges, consisting of cypress and palmetto pilings ranging from nubbins to three-feet-tall stubs, are within one-half mile of the SpaceX launch site.
“We ended up updating the documentation on all those pilings. They are among the most tangible connections to those times,” Keller said. He recorded and photographed the bridge sites, which are under federal and state ownership. “The pilings had already been determined to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.”
When Keller graduated with his PhD in archeology in 1974, he expected to become an academic, but the business of cultural resource management (archeological surveys) was opening up. Eventually, archeological surveys were mandated for new construction on federal and state owned land as well as for agencies receiving government funds for construction.
Once upon a time Keller had 20-30 people working for Southern Archeological Consultants doing surveys from offices in Longview and the Valley. “It’s one thing to do the archeology and another to do the administration. Unless they are awfully good, you still have to look over their shoulder and keep track of artifacts.” Running field crews at sites around the state required considerable logistics.
About 12 years ago, Keller downsized the business to a one-man operation and decided to only take on projects he found interesting. What he does now can be classified either as planned surveys or as surprises: discoveries that require an archeologist to interpret.
“The irrigation district will call me and says, ‘Jack, we need a survey for a river pump ramp.’ They are going to disturb the surface on Intentional Boundary Water Commission land,” Keller said, and an archeological survey is mandated. Ironically, the advent of irrigation systems and deep plowing in the Valley probably destroyed much of whatever archeological sites and artifacts remained of prehistoric, nomadic tribes and the earliest Spanish and Mexican settlers, he explained. While farming has unknowingly destroyed many sites, others have been buried by silt from the Rio Grande flooding while others have been washed away by erosion.
Nevertheless, Keller knows of prehistoric (1000-1400 A.D.) cemeteries in Hidalgo and Cameron counties, but most have been destroyed or severely disturbed.
Keller’s company did surveys at places like Harlingen Airpark and for Anzalduas International Bridge, the last using backhoes to trench 12 feet deep. “I’ve learned a shovel is the not the way to go here. In the wall of the Anzalduas trench, you could see plow scars, individual furrows in cross sections, and where the river had deposited silt when it was four miles closer.”
The Texas Historic Commission maintains a list of about 100 archeological surveyors and Keller thinks he is the only one in private practice in the Valley. Nowadays, with various environmental companies serving as principal, Keller takes on local contracts, depending on “how much it pays and whether I will be having fun.”
Probably the most visible of Keller’s recent projects featured Brownsville’s oldest cemetery, abandoned and forgotten, across from the Dancy Building in Brownsville. When a construction team started digging up bones, lots of bones, Cameron Country gave him a crew and unleashed him. “I knew everything that had to be done. It’s not rocket science,” Keller said. “We did the analysis, aged and sexed the bones, identified coffin nails.” He estimated probably 700-800 graves are in that vicinity. “That’s the kind of thing that happens.”
“Archeologists have all these magnificent tools now,” Keller said, “magnificent and very expensive.” He observed while Rolando Garza, archeologist and chief of resource management at Palo Alto National Battlefield Park, and a team used ground-penetrating radar on a NPS remote sensing project at the earthen, star-shaped Fort Brown which lies mostly beneath a golf course. “On the surface you can’t see much, but you run instruments over the ground, you can see the glacis where the wall was shaped and the rifle steps. I was amazed.”
For more information, call 233-9899 or email jeksac@earthlink.net.
This feature by Eileen Mattei appears in the February 2016 edition of Valley Business Report.