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Prehistoric Montgomery County

by Robin Montgomery

Samplings have been found in our county linked to cultures ranging from the Paleo-Americans of the late Pleistocene or ice age through cultures with characteristics of the Archaic era.  This covers a prehistoric time span from about 12,000 B.C. to 2500 B.C.  What we know about the ingenuity and courage of these people boggles the mind. 

Especially mind-boggling were the Paleo-Americans who, with the crudest of weapons, brought down such large and dangerous animals as mammoths, a type of early elephant, and saber-toothed tigers. The culture of these intelligent and robust people evolved from the earlier Clovis era to the Folsom, terms derived from New Mexico towns where evidence of them first surfaced. 

Thousands of years before the invention of  bows and arrows, both Clovis and Folsom cultures featured the spear as the tool for hunting. Hunters of each culture attached their respective variety of sharpened stone as a dart to a foreshaft which, in turn, was attached to a longer wooden shaft. When they thrust a spear into a prey, the foreshaft and stone point would break off, remaining lodged in the animal.

By the Archaic era, the larger animals had perished, either from the dramatic change in climate, disease or over-hunting. Archaic peoples were also somewhat more settled than their Paleo-American forebears. 
 
The weapon in common use during the Archaic period was the atlatls, a thin leather device of some twenty inches with which to propel a spear into a target. The hunter would first hook the atlatls to the wooden spear at the end opposite the spear’s stone dart.  Then, with one hand, he would both secure the remaining end of the atlatls and grasp the spear. Thus positioned, the hunter could fling the spear into a target with greater force than with just his bare hands.

Samplings of the Archaic culture were found in deep sand along Atkins Creek, just west of Conroe. Feverishly, scientists worked the scene. But alas, on the verge of surely major finds, the waters of the then new Lake Conroe overtook them.

The culture of our immediate region was slow to emerge completely from the Archaic era. Until around 500 A. D. it was in what some call an “ethnological sink”, stuck between the rising Caddo civilization to the east and a more primitive region called the “Galveston Bay Focus”. 

It is stirring to the mind to attune to the echoes of our prehistoric past.

Thank you.


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