Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine March 6, 2025, story by Louie Bond
It might seem like only bits of sticks and rock in a cave, but the discovery of a pristinely preserved hunting kit is shining a new light on the fascinating lives of West Texas’ earliest residents.
Deep inside that cave, an Indigenous hunter built a little fire, then reworked the broken components of weapons in his kit, leaving behind mundane items of everyday life that waited thousands of years to be discovered. What these archeologists found was worth the wait: potentially the oldest example of an intact full weapon system in North America.
“If it really is a contemporaneous kit, it’s a pretty monumental finding,” says Bryon Schroeder, director of the Center for Big Bend Studies (CBBS). “We can use the wood to reconstruct the environment and learn more about the amount of time they spent working on tools.”
This new knowledge can be applied to other archeological sites in the Big Bend.
“We get these incredible snapshots of life, vignettes of how they lived, what the environment was and how they responded to it,” he says.
Odyssey to the First Peoples
The CBBS team is collaborating for the sixth year with the Odyssey Archaeological Research Fund at the University of Kansas, under the direction of Rolfe D. Mandel, to study Big Bend sites that may harbor the earliest evidence of humans in the region.
To see what’s exciting this team, take a peek deep inside the San Esteban Rockshelter, south of Marfa.
“A person came to the back of the cave and went through their hunting gear piece by piece: ‘This is good. This is not good. I need to remake this leather pouch a little bit.’ And then they went on their way,” Schroeder says. “But that one small act is going to have profound implications in understanding a wide range of topics, including the environment.”
CBBS assistant professor Devin Pettigrew says that caves were often special places in Indigenous American cultures, where hunted prey could be reincarnated.
“We aren’t sure to what extent the deposit of these broken components in the rock shelter had a symbolic or spiritual purpose,” he says. “Interpretations like this, based on more recent cultures, are more difficult the further back in time you go.”
While no components are complete, nearly all the pieces of a hunting projectile (dart) system were found. The dart foreshafts fit into sockets or sleeves in the end of a dart main shaft. The nock ends of the darts fit against the atlatl spur; the dart flexes when thrown to maintain straight flight.
“We don’t yet have the socket ends we need to understand how the foreshafts attach to the main shafts,” Pettigrew says. “We’re also missing the proximal (handle) end of the atlatl, but we know enough about this type to reconstruct what it may have looked like.”
A weapons expert, Pettigrew is gleaning even more knowledge about the straight-flying boomerang in the kit.
“The medial edge of the boomerang is cool,” he says. “The wood desiccates in the desert environment and cracks down the center where the medulla (pithy center) is still intact, a common issue in woodworking.”
Most boomerangs were designed to fly straight and hit a target; returning versions were toys or used to hunt birds. Boomerangs had to be wide enough and heavy enough to kill or incapacitate small game. Heavy versions were used in combat. The region has produced many examples of worn-out and broken or repurposed boomerangs, including another better-preserved boomerang in the Museum of the Big Bend that broke the same way.
“They heated a green branch or sapling over hot coals until boiling sap and steam came out both ends, then bent it around a form to cool and dry and work into an airfoil,” Pettigrew says. “With a lot of use, the impacts make the cracks worse until eventually the weapon splits in half.”
Besides the hunting kit, the archeologists found human feces (which provides more enlightening information than you might think) and a folded pronghorn hide.
That tanned hide, with hair still intact, stopped Schroeder in his tracks. “We just sat there and stared at it in wonder,” he says. “That’s a moment in time. It’s akin to holding dish gloves that somebody put over the sink after doing the dishes. Somebody folded that hide up and sat that right on top of this rock. And nobody touched it for 6,000 years.”
The hide’s perimeter had spaced holes to tie to a frame for softening, a common practice among historic Plains groups. But how was the fragile pronghorn hair, easily shed during the animal’s life, still intact, still retaining its original color?
“I showed it to everybody who studies this, including our Borderlands Research Institute folks, who marveled at it,” Schroeder says. “Sadly, it’s already been losing hair since I found it.”
What They Found
Here’s a sampling of the tools in the hunting kit.
Four dart nock ends: These contain shallow cups that fit against the actual throwing device, an atlatl. These were all broken in the same place.
Straight flying boomerang: One of the oldest-known finds of these lethal weapons, this device is deadlier than its early name – rabbit stick – would imply.
Six stone-tipped foreshafts: These connect knapped stone points to atlatl dart main shafts and are easily replaced, making a modular and repairable weapon. Stone points are still embedded in two foreshafts, broken bases of points in others.
Four hardwood foreshafts: These long wooden tips might have been used for poison delivery.
Partial atlatl or spear-thrower: This was considered the oldest in North America until a slightly older (30 years) atlatl was found in Utah. Devin Pettigrew, CBBS assistant professor, has made replicas to test in the field to see how it might have been used for hunting and warfare.