TEXAS NATIVE AMERICAN TIMELINE
Planning Sheet 2
OVERVIEW OF ARCHEOLOGICAL CHRONOLOGY IN TEXAS
| Period |
Dates |
Characteristics |
Artifacts |
| HISTORIC |
1600-1800 |
Cabeza de Vaca; Spanish missions; entry of
Tonkawas, Apaches, and Comanches |
Spanish Colonial artifacts;
gunflints; metal
arrowpoints |
| LATE
PREHISTORIC |
700-1600 |
Toyah phase bison hunters; villages in the
Panhandle; Caddo cultures in East Texas |
pottery; introduction of
bow and arrow (tiny
arrowpoints); agriculture
in parts of state |
| TRANSITIONAL
ARCHAIC |
300 B.C.-A.D. 700 |
first mounds in East Texas; hunters and gatherers
continue elsewhere |
dart points are smaller:
Ensor, Frio, Fairland,
Paisano |
| LATE ARCHAIC |
1000-300 |
bison hunting in Panhandle, lower Pecos, Central
Texas; increased trade; cemeteries in Southeast
and South Texas |
large points for hunting;
Castroville, Montell;
"corner tang" knives |
| MIDDLE ARCHAIC |
2500-1000 |
hunters and gatherers across Texas; rock art
begins in lower Pecos; burned-rock middens in
Central Texas |
Langtry points in West
Texas; Pedernales points
in Central Texas |
| EARLY ARCHAIC |
6000-2500 |
development of modern vegetation and fauna;
hunting and gathering; possible period of aridity
5500-3000 B.C. |
widespread point types cut
across regions: Bell,
Uvalde, Martindale,
Gower |
| PALEO-INDIAN |
9600-6000 |
earliest occupations by Native Americans, with
Pleistocene or ice age ending around 8000 B.C.;
first peoples are known as Clovis and hunted
mammoths and other ice-age animals |
distinctive point types:
Angostura, Golondrina,
Plainview, Folsom, Clovis |
From Ron Tyler, Douglas E. Barnett, Roy R. Barkley, Penelope C. Anderson, Mark F. Odintz, eds., "Prehistory," The New Handbook of Texas, 6 vols., (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1996), Vol. 5, p. 321.
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