Do these look familar?


I was looking around on that website Texasbeyondhistory and saw a section that was Trans Pecos Mountains and Basins. On the front of the home page go up to prehistoric and click on Trans Pecos Texas, then click on the triangle one on the map that says, "wind canyons". It won't let you know what it says until your cursor is on it. When you go in there and scroll down you'll see this picture. Well, Sanderson is the cactus capital of Texas and lechuguilla is all over. I bet this is why I find so many scrapers, they use them to take the leaves of the lechuguilla before baking. Sure these were used for butchering animals too, but I bet most of the ones I find are for the cactus.

Well DJ, My memory may be getting a bit hazy in old age,, , ,Not sure I remember those exact items your showing BUT thats a very interesting posting.

Worked pieces of flint are typically noted as scrapers for animal butchering and processing.
Now that you have found that article, its for sure the food preparers made their own mini tools for the
plant processing [ there had to be something before the Mano, Matate & fire rock oven ]

Cactus capital of the world ? Better than " poison Ivy capital of the world ! "
My last time through ALpine [ TX ], I visited the Sul Ross university museum. Out front they have a large garden with a display of local plants, big variety, all labeled [ common names & gibberish clasification ].
There must have been 50 varieties of plants falling into the "cactii" family. Not much of that education stuck, but I DO remember the one cactus that grows very level with the groundlevel with pretty big thorns,
the "horse crippler"

Tks for the info, I'll be looking a lot closer at smaller flint "flakes/tools"]

I didn't mean those exact ones. I find a lot of scrapers similar to those and so many that I started wondering if they were anything at all. Sanderson is the cactus capital of Texas, not the world by the way.

Cooking cactus breadcakes required building small rock ovens, and from the characteristics of your middens, I believe this was the primary activity of them, and they had to use new pieces of rock each time an oven was built in order to retain the right heat needed for baking(embrittlement and inability to hold heat after first usage).

I deleted the other pic of scrapers from photobucket on a accident. This is one that I found in a shelter and it has black stuff on it. None of the others from the shelter do, so could it be blood?

Possible,...........but not probable. It could however be stained from a tar base mastic used with hafting a wooden handle to this piece, and a scraper like this one could have been a useful tool in harvesting cactus/ soltol, etc. for baking.

I know what you mean ! I agree [ but not with the blood, hundreds of miserable scavengers would have licked it clean ]
Thats a really delicatly chipped edge on the piece in this latest pic.

Whynot take the upgrade ?? If it's #1 in Texas, it must preside over ANYPLACE worldwide !