Anarchaeology.com

[DavidCampbell]

On March 5 and 6 I attended the East Texas Archaeology Conference in Paris,
Texas which included field trips to two newly discovered sites of the Fourche Maline Culture. Fourche Maline is thought by some to be the Mother Culture of the mound building cultures such as the Caddoans of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. It began in the Woodland period around 1000 BC and reached its full expression between 400 BC and 800 AD. At the Gene Stallings Ranch, site of this year's Texas Archeology Society Field School, we viewed what may turn out to be one of the earliest houses built by the mound building cultures. We also saw presentations of ironstone artifacts used by these early horticulturists. It finally answered my question as to what the ironstone artifact I found on Caney Creek was. Apparently it is a hoe or digging instrument dating to the early cultivation of oilseed plants such as sumpweed.

I also had the honor of meeting Don Wyckoff whose Burnham Ranch site in Western Oklahoma is claimed to date to 40,000 years BP. Don also confirmed that my glassy white artifacts were indeed Frisco heat treated flint from the Ouachita Mountains of Eastern Oklahoma. He also stated that the quartzite ancient artifacts that I found below the Frisco Flint artifacts, likewise came from Oklahoma a couple of hundred miles from where I found them on Caney Creek in Texas. He expressed interest in visiting the Caney Creek site. Gary Sykes, a lithics specialist, also confirmed that the Edwards Chert blade cache I found on the North Sulphur River were in fact artifacts and not accidents of bridge building. The worked edges and bulbs of percussion consistent on numerous large flake blades were signs of human workmanship and the concentration of these in one limited site further confirmed the assessment.

The most intriguing presentation was a slide of a large channeled stone object in East Texas which was jokingly referred to as a Ford-350 bumper because of its resemblence to a gigantic bumper. I, of course did not take it as a joke or geofact. It clearly resembled a concrete drainage gutter seen in modern bridges yet it was buried in cretaceous sedimentary stone in some ways similar to the buried walls at Rockwall. I will endeavor to track this one down for further study.
_________________
David Campbell
"The going's getting weird, so I'm turning pro."

[Lance Oliver]

Hi,

Do any of you think some of the structures/ruins/artifacts in Texas and surrounding states could be as old as 65 million years?

I do understand that there is evidence of humanoid tracks associated with those of dinosaurs found in the limestone of Glen Rose, TX. I believe those "human" footprints are actually those of giants. I've been very interested in giants too and wondered if anyone here has seen any signs of that type of very ancient culture.

Thanks,
Lance Oliver

[DavidCampbell]

Welcome to the board, Lance. If you accept the conventional geological dating, Rockwall is around 80 million years old, based upon the Cretaceous sediments in which the walls are buried, and diagnostic marine fossils found in them, such as shark teeth and mosasaur fossils. However, unfossilised sand dollars were found by John Lindsey in the upper portions, indicating that the walls were above water after the sea receded.

As for the Paluxy tracks, I have come to agree with the paleontologists that these are actually incomplete dinosaur tracks. An actual giant skeleton was found Dr.Ernest T. Adams near Glen Rose and displayed in the Somerville County Museum until 1961 when Dr. Adams died and the family had it removed. Dr. Adams believed it dated only to 1000 AD and that is consistent with the giant skulls found in Nevada and kept in the Nevada State Museum. These are believed to have been exterminated by the the Paiutes around 800 AD. As far as I know at this point, there are no artifacts or ruins associated with these in Texas. There is however, rumored to be another ruin similar to Rockwall, just north of Denton on Milam Creek.
_________________
David Campbell
"The going's getting weird, so I'm turning pro."

[DaveMoore]

FWIW, I came across this interesting treatise on different aspects of converting living matter into fossils, including rapid processes.

http://www.ncsec.org/cadre2/team2_2/Lessons/howDoesWoodPetrify.htm

David C says "conventional wisdom" sets the age of rock layers by the index fossils. This model is built on the assumption that fossils represnt the entire column of evolutionary development as opposed to snapshots of catastrophic events. It's not hard to imagine that soft tissue flora and fauna became fossilized by some mechanism of rapid burial, either by moving water or by volcanic ash. Otherwise, exposed to air, microbes and water, soft tissue breaks down and turns to compost.

Catastrophism, IMO, is the key to history, not uniformitarianism. In this light, it would make sense that Rockwall is much more recent than 65-80MY. C-14 dating of anything organic should bear this out - what has been done along these lines?

[DavidCampbell]

Dave, as you know, C-14 dating is generally limited to dates under 50,000 years. As far as I know, John Lindsey never had any dating done on the unfossilized sand dollars he found associated with the walls. Kenneth Schar found some bison bones in his 1976 excavations at Rockwall but these were of the modern type as I recall and the artifacts found with them were Wichita. One point was made of brass which would point to the French Colonial period of the 18th century. There are a number of mound sites in the immediate vicinity and the Forney Lake Archaeological Salvage Project in 1965 turned up typical Gary points from the Archaic which date to somewhere around 6000 BC. Local collectors have found a few Folsom points but the majority of artifacts in Rockwall date no earlier than the Early Archaic. These have no direct association with the buried walls but simply indicate that the area was populated at least as early as the Late Paleoindian period. Two parllel wall features Schar found suggested to him an aqueduct but he surmised that in later times these may have been used to trap bison by various Caddoan bands known to have inhabited the area. The walls were known to have been exposed above ground in places as late as the mid 19th century when the Mercer Colony arrived in the area so it is not unlikely that the Indians exploited them for bison drives. The area was semiarid according to the chroniclers of DeSoto's Expedition in the 16th century owing to a very dry period which began around 400 AD. This stabilised into a more benign climate by 500 AD and lasted until around the end of the 12th Century when another drought period caused a period of social disintegration in the Southwest.

As far as catastrophes go, it is known that a major flooding event took place around the end of the Pleistocene in Texas causing most major rivers to exceed their present boundaries three to four times. There is also evidence of a number of meteor impacts in East Texas which would certainly have had some effect on Rockwall not to mention the New Madrid Earthquake around 1812. It could be that liquification of earth associated with major quakes may have caused the walls to subside to a degree but that is just speculation on my part. Rockwall like all other parts of Texas has been subject to any number of catastrophic events since Laramide Orogeny some 80 million years ago. How this relates to the walls themselves, I still do not know.
_________________
David Campbell
"The going's getting weird, so I'm turning pro."

[TexasGuy]

[DavidCampbell]

A very intriguing reference Dave Moore gave above. By coincidence there used to be a veritable forest of petrified wood on the west side of the East Fork of the Trinity across from Rockwall north of the old Highway 66 viaduct. It is now underwater but I am fortunate to have a three foot section of it from a collection in Rockwall. The minerals needed for petrification, calcite, marcasite, pyrite and manganese are abundant in the buried walls and the marcasite alone may account for the red mortar in the stairsteps near Highway 30 now underwater as is the petrified "forest". The article mentioned silica rich water from volcanic sources or mineral spring causing rapid petrification and both these are present at Rockwall and nearby Heath, or at least they were in the recent past. Mineral springs at Heath used to draw people from miles around to fill wagons full of barrels of mineral water from the springs which are now silted up. You can read this reference and many others in "Springs of Texas", a costly but valuable source of information recently reprinted. I have to say that the volcanic source must be qualified. The boundary of the hot water table is the old Ouachita Range beneath Rockwall which is paralleled by a series of ancient dormant volcanoes (let's hope they stay that way). That hot water has recently increased in movement and temperature up to the Talco Fault north of Rockwall. This source of heavily mineralized water gives support to the mainstream geological stance that the buried walls are clastic sand dikes. Rather than an extrusion of the Wolfe City Sand, which Cunliffe posited in his 1999 diatribe against John Lindsey's claim for artificiality, for the North Dallas Skeptics Society, the mineralized water along with a seismic event provide the mechanism for natural formation. Contrary to Cunliffe, George Wilson stated in his 1949, MS thesis that the Wolfe City Sand does not underly the Marlboro Marl and that the walls cut through the Lower Taylor Formation below the Marlboro Marl(blue shale).

While it is true that we only have "snapshots" of the fossil record in its entirely, the Upper Cretaceous in North Texas has a fairly extensive family album thanks to those money grubbing petrochemical exploration geologists. The mosasaurs, sharks and giant turtles pretty well peg the Gulf Series of sedimentary formations long before the advent of humans. Other than the usual molluscs and foraminifera, that's about the only biological evidence we have associated directly and unequivocably with the walls themselves. Not to say there is not more to be found but that is the situation to date. A fossilized hominid would be great news as would an artifact in direct association and I will keep the rapid fossilization data in mind as all the elements are present. The other problem seems to be that no one has done a great deal of digging inside the walls as they form a cachement and the water table at around 30 feet usually stopped excavation in the early days. That is where one would expect to find the best evidence for artificialiy and I suspect at some point someone has.
_________________
David Campbell
"The going's getting weird, so I'm turning pro."