The July members meeting of the Houston Archeological Society will take place in person on Thursday, July 16, starting at 6:00 p.m. This will be a hybrid meeting with both an in-person gathering at the Trini Mendenhall Community Center and a Zoom component for those members who cannot join us there. The link for the Zoom meeting will be sent to currently registered members as we get closer to the meeting date. We will welcome guest speaker Alan M. Slade of the University of Texas, Director and Principal Investigator of the Texas Fluted Point Survey, who will present A Distributional Study of Paleo-Indian Projectile Point Types in Texas: 60 Years On, A Tribute to Thomas R. Hester. The Texas Historical Commission (THC) recently recognized Dr. Hester as the 2025 recipient of the Curtis D. Tunnell Lifetime Achievement in Archeology Award. The award acknowledges an individual for outstanding lifetime accomplishments in archeological research and preservation in Texas. As the THC expressed, few scholars have had an influence on Texas archeology as extensive as Hester. A native of Carrizo Springs, his interest in archeology began in South Texas and developed into a professional career spanning more than five decades. His early contributions included assisting in the establishment of an archeology program at the University of Texas at San Antonio, followed by his long leadership of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. Hester's publications, including books and reference works, are standard resources for the field. These materials inform artifact identification, field methodologies, and archeological interpretation not only in Texas but throughout North and CentralAmerica (Hester - 2025 recipient).

Our speaker, Alan M. Slade, lithic analyst and palaeolithic researcher, spent fifteen years as a prehistoric and palaeolithic field archaeologist in Britain and Europe, as well as a further decade helping to curate the lithic collections in the British Museum. In 2007, he became interested in Early Paleoindian archaeology, in particular the Clovis period. Slade spent six years studying Clovis fluted points in collections across North America, largely facilitated and encouraged by Prof. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Michael Collins invited Alan to continue his analysis of Clovis fluted point technology as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, and lithic analyst for the Prehistory Research Project in 2019. This lead to Slade’s directing the Texas Clovis Fluted Point Survey (TCFPS) and then the Folsom survey (TFFPS) at TARL. Slade was educated in London at Birkbeck College, University College London, at the Institute of Archaeology, and then at the University of Southampton, Hampshire. He is a research fellow of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO) at the University of Southampton, and he is on the committee for the Lithic Studies Society in London and is also an active member of the Society for Museum Archaeologists. Since 2018 he has been an active member of the Texas Archeological Society, Houston Archaeological Society, Central Texas Archeological Society, North Texas Archeological Society, and the Travis County Archaeological Society.

We hope you will all join us on July 16 as we enjoy being together and hearing from Alan Slade. The Trini Mendenhall Community Center is located at 1414 Wirt Road in the Spring Branch area of Houston. The meeting is free and open to the public. Be looking for your meeting reminder, which will also contain the Zoom link so that those HAS members who cannot attend in person will be able to tune in from afar. For more information about this program or about the Houston Archeological Society, please contact Bob Sewell at president@txhas.org.   Wishing you a great Fourth of July, and I look forward to seeing you in the field soon

Sources and more information at https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.2025-12; https://txarchives.org/utsa/finding_aids/00396.xml; https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/anthropology/faculty/hester.

 

HAS JOURNAL 144 NOW AVAILABLE

HAS Journal No. 144 is now available. The Journal Number 144 The articles will focus on the San Felipe de Austin Dig by John Lohse, Horseshoes in Texas, a Thimble from the 18th or 19th century from France found in Frosttown, and another article about Camp Kirby in Dickenson, TX, a civil war camp by Charly Gordy, ceramics from Cottonfield by Tim Perttula, and information from Mike Woods about a Butted Knife Found in Comal County. Complimentary copies may be obtained by HAS members at the monthly meetings. Non-HAS members may purchase copies through Amazon.com. Go to the HAS Journals Section for a link to the publication on the Amazon.com website. Alternatively, copies may be purchased at the HAS Monthly Meetings.

To learn more about the history behind our archeological society contact president@txhas.org.