Just a little north of Austin is one of the richest archaeological sites in the country.
It’s not a national park or even a state one. In fact, for years, it was completely inaccessible to archaeologists.
One man led the change that turned the land into what’s now an area designated for research. The documentary “The Stones Are Speaking” tells his story.
Olive Talley wrote, directed and produced the film, which is now available on PBS and other streaming platforms. Listen to her interview with the Texas Standard in the player above or read the extended transcript, below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
Texas Standard: Who is Michael Collins?
Olive Talley: Michael Collins is one of the most amazing people you’d ever want to meet.
He’s a scientist, he’s an archaeologist, he’s a geologist, and that’s by profession. By personality, he is charming, he’s brilliant, he’s patient, he’s kind, he’s generous, and he’s also the consummate teacher. He loves sharing what he knows with others.
And he’s really a little lightning bug about archaeology and history, because those are his passions. So he’s an infectious person to be around if you have any interest at all in history, archaeology or things of the past.
How did you first hear his story?
Well, as I’ve said to a few people, leave it to a native Texan to go to the ends of the earth in Antarctica and come home with a story about Texas.
National Geographic photographer Kenneth Garrett was giving a lecture on the ship as we were heading to the white continent. And it was about his work covering the peopling of the Americas, the migration of people into the Western Hemisphere. He mentioned this place, the Gault Site, and all of us Texans on the ship looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders and said, “We don’t know about this place.”
We’ve never heard of this place, and he was telling us that this was a pivotal place in history that really contributed major data and understanding that changed what we thought we knew about when people were living and where in the Western Hemisphere around the time of the Ice Age or before.
And as a reporter, I went, “How could I have missed this important story in our backyard here in Texas?” So that’s how it got started. I came back from the trip after peppering Ken with questions throughout the rest of the journey and he said, “Just please, please call Mike Collins when you get back.” I did and here we are, you know, seven years later.
Mike Collins in an excavation pit.
Credit: Gault School of Archaeological Research
The documentary really takes us through the history of the land that’s now the Gault School of Archaeological Research, but could you give us the highlights? This was privately owned for a really long time.
Yes, the land got its name from the owner who held it at the turn of the century, Henry Gault. In the 40s, he sold that property to the Lindsey family. Neely Lindsey and ultimately Elmer Lindsey ran it as a pay-to-dig for about 50 years.
A pay-to-dig is when they, in this case, they rented out their property for $25 a day. And anyone could come on as long as they ponied up the cash. They came on, they dug, and they kept whatever they found. So artifacts were flying out of this place for decades.
In 1991, a collector found some very unusual engraved stones in the context of Clovis points. Now Clovis points and the Clovis culture was for many, many decades, the theory and the base of the theory of the Clovis theory is that these were the first people in the Americas.
And we learned all this in school. Well, we were taught this in schools, that people came from northern Asia across the frozen Bering Strait into modern-day Alaska, and then an ice-free corridor opened up at some point and people filtered down into the rest of the continent.
We now know, because of Gault and because of other sites, that is not the case. People did come that route, but it was not the only route. And when you have evidence of people living here in modern-day Central Texas, up to 20,000 years ago, you can’t say that the first people came this route 13,000 ago.
So, in 1991, a collector who had been a pay-to-dig customer found these engraved stones that were rather unusual. Eventually word got to Mike Collins and Tom Hester at the Texas Archaeological Research Lab out at UT, and they had to go see this. The collector was gracious and he led them exactly to his little honey hole, his little pot where he had been digging up all this stuff.
And Mike and Tom found more engraved stones and more artifacts that the collectors didn’t even recognize to be important. At that moment, Mike knew that there was more here and other archaeologists had written it off as destroyed by these decades of looting and collecting. But Mike saw something that they missed. He saw potential.
This place had water for people, water for the animals that the people hunted and ate to survive. It had other resources, pecan trees, and it had this huge supply of chert, which is flint, which was what people were making their stone tools out of to survive. You had all the elements, an ideal location for prehistoric life.
So Mike had this vision and this training, because he had trained with scientists all over the world Israel, in France, with some of the world’s leading archaeologists on cultures much older than what we found in the Western Hemisphere. So he had this knowledge, he had his vision, and he was able to use his geo-archaeology eyes and size up this place as being an ideal location.
But then the question became, “Can we do a controlled excavation to figure this out and to really know and find out what’s truly underneath our feet?” And the answer was, he only got 12 days under this owner, Neely Lindsey, and they could not make a deal because Neely Lindsey wanted all of the scientists to also pay for a lease. UT wouldn’t go for that, and they had to walk away knowing that the looting was going to continue, and it did, and Mike says that in the film.
Credit: Kenneth Garrett
But then, serendipitously, maybe fortuitously, the land changed hands. That part of the Lindsey family sold it to a developer in Houston, so the site was at major risk of being lost to development, track homes, or you know, there’s like 15-20 rock quarries surrounding this place. Somebody could have turned it into a rock quarry, or somebody could have just purchased it to mine it for the artifacts, because a lot of people knew about this place sort in the underworld.
Another member of the Lindsey family bought the place, the heart of this place, Howard and Doris, his wife, and their son Ricky. They were collectors too, and they wanted to maintain it as a family piece of property, but they wanted it to use it to collect, too.
Long story short, they find some big bones and they find unusual stone tools. They call UT, out goes Mike and Tom again. And then that’s when Mike sees more Clovis artifacts in their back dirt that they’ve thrown out, digging their hole, that they didn’t recognize. More Clovis artifacts than he’s ever seen in his entire life. And this is Mr. Clovis. And he eventually persuades them to work with him and let him do a controlled excavation.
And he got a three-year lease. And that’s when he proved that this was the gold standard for Clovis sites in North America. More Clovis artifacts have been excavated at this site than any other site in North America.
But then he wanted to do more, and he wanted to see if there could be evidence of cultures and people coming here before that time frame. And that’s one of the big… I think turning points and a big moment in the film, because we explain how the Lindseys said “No, we’re done.” And Mike then went off and had to cover up all the work he had done, fill in the excavation.
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And then the Lindseys decided they wanted to sell the property. So once again, there was a fear that it might fall back into the hands of other actors or people who wanted to mine it and destroy the science that had already been proven to be extraordinary there.
Again, another long story short – you’ll have to watch the film to hear all the details – but in essence, Mike purchases the site with his own money, with his family money. And his wife, Karen, supports him in that effect. She’s the one who suggests it. At one point, after many, well, years of frustration, she just turned to him at the dinner table one night and just said, “Go buy the damn place.”
He had inherited some money from his father when he died, but it wasn’t enough. So they dipped into all of their resources and managed to mortgage everything and come up with the money to purchase the site.
And then he turned around and donated it to the nonprofit Archaeological Conservancy to protect it for perpetuity. And then he did the final dig. And it was then that they were able to go all the way down to bedrock and to find evidence that in fact unknown cultures that don’t even have a name, different types and styles of stone making and tool making they saw here with the way people chipped their stone and created their tools.
So, they’re calling that the Gault assemblage, which is an archaeological term for a bunch of stuff that you find together and then you don’t really know what it is, and, you know, dialing back that timeline to show that people were here at this time in our prehistoric time period.
“The Stones Are Speaking” is the title of your film. Can you tell me more about what that phrase means to you?
Well that, I have to credit an archaeologist by the name of Bruce Bradley for doing that. Bruce and Mike were doing an interview, and I really just had them talking to one another sitting along Buttermilk Creek. And they were talking about what it meant, what all of the findings and all the science meant and what they were trying to prove with this research.
And they were talking about the takeaway points. These people were sophisticated. These people were smart. They were people just like us. I mean, they’re modern homo sapiens, you know? I mean, it’s hard to imagine because we don’t see them, we don’t know their language, we don’t have pictures of them.
So they were trying to conjure up and discuss this, you know, what we’re learning from stone tools and what the stone tools can tell us about these people. And so, Bruce is the one who said … The stones are sp
Older than Clovis artifacts from Gault.
Credit: Kenneth Garrett
eaking and they’re telling us these people are smart and sophisticated and blah, blah, and you can look at stone tools, and Bruce says this in the film too, the reason that archeologists study stone tools is because 99% that’s about what you have left over. You might have some bones, but at Gault all the organic material has just been eroded over time. So what you have left to study are these pieces and scraps of life that are in the stone tools.
And you can derive meaning from that by saying, “Oh, this could have been used to punch leather. This could have used to scrape a hide. Oh, this blade, it was a multipurpose knife. It could have cut meat. It could’ve cut grass.” So they’re studying the stone tools to learn what they can about the people who use them.
And so I just felt it was perfect. And I must credit my editor, because I was gnashing my teeth trying to come up with, you know, a one-word title. And he said, “Olive, why don’t you just use ‘The Stones are Speaking’?”
I think a lot of Texans are like you and like me and they haven’t heard of Gault even though it is so close to the center of Texas, the state Capitol. There is limited access to the Gault archaeological area. Should Texans make a trip?
Oh yes, and it’s actually not too limited anymore. It was way back when they were doing all this work, although thousands, thousands of volunteers were at that site helping Mike and helping the team at the Gault School really uncover all this history.
It is open to public tours. The Bell County Museum, the Williamson County Museum, the Gault School of Archaeological Research as a nonprofit, they also host individualized tours. People can get on the site, and they should.
Because even now you walk on that place and while you have to imagine and know that the real history is buried beneath your feet, you are still able to see lots of remnants and chips of stone that people made and almost every tour somebody finds something on the surface.
Now, it doesn’t have any scientific meaning when it’s found on the service because it’s not in the context. But the archaeologists and the scientists can look at this and say, “Oh, well, that’s, you know, an Angostura or that’s an Andeis point,” and they can identify the type of point or tool that it was.
But it’s just still astounding that you have to imagine if we’re still seeing stuff now, what must it looked like back in 1991, back in, you know, 15,000 years ago, 20,000 when they were making these stone tools.
Mike had a wonderful saying, can you imagine all of these … flint knappers they call them, making their stone tools and they’re hitting with rocks and deer antlers and you know, things to chip them. And he said, “Just imagine people sitting under these trees along Buttermilk Creek. The sound must have been reverberating up and down this little valley.”
And so when I walk out there, that’s what I think about. I envision this. And in the back of my head, I hear these stones being broken. And it just must have been a magical place.
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