Difference between revisions of "TexasBeyondHistory.net"

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Texas Beyond History

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Texas Beyond History (TBH) is a public education service of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with 14 other organizations. Begun in 2001, its purpose is to interpret and share the results of archeological and historical research on the cultural heritage of Texas with the citizens of Texas and the world.

In this virtual museum you will find information on and images of many different aspects of the cultural legacy of Texas, a legacy spanning at least 13,500 years. Yes, people have been living within the borders of the modern political state of Texas for at least 13,500 years. In more concrete terms, that is over 540 human generations! For most of that immense time span, there is no recorded history, no books, and no eyewitness accounts. Instead all we have to tell the stories of much of the cultural heritage of Texas are mute stones, ancient campfires, broken bones, and delicate traces of once-flourishing societies. This is the "material evidence" upon which archeologists base most of our interpretations. The arrival of the first Spanish explorers in the region in the early 1500s ushered in the historic era in Texas and the creation of the written documents and drawings upon which historians depend.

Our collective cultural heritage is complex and fascinating, if sometimes painful to recount. The sixteenth-century arrival of the Spanish, for instance, also marks the beginning of over 300 years of often-brutal cultural conflict between Texas' native peoples—Indians or Native Americans—and the mainly European-derived immigrants who made the land their own. In a few short centuries the native population of Texas was decimated. Texas Beyond History covers not only the prehistoric and native peoples, but also much of the early history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, and Anglo explorers, missionaries, soldiers, miners, traders, and settlers who lived and often died in Texas. And later history, too—that of German farmers, Black freedmen, and Mexican-American laborers among many others.

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