San Jacinto archeology findings

[billchemerka]

Here's some interesting info about Mexican Army artifacts found at San Jacinto sent to me by Alamo Society member Joe Gannon:


calvininjax.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/archeologists-uncover-site-of-mexican-surrender-at-san-jacinto/

[jerry]

A related article written by DALLAS MORNING NEWS staff writer Elizabeth Souder was on the front page of Thursday's edition. Dr. Jim Crisp is quoted thus: "I'd say this is a pretty big deal."

Jerry

[Jim Boylston]

Here's a link to that Dallas Morning News article:
www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/041609dnbussanjacinto.3ddefc4.html
Good stuff!
Jim

[tmdreb]

I can't wait to see some specifics.

[sloanrodgers]

Interesting article. Wish I could have gone down to the smposium and caught this discussion
in person. Weather and other matters deterred me. Happy San Jacinto Day to all.

[coleblooded]

From the LA Times - 4.17.09! The image of 3 bayonets can be viewed on the link below from which the article here appears!

www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-battle17-2009apr17,0,4510649.story

TED COLE....aka....Cole_blooded

Texas Revolution ended here, archaeologists say

By Thomas H. Maugh II
April 17, 2009

On the heavily wooded grounds of a Texas power plant, archaeologists have found the spot where Mexican troops under the command of Col. Juan Almonte surrendered to Sam Houston's force of Texas irregulars along the San Jacinto River, ending Texas' war of secession.

The 1836 surrender "resulted in the loss of all Mexican territory west to California," said archaeologist Roger Moore of Moore Archaeological Consulting in Houston, who led the team that found the site.

"The whole continental expansion of the U.S. to the West Coast hinged on this battle," he said. The discovery was announced Thursday.

In the early 1800s, Texas was a Mexican territory, but many Americans had moved into it and they grew tired of the oppressive Mexican rule, eventually fomenting rebellion.

The Battle of San Jacinto occurred six weeks after the battle of the Alamo, in which Mexican forces led by Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna besieged the fortress and eventually killed all 350 secessionists inside, including Davy Crockett and James Bowie. Santa Anna then went after Houston's troops with an overwhelming force, but, confident in his chances, he made the fatal mistake of splitting his troops.

The force led by Almonte that encountered Houston was only 1,100 to 1,200 men strong, about the same size as Houston's group. But the Texans had been enraged by the slaughter at the Alamo. Houston, moreover, was able to take advantage of deep swales in the landscape to march his soldiers close to Almonte's force and, in effect, ambush them.

In a battle that lasted only 18 minutes, Houston's forces routed the Mexicans, who threw down their guns and ran. Almonte was able to slow them down in another gully and organize them into a cohesive mass that surrendered without further casualties. "It probably saved their lives," Moore said, because the enraged Texans would probably have slaughtered the Mexicans if they had been running away individually.

Santa Anna was later captured nearby and was persuaded to order all his troops out of Texas.

Most of the locations of the battle are well known, but not the site of the surrender, which had been mismarked by veterans of the battle in 1890.

Some historians suspected that the actual location was in the middle of a 50-acre triangular plot of land on the grounds of a natural gas plant owned by NRG Energy Inc.

The problem was that the site was so overgrown with imported Chinese tallow trees and local shrubs that it was virtually impassable -- a fact that probably protected the artifacts from treasure hunters, Moore said.

With permission from NRG and $50,000 in grants, Moore was hired to check out the area. The conventional way to look for battlefield artifacts is with metal detectors, but the brush prevented this. So the team went in with a device called a Woodgator, which has a huge drum on the front that spins and grinds up trees and shrubs, reducing them to mulch.

After making several passes across the site, the team found two deposits of musket balls and other items. The team eventually uncovered an area about 130 yards by 20 yards that was littered with piles of 10 to 20 unfired musket balls, uniform buttons and other metal artifacts -- a total of several hundred in the small space.

Many of the musket balls were in piles indicating that they were still inside soldiers' pouches when thrown down, a sign of surrender.

"The balls are the equivalent of lithic flakes and potsherds, and are the ubiquitous material in a battle site of this period, linking together rarer artifacts," Moore said. "They show where people were standing, kneeling -- or lying dead."

All of the artifacts have been taken to Texas A&M University for cleaning and preservation and will be given to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for display.

Moore and others will present the new findings Saturday at the annual Battle of San Jacinto Symposium at the University of Houston.

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[coleblooded]

This piece came out of The Houston Chronicle - 4.20.09! Hit the link below for 2 images, one being archaeologist Roger Moore holding a Mexican bayonet and Area where artifacts were found!

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6383420.html

TED COLE....aka....Cole_blooded

Artifacts shed light on San Jacinto battle

By ALLAN TURNER HOUSTON CHRONICLE
April 20, 2009, 11:14PM

Time has taken its toll on the Mexican bayonets, but their rust-pocked remains still hint at a lust for blood. The balls Santa Anna’s men loaded into their muskets fared better. Still round, they glisten like sinister grapes. A grenadier’s badge gleams as proudly as it did when, 173 years ago today, Texans struck the winning blow for freedom at San Jacinto.

Today, these and more than 400 other artifacts — fruits of a recently completed archaeological project near the famed battlefield — are helping fill the gaps in the oft-told story of Sam Houston’s routing of the Mexican military.

Archaeologist Roger Moore believes the trove of artifacts gleaned from the recent dig are the armaments discarded by 200-400 Mexican soldiers before they surrendered to a handful of victorious Texans.

Funded through grants administered by Friends of the San Jacinto Battleground, Moore led a brigade of 20 professional and amateur archaeologists in scrutinizing a 50-acre site about 1.5 miles south of the battlefield.
“There had been folklore, word that had filtered around from illegal collectors that artifacts had been found on that property,” Moore said. “That’s what piqued our interest.”

Land choked by trees

The site, located on land owned by NRG Energy, was an archaeologist’s nightmare. Though open prairie at the time Santa Anna’s troops beat a hasty retreat, the land Moore faced was choked with an almost impenetrable tangle of Chinese tallow, an invasive tree species.

That’s when Moore called in the heavy archaeological artillery — a massive Woodgator whose spinning toothed drum mowed down trash trees as easily as cutting a lawn. After a few test clearings, in came a volunteer expert in the use of metal detectors.

“With 50 acres,” said Friends of the San Jacinto Battleground president Jan DeVault, “the possibility of pinpointing anything was pretty dicey. The first day out, we hit the jackpot.”

With the first find, more test clearings were made. Moore and his colleagues soon discerned a pattern. The artifacts seemed concentrated in a swath of land roughly 130 yards long and 20 yards wide.

“I’m an archaeologist,” Moore said. “I’m not a historian.”
Still, he believes the pattern of his findings suggests the site may be the point at which soldiers under the command of Santa Anna stalwart Juan Almonte gave up.
As Moore re-creates the scene, Almonte’s men — surprised like other Mexican troops by Houston’s midafternoon raid — retreated through boggy ground and prairie until they reached a gully shielded by trees. In that brief respite, the Mexican commander organized his troops into formation, then ordered them to discard their weapons before marching forward under a white flag.

The action was an almost anticlimactic ending to an afternoon — the battle lasted less than 20 minutes — that reversed Texan disasters at San Antonio and Goliad. When the battle smoke cleared, 630 Mexicans were dead and 730 captured. On the Texan side, nine were dead and 30 wounded. Moore said artifacts retrieved from the site eventually will be exhibited through the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
New interest

DeVault said the project points the way to more exploration.
“It just blows you away,” she said. “I think people became very lax. They just assumed that the battlefield was picked over by souvenir hunters. Now we have tools that are very sophisticated — magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar, a generation of metal detectors that can penetrate far below the surface.
“The first systematic archaeological survey of San Jacinto began in 2002 and 2003,” DeVault said. “We believe we have just scratched the surface.”

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[coleblooded]

Article from The Huntsville Item - 4.22.09! Link below will have this story plus an image of Sandy Rogers, collectors registrar holding an engraved Mexican cross belt piece!

www.itemonline.com/homepage/local_story_112000135.html/resources_printstory

TED COLE....aka....Cole_blooded

New exhibit features artifacts from Battle of San Jacinto

By Matthew Jackson
Staff Reporter

April 22, 2009 12:01 am

— The Sam Houston Memorial Museum introduced a new exhibit this week featuring never-before-seen artifacts recovered from the site of the Battle of San Jacinto.
A pivotal moment in Texas history, the Battle of San Jacinto, fought on the morning of April 21, 1836, served as the final defeat of Gen. Santa Anna at the hands of Gen. Sam Houston and his Texian forces.

Now, 173 years later, archeologists from Moore Archeological Consulting Inc. under the supervision of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Texas Historical Commission are conducting an extensive survey of the original battlefield in an attempt to restore it to its original condition.

The ongoing survey began in 2004, and netted hundreds of items, many of them original artifacts belonging to Mexican soldiers. Today, the survey continues, extending into areas south of the battlefield itself currently owned by energy companies.

In 2008, a large portion of land owned by NRG Energy was cleared of forest land and undergrowth, leading to the discovery of hundreds of more artifacts. The strong concentration of artifacts in the area, combined with evidence from historical accounts, have led researches to believe that this was likely the site of the Mexican army’s final surrender to Houston.

The five items on display in the current exhibit are from the original 2004 survey. Sandy Rogers, Collections Registrar for the museum and archeological steward with the Texas Historical Commission, helped to excavate many of the artifacts, now on loan to the museum from Texas Parks and Wildlife. They include a Mexican bayonet, a Mexican coin dated 1834, a canister shot fragment believed to be from one of the famous Texian “Twin Sisters” cannons, a brass horn worn on the hat of a Mexican soldier, and a cross belt piece adorned with the letters “BG,” signifying “Battalion Guerrero,” a Mexican battalion present at the Battle of the Alamo.
“These are the most exciting pieces, especially that cross belt piece,” Rogers said. “We know that the Battalion Guerrero was at the Alamo, and they came directly from the Alamo to San Jacinto.”

The exhibit also includes a dress sword belonging to Houston and a map of the battlefield surveyed by Houston and Henderson Yoakum circa 1850. The map was included in Yoakum’s history of Texas, the first book of its kind. The exhibit will remain in the museum until April of 2010, and Rogers noted that new pieces could be added in the coming months.

The Sam Houston Memorial Museum, located at the corner of 19th Street and Sam Houston Avenue in Huntsville, is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 4:30 p.m.