Houston and Southeast Texas have an ancient, storied prehistory. Using data from hundreds of archeological site reports, a changing coastal landscape modeled through time in 3D, historical information on Native Americans taken from the accounts of the earliest European visitors, and digital GIS mapping to weave it all together, this book recounts the development of the physical landscape of this region and the cultures of its Native American inhabitants from the peak of the last ice age until the Spanish colonial era. Its 504 pages are illustrated with nearly 350 full color maps, charts, drawings and photographs.

Chronicles the conquest of the Karankawas and Tonkawas Indians by white settlers in nineteenth-century Texas.

Author David La Vere offers a complete chronological and cultural history of Texas Indians from twelve thousand years ago to the present day. He presents a unique view of their cultural history before and after European arrival, examining Indian interactions-both peaceful and violent-with Europeans, Mexicans, Texans, and Americans.

An incredibly detailed account of Indigenous lifeways during the initial rounds of European exploration in south-central North America. Several hundred tribes of Native Americans were living within or hunting and trading across the present-day borders of Texas when Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions washed up on a Gulf Coast beach in 1528. Over the next two centuries, as Spanish and French expeditions explored the state, they recorded detailed information about the locations and lifeways of Texas’s Native peoples. Using recent translations of these expedition diaries and journals, along with discoveries from ongoing archaeological investigations, William C. Foster here assembles the most complete account ever published of Texas’s Native peoples during the early historic period (AD 1528 to 1722). Foster describes the historic Native peoples of Texas by geographic regions. His chronological narrative records the interactions of Native groups with European explorers and with Native trading partners across a wide network that extended into Louisiana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Foster provides extensive ethnohistorical information about Texas’s Native peoples, as well as data on the various regions’ animals, plants, and climate. Accompanying each regional account is an annotated list of named Indigenous tribes in that region and maps that show tribal territories and European expedition routes. “A very useful encyclopedic regional account of the Europeans and Native peoples of Texas who encountered one another during the relatively unexamined two hundred years before the Spanish occupation of Texas and the French establishment of Louisiana.” —Southwestern Historical Quarterly

This birding guide profiles more than 80 of the best sites and attractions along this approximately 2,110-mile trail which covers more over 41 counties along Texas's Gulf Coast, and hosts half of the 600 species found in the state.

In this pioneering book Daniel Usner examines the economic and cultural interactions among the Indians, Europeans, and African slaves of colonial Louisiana, including the province of West Florida. Rather than focusing on a single cultural group or on a particular economic activity, this study traces the complex social linkages among Indian villages, colonial plantations, hunting camps, military outposts, and port towns across a large region of pre-cotton South. Usner begins by providing a chronological overview of events from French settlement of the area in 1699 to Spanish acquisition of West Florida after the Revolution. He then shows how early confrontations and transactions shaped the formation of Louisiana into a distinct colonial region with a social system based on mutual needs of subsistence. Usner's focus on commerce allows him to illuminate the motives in the contest for empire among the French, English, and Spanish, as well as to trace the personal networks of communication and exchange that existed among the territory's inhabitants. By revealing the economic and social world of early Louisianians, he lays the groundwork for a better understanding of later Southern society.