2003 – Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association Book Award Winner – Texas Catholic Historical Society 2004 – Finalist: Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award for Book Making the Most Significant Contribution to Knowledge – Texas Institute of Letters The region that now encompasses Central Texas and northern Coahuila, Mexico, was once inhabited by numerous Native hunter-gather groups whose identities and lifeways we are only now learning through archaeological discoveries and painstaking research into Spanish and French colonial records. From these key sources, Maria F. Wade has compiled this first comprehensive ethnohistory of the Native groups that inhabited the Texas Edwards Plateau and surrounding areas during most of the Spanish colonial era. Much of the book deals with events that took place late in the seventeenth century, when Native groups and Europeans began to have their first sustained contact in the region. Wade identifies twenty-one Native groups, including the Jumano, who inhabited the Edwards Plateau at that time. She offers evidence that the groups had sophisticated social and cultural mechanisms, including extensive information networks, ladino cultural brokers, broad-based coalitions, and individuals with dual-ethnic status. She also tracks the eastern movement of Spanish colonizers into the Edwards Plateau region, explores the relationships among Native groups and between those groups and European colonizers, and develops a timeline that places isolated events and singular individuals within broad historical processes.

In the fourteenth century, a culture arose in and around the Edwards Plateau of Central Texas that represents the last prehistoric peoples before the cultural upheaval introduced by European explorers. This culture has been labeled the Toyah phase, characterized by a distinctive tool kit and a bone-tempered pottery tradition. ?Spanish documents, some translated decades ago, offer glimpses of these mobile people. Archaeological excavations, some quite recent, offer other views of this culture, whose homeland covered much of Central and South Texas. For the first time in a single volume, this book brings together a number of perspectives and interpretations of these hunter-gatherers and how they interacted with each other, the pueblos in southeastern New Mexico, the mobile groups in northern Mexico, and newcomers from the northern plains such as the Apache and Comanche.? Assembling eight studies and interpretive essays to look at social boundaries from the perspective of migration, hunter-farmer interactions, subsistence, and other issues significant to anthropologists and archaeologists, The Toyah Phase of Central Texas: Late Prehistoric Economic and Social Processes demonstrates that these prehistoric societies were never isolated from the world around them. Rather, these societies were keenly aware of changes happening on the plains to their north, among the Caddoan groups east of them, in the Puebloan groups in what is now New Mexico, and among their neighbors to the south in Mexico.

This study of one of the least known Apache tribes utilizes archival materials to reconstruct Lipan history through numerous threats to their society.

Why and when human societies shifted from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture engages the interest of scholars around the world. One of the most fruitful areas in which to study this issue is the North American Southwest, where Late Archaic inhabitants of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts of Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico turned to farming while their counterparts in Trans-Pecos and South Texas continued to forage. By investigating the environmental, biological, and cultural factors that led to these differing patterns of development, we can identify some of the necessary conditions for the rise of agriculture and the corresponding evolution of village life. The twelve papers in this volume synthesize previous and ongoing research and offer new theoretical models to provide the most up-to-date picture of life during the Late Archaic (from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago) across the entire North American Borderlands. Some of the papers focus on specific research topics such as stone tool technology and mobility patterns. Others study the development of agriculture across whole regions within the Borderlands. The two concluding papers trace pan-regional patterns in the adoption of farming and also link them to the growth of agriculture in other parts of the world.

THE PALEO INDIAN SERIES: CLOVIS THE DREAM HUNTERS EPOCH A frightened abandoned child struggles to survive the terrifying perils of the Pleistocene Llano Estacado to become a powerful woman, protected by Spirit Mammoth Mother; her only friend a huge Dire Wolf. Set against the panoramic backdrop of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and Llano Estacado of Wyoming, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico, the reader will thrill to meet the majestic Columbian Mammoth, shiver with fear at the attack of a fi erce Saber Toothed Tiger and come to love a very special Dire Wolf. She seeks and fi nds Th e People only to be threatened by an evil Dreamer who recognizes her as a threat and seeks her death. Th e Dream Hunters series will both captivate and educate the reader as they learn about the Clovis people, that early Paleo-Indian culture which has so intrigued and eluded the archaeologists for decades. Th e author has applied her fi rst hand experience as continued to back fl ap

“We must! Or we all will die here in these miserable Starving Mountains. They are out there, I know they must be.” A pair of youths on the cusp of manhood bring The People across the great moving sand belt onto the Great Plains. A young woman is tested greatly by the Bison Spirit and found acceptable to lead The People back to the ways of their ancestors. But Basket is only half the way; they must be reunited. Soul brothers ripped asunder as evil claws its way in. Only Basket and Star Child can save the people and drive the evil away so that The People reach their destiny. At the end of the Younger Dryas—11,500 years ago—the rain returned. The Great Plains again supported vast herds of bison: bison antiquuis. The People were living in fragmented groups at the edge of starvation, but gradually, they began to adapt to a new way of life and spread from south Texas to North Dakota. They were the Folsom Culture.