Honey Creek

The investigation of a rather ordinary prehistoric campsite overlooking a small tributary of the Llano River in western Mason County gave archeologists much insight into hot rock cooking, the process that left its permanent mark at tens of thousands of localities across the Plateaus and Canyonlands region. The most obvious “marks” left by hot rock cooking are the two most common archeological features—burned rock middens and hearths. Middens are large mounded accumulations of fire-cracked cooking rocks and other debris generated by earth oven facilities used over and over to bake plants. "Hearths" are relatively small circular patterns of cooking rocks that represent individual cooking episodes quite similar to those that resulted in the midden accumulation.

What makes the Honey Creek site (41MS32) extraordinary is not the nature of the site itself, but what was learned from it. The site was excavated in 1987-1988 by an archeological team from the Texas Department of Transportation led by Glenn T. Goode, prior to its destruction by a road widening project. A few years later, a research team from the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL, UT Austin) led by Steve Black analyzed the field results as part of a larger study of four similar “burned rock midden” sites. The Honey Creek site proved especially informative because both the field and the lab teams asked timely questions and were able to marshall the data needed to answer most of their questions.

Hot Rock Cooking at Honey Creek

In the late 1980s, researchers were beginning to understand how and why burned rock middens formed, but they hadn’t quite put the pieces together. A sketch of the history of midden interpretation can be found in the Camp Bowie exhibit. The analysis of the Honey Creek site helped pull research threads together because the site had yielded the “right stuff”—well-preserved, charred plant remains, good field documentation, and really good dirt—dozens of soil samples collected from within the midden and from individual oven features.

What archeologists classify as "burned rock midden sites" are open campsites containing one or more middens and various other features such as hearths. In other words, middens are special site features, not sites in and of themselves. At the Honey Creek site there was only one small midden about 45 feet in diameter (13-x-15 meters) and less than two feet thick. Because the field archeologists carefully weighed samples of the burned rocks making up the midden, the total mass could be calculated –12.5 metric tons or so (about 27,600 pounds). And this is just a small midden. At some sites in the region, individual middens cover several acres and must have a mass of well over a hundred metric tons.

What caused native peoples to amass all these fire-cracked rocks in one place? Plant baking. They baked plants with heated limestone rocks in layered cooking arrangements known as earth ovens. You can read more about earth ovens elsewhere in this website, but consider a few telling numbers from the midden at the Honey Creek site. We can calculate, at least crudely, the number of plant baking episodes it took to form this smallish midden. Based on field data and experimental work, an average-size individual earth oven required the use of roughly 500 lbs of cooking rocks. Dividing this into the total midden mass (27,600 lbs), we get 52 ovens. But, experimental work shows that a good cooking rock could be used about three times before it cracked into pieces too small to be reused. So, multiple 52 by 3 and we arrive at a projection of 156 ovens. To recap, the total mass of the small midden at the Honey Creek site is estimated to represent the accumulated debris resulting from perhaps 156 oven-baking episodes. But what was being cooked in the ovens?

We can answer that question because Goode carefully collected 10-liter soil matrix samples from 16 individual hearth/oven features as well as samples from various areas within the midden. During the analysis phase, archeobotantist Phil Dering, an archeologist and botanist then at Texas A&M University, “floated” each matrix sample. This means he used a water flotation processing technique to skim off the “light fraction” charred plant remains for identification—the charred bits float, rocks and bones sink. Once the light fraction samples dried, Dering spent many hours identifying the genus, and species of plants represented by the small charred fragments. He did this by comparing the archeological specimens to “known” samples of charred modern plants collected especially for comparative study.

Check out the accompanying summary list of the identified plant remains found in the Honey Creek midden. This is a fascinating assortment of plants and includesonly the potentially edible plants. At least 14 different kinds of charred wood were also recovered from the midden—oak wood (live oak and red oak) was the most common, followed by persimmon, hackberry, walnut, juniper, buckthorne, and others. It looks like the Honey Creek cooks burned any dry wood their children could lay their hands on. (In hunting and gathering societies, everyone pitched in and the task of fetching firewood usually fell to children.) And there were no log fragments, all of the firewood appears to have been harvested as stick-sized chunks—dead limbs and twigs that could be easily broken off and hauled back to camp.

The edible parts—seeds, nuts, stalks, bulbs, hearts, leaves, or pads—of at least nine different plant species were found in the midden. But most of the nuts and seeds from plants such as Indian cherry, goosefoot, hackberry, and oak don’t need to be baked. These (and various animal bone fragments) are thought to represent ordinary cooking debris from other kinds of cooking activities that took place in the midden area. (Only plant baking requires lots of hot rocks and here we are trying to explain why the heap of spent cooking rocks formed.) Among the charred plants from the Honey Creek midden, the most likely baking candidates are prickly pear pads, sotol and perhaps yucca leave bases (hearts), and the bulbs of lily family plants such as wild onions. Visit the Plant Gallery in the Nature’s Harvest section for details about how these plants were used.

The charred identified plant fragments were also used for radiocarbon dating. The accompanying graph tells the dating story. The Honey Creek midden formed over a 600-year time span between about A.D. 1100-1700, during the Late Prehistoric period and the very early historic era. Now let’s finish the numbers.

As explained, the small midden at the Honey Creek site is estimated to have formed from the accumulated debris generated by perhaps 156 ovens (individual plant-baking episodes). That sounds like a lot, but not when you factor in time—the midden formed over a 600 year period. That means we could account for the accumulation of spent cooking stones (i.e., the midden) if small bands of hunter-gatherers had stopped at the site merely every 3.8 years and fired up only a single oven each time.

Of course it must not have happened so regularly. More likely, family bands of 15-20 people came to the Honey Creek site once every generation or so and did quite a bit of baking for a few days or a week or two. That would also help explain why additional ovens were found outside the midden—the site may have been a busy place during the peak availability of baking plants. These site use episodes probably didn’t occur very often simply because it wouldn’t take long for an experienced family of gatherers to harvest all the nearby mature sotol plants or dig out a thick nearby patch of wild onions. Once heavily harvested, these plants take many years to grow back into a dense stand. In other words, it is likely that people came to the site to bake plants only when the targeted plants in the immediate area were ripe for the picking and that probably didn’t happen all that often.

Such educated guesses are just that: educated guesses or interpretations based on the facts as we archeologists know them at the time and on as many lines of evidence as we can bring together. It is our job to read between the lines of evidence and put forth a solid argument and plausible interpretation. As archeologists investigate more sites like the Honey Creek site and ask the right questions, we will learn more and come up with improved interpretations and better educated guesses about what happened in the past. This is how archeology as a science progresses: tiny charred bit by tiny charred bit, date by date, and reasoned inference by reasoned inference. The Honey Creek site in southwestern Mason County may have been a rather ordinary archeological site, but it yielded some fascinating insight into the prehistory of the Plateaus and Canyonlands.

Prehistoric Recycling: The Case of the Battered Martindale

Take a look at the photo on the left labeled “Recycled Point.” This Martindale dart point is of a style made in late Early Archaic times, perhaps 7000-8000 years ago (5000-6000 B.C.). But it was found in the upper deposits at the Honey Creek just north of the midden along with a hodge-podge mix of arrow points, a few dart points, and other stone tools, several of which show evidence of recycling

At first glance, this cluster of artifacts (Cluster 6 as shown on plan map on the right) might be considered a “mixed-age” accumulation of artifacts made thousands of years apart and too mixed up to make any sense of. But close study reveals a different story. The northern edge of the Honey Creek midden appears to be an area where stone tools were made and used during the same period the midden formed (A.D. 1100-1700). The arrow points (most of which were broken as they were being made) date to that time. But the Martindale and several other dart points appear to have been recycled tools, probably reused on the spot by the later arrowhead-making peoples. Study the enlarged photo of the recycled point, read the caption, and then come back and read the following.

Here is what we think these details observed on the Martindale point may mean. The original point was made, used for deer hunting, and discarded at the end of its “use life” by its original owner some 7000-8000 years ago. The point was probably left behind after it was used and resharpened several times, rendering it too short, stubby, and dull for a proper hunting point—most dart points were discarded for similar reasons. For thousands of years the Martindale point just lay there, slowly developing patina.

Much later, during the 600-year period the Honey Creek midden was in use (A.D. 1100-1700), somebody spied the Martindale point lying on the ground and picked it up. Or perhaps they found it while scraping up a basket of dirt to help seal an earth oven. However it was found, somebody realized it could be used to make a simple cutting or scraping tool. Grabbing a convenient hammerstone, the person quickly knocked off a few small chips (small flakes) from the edge of the point to create a fresh, sharp edge. A sharp edge would be useful for many everyday tasks, just like you use a pocket knife or a pair of scissors. Daily task accomplished, the recycled point was soon abandoned again.

Hundreds of years later, Glenn Goode spotted this Martindale point during the excavations and socked it away in a properly labeled bag. And a few years later, Steve Black opened the bag and looked closely at this specimen and others from the site and came up with this explanation. Such “just-so” stories must be recognized for what they are and taken with a grain of salt. We’ll never know the details of exactly what happened 700 years ago. But the details don’t really matter as much as understanding the pattern to answer the question—why was a battered old dart point with freshly chipped edges found amid much younger artifacts? We can be confident that native peoples were practiced recyclers throughout prehistoric times. This old, commonsense habit probably accounts for considerable “mixing” of materials of different ages in archeological deposits.

Teaching Honey Creek

What's Cookin' at Honey Creek? introduces students to the fascinating process in which prehistoric "chefs" on the Edwards Plateau cooked quantities of plant bulbs in earth ovens by using hot rocks. This cooking technique was used for more more than 8,000 years in Texas, so they clearly had a recipe for success! View TEKS and download page.

Credits & Sources

This exhibit was written by Steve Black, TBH co-editor and leader of the analysis team at TARL that studied the excavation results from the Honey Creek site on behalf of the Texas Department of Transportation. This exhibit was developed as part of the Prehistoric Texas project.

Print Sources

Black, Stephen L., and Alston V. Thoms
2014   Hunter-Gatherer Earth Ovens in the Archaeological Record: Fundamental Concepts. American Antiquity 79(2) pp. 203-226. Download article as PDF.

Black, Stephen L., Linda W. Ellis, Darrell G. Creel, and Glenn T. Goode
1997   Hot Rock Cooking on the Greater Edwards Plateau: Four Burned Rock Midden Sites in West Central Texas. Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, Studies in Archeology 22, UT Austin. (Published jointly with the Texas Department of Transportation.)

Black, Stephen L.
1997   "The Honey Creek Site, 41MS32." Chapter 6 in the above volume.

1997   "Oven Cookery at the Honey Creek Site." Chapter 10 in the above volume.

Goode, Glenn T.
1991   Late Prehistoric Burned Rock Middens in Central Texas. In: Hester, Thomas R., ed., The Burned Rock Middens of Texas: An Archeologial Symposium. Studies in Archeology 13, Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, UT Austin.