Reviewed by: A Prehistory of Houston and Southeast Texas: Landscape and Culture by Dan M. Worrall Stephen Fox A Prehistory of Houston and Southeast Texas: Landscape and Culture. By Dan M. Worrall. (Fulshear, Tex.: Concertina Press, 2021. Pp. 485. Illustrations, appendices, references, index.) Retired Houston-area geologist Dan M. Worrall has written an ambitious book that seeks to fill in the last 22,000 years of regional pre-history, the time that preceded European exploration beginning five hundred years ago and Anglo and African American settlement of the upper Texas Gulf coast beginning two hundred years ago. Worrall defines his study area as the twenty counties bounded on the east by the Sabine River; the southeast by the Gulf of Mexico; the western edges of Brazoria, Wharton, Waller, and Grimes Counties; and the northern edges of Grimes, Walker, San Jacinto, Polk, Tyler, Jasper, and Newton Counties. To supplement the written and pictorial records on which historians customarily rely, he deploys the disciplines of geology and archeology. For historians, Worrall’s results are likely to require some conceptual readjustment to deal with the vast expanses of time he surveys, the radical geophysical reconfiguration this territory experienced, and the scarce material culture fragments from which he deduces human history. Worrall approaches this difficult task with impressive rigor as he interprets geological and geographical data and cultural remains and integrates them to produce pre-history interpretations. A Prehistory of Houston and Southeast Texas is divided into three major sections. The first, “The Physical Landscape,” consists of two chapters and the first of the book’s five “atlases,” which graphically convey information in maps and diagrams. (For this section of the book, Worrall credits contributors John B. Anderson, Ewing Professor Emeritus of Oceanography at Rice University; Don Dobesh and Rosemary Neyin, specialists in seismic interpretation and depth imaging; and Cary Burnley, a specialist in Geographic Information System mapping.) Part Two, “The Human Landscape,” contains six chapters and two atlases. This section focuses on the Indigenous communities occupying the present twenty-county area from the time of European-American contact back into deep time. Worrall credits the fieldwork and publications of the Houston Archeological Society, especially those compiled by Leland Patterson, with laying [End Page 309] the groundwork on which he constructs his arguments. He observes that his large, ecologically diverse study area, encompassing barrier islands, coastal salt flats, the Big Thicket and Piney Woods, coastal plains, and rolling inland prairies, was occupied by culturally distinct Indigenous groups, some of whom made seasonal forays into parts of this territory while other groups migrated cyclically within the territory. Worrall identifies the Atakapa cultural group (constituted by Akokisa, Bidai, and Atakapan bands) as dominant in the coastal plain between the Sabine and Brazos Rivers. His analysis of how Indigenous bands used landscape conditions to facilitate their hunting of animal herds and how they managed landscape conditions to optimize conditions that would attract such herds is fascinating. Part Three, “Putting It All Together,” consists of three chapters and two atlases that address regional trade networks that can be inferred from archeological finds and ends with Worrall’s reflections on current questions of cultural diversity and climate change from the longue durée perspective his investigation involves. Worrall’s efforts to synthesize findings from an array of disciplines bridging a very long time-span are, as he acknowledges in the preface, “not a light read” (xv). His intellectually courageous determination to confront a topic of this magnitude, consistently externalize his sources and methodology, and communicate not only via text, but also graphic diagrams and maps, demonstrates his commitment to building a base that other scholars can amplify. A Prehistory of Houston and Southeast Texas aspires not to be so much the last word on the pre-European landscapes and cultures of the upper Texas Gulf Coast but a crucial first word that integrates geology, cultural geography, archeology, and Indigenous history to expand historical awareness and scholarship beyond written sources alone. Stephen Fox Anchorage Foundation of Texas, Houston Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association
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Feb 28, 2022
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