Overview

When Harold F. Pape moved to Gregory, Texas, in 1927, he quickly became fascinated by the wealth of Native American artifacts along the nearby shoreline of Corpus Christi Bay and what is now called Port Bay, a southern arm of the larger Copano Bay. A lifelong natural history enthusiast and collector, Pape met and married Lucile H. Tunnell, a widow with three young sons. Before long, John W. Tunnell, Lucile's oldest son, was accompanying Pape on his field studies in surrounding areas and the wider Texas Coastal Bend.   Working in the days before much of the development that now covers the region, Pape and Tunnell studied more than two hundred sites throughout the Coastal Bend, making meticulous logs, maps, and notes of their discoveries. John W. (Wes) Tunnell Jr. and Jace Tunnell have organized and documented their family collection and present it, along with brief biographies of the two collectors, as a survey of the state of knowledge in the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as a tribute to these two important early researchers and their body of work.

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9781623492748

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Reviews

This book helps correct the overlooked contributions to Texas archeology made by citizens untrained in the profession. With a keen sense of doing things right Pape and Tunnell preserved information and artifacts in the Coastal Bend that otherwise would have been lost to history and progress. This is a testament to how non-archeologists can make extraordinary contributions to archeological science.-- Elton R. Prewitt, Dept. of Anthropology, Texas State University--Elton R. Prewitt (01/15/2015)

This volume is an invaluable addition to the study of Texas archaeology through the lens of a significant collection of artifacts assembled by two pioneer avocational archeologists. Moreover, it reveals the engagement with these materials by four generations of the learned Pape-Tunnell family and speaks to all Texans who feel a connection to their state through the pre-history in the ground beneath their feet. As such, Pioneering Archaeology in the Texas Coastal Bend: The Pape-Tunnell Collection is both archeological science and literary treasure. Thomas H. Kreneck--Thomas H. Kreneck (02/09/2015)

The remains of the Indian camps and villages were already vanishing under the onslaught of erosion, tides and storms along the South Texas coast. This book documents the detailed studies made by two avocational archeologists, Harold Pape and John Tunnell, to discover and describe the Indian coastal sites in the Corpus Christi/Copano Bay area. Their pioneering work was done in the infancy of professional archeology in Texas, so these two had to devise their own methods of documentation. In the 1920s and 1930s, they discovered over 200 sites, which they documented with maps, sketches and written descriptions. Their important work has now been brought to publication by two descendants and will provide the data to see into a ten-thousand year history of Native American habitation that has now disappeared. -- Herndon Williams, Bayside Historical Society

Author Information

John W. (Wes) Tunnell Jr is associate director and endowed chair of biodiversity and conservation science at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies and regents’ professor, Fulbright scholar, and retired professor of biology at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, USA. Jace W. Tunnell is the director of research and planning at the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program in Corpus Christi, where his work focuses on large-scale habitat restoration, water quality, and environmental planning initiatives.

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