The Stones Are Speaking

- [Narrator] Funding for this program made possible by Clements Foundation, Still Water Foundation, LaNoe and Paul Scherer Family Foundation, and Summerlee Foundation.

Additional funding provided by... (uplifting music) And by... For more information and a full list of funders, please visit us at thestonesarespeaking.com.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] If there's a single trait that makes us distinctly human, it is curiosity.

We grapple with big mysteries of life dating back to the first people who roamed this planet.

Where did we come from?

How did we get where we are today?

- [Michael] Humans want to know about the world around them, and part of the fundamental human curiosity is about our own past, and archeology at one level is simply an effort to provide for that intellectual need.

- [Narrator] For some archeologists, the most vexing question is how and when humans arrived in the Western Hemisphere.

- [David] The people in the Americas, it's part of the great human story.

It's a journey that started in Africa over 100,000 years ago.

The Americas were the last place on Earth that modern humans got to.

Going into unknown lands, making their way successfully.

- [Narrator] Who could imagine that an obscure site deep in the heart of Texas would rewrite this global story?

- Well, good morning, and welcome to Gault!

- [Tom] So we're told that archeology is in foreign places that you have to travel to, and you barely have to leave Austin before you find one of the most groundbreaking sites in the United States.

- It's a part of mystery.

It's a place of wonder.

- [Tom] The site is so unassuming to anyone that would walk around here.

They don't see these big ruins.

The archeology that they've been told is sort of the evidence of civilization.

- We have now excavated 3% of the site, and we have 2.6 million artifacts.

Lots of stuff here.

- [Narrator] Dr. Michael Collins, a scientist with a bold vision, saw the possibilities here and staked his career to save Gault for humanity.

He rallied a team who uncovered an archeological goldmine of stone tools and scraps of life that upended long-held theories about the earliest people in the Americas.

- [Clark] There were people here significantly earlier in the Americas than we used to tell people.

- [Bruce] He had a feeling for the land, the place.

- [Tom] You throw in Gault with Mike, and somehow, it's just magic.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) - The challenge of archeology is to take the scraps that people left behind and try to reconstruct what their lifeways were like, what the environments they occupied were like.

If you get enough of those little bits and pieces and you integrate the perspectives from multiple sciences, how do these inform us of what life might've been like 15,000 years ago?

That's what makes archeology just absolutely fascinating.

I can trace my interest in archeology pretty specifically to the fact that when I was 11 years old, I joined the Boy Scouts.

We went on a camping trip in the sand dunes, and I found a milling stone with the hand stone that goes with it.

So I carried it home and was telling my dad.

He saw that interest.

- [Narrator] Collins' parents fostered his love of the outdoors, but nothing captivated him more than how people lived in the past.

- And we went to archeological sites, Mesa Verde, and a lot of the famous sites that were open to the public.

That was fuel to the fire.

There was an archeological site just not very far from grade school, and boy, when the wind was blowing, I couldn't wait to get out and go see what was being uncovered.

The people behind that behavior were fascinating to me.

Who were they?

What were they like?

What can we learn out here?

That was how I got started, and it became a profession.

- [Narrator] By age 13, he was a lifetime member of the Texas Archeological Society and mentored by an iconic naturalist, Glen Evans.

- This guy had done excavations of prehistoric mammoth sites, so I mean, he absolutely epitomized my fascination with the discipline of archeology.

- [Narrator] Evans schooled his young protege to look deep into the natural world and read the landscape.

- His classroom was the front porch or the front seat of an automobile, and all of a sudden, he'd stop and he'd say, "Look over there at those sand dunes.

Look how the wind's blowing the sand off the top of the tall ones and blowing it into the valley below."

(laughs) You know?

Yeah, you can see it, but what does it mean?

What's it telling you?

- [Narrator] The tutoring paid off when Collins, at age 17, stuck his shovel in the ground while exploring a rock shelter and uncovered a fossil bison bone in an unexpected location.

- [Michael] Bison would not have gone up in this narrow canyon.

I carried it home and showed it to Glen, and they did a test excavation.

It was a classic high plains buffalo drive, where the Indians would gather up a herd and send them into a trap, run 'em over a cliff.

(dramatic music) This bonfire rock shelter turned out to be one of the major sites in the state.

- [Narrator] It was the first of many significant discoveries by Collins.

(upbeat music) His career took off at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied anthropology and geology.

He got his PhD at the University of Arizona, where he embraced an emerging concept for analyzing stone tools, called experimental flintknapping.

He met Bruce Bradley, a colleague and friend for life.

- We ended up spending weekends every now and again busting rocks together, you know, trying to learn about stone tools by making 'em.

There we go.

What really makes stone tools interesting is that, you know, 99.9% of human history, that's all we have to study.

We were looking at how they were made.

We use the term reading stone tools.

It takes a lot of forethought, planning, skill, to take a piece of stone and produce the kinds of pieces, what we call flakes, that are gonna be useful for what you wanna do.

- [Michael] The waste flakes reflect the behavior that produced them.

- [Bruce] And so understanding the nuances of how they were made, how they were used, how they were perceived in the past, is our only insight into some of these ancient cultures.

- [Narrator] In his 20s, Collins studied abroad with some of the world's leading archeologists.

(gentle music) He had an epiphany as he worked at Tabun Cave in Israel on the day man landed on the moon.

- [Michael] I was down excavating, uncovering something, looked like a hand ax, almost as near as anything could be to the first level of human technology.

It's just a simple rock with some flakes knocked off of it to make a sharp edge.

I heard Armstrong say... - [Neil] That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

- [Michael] Right there, from that stone tool to that man stepping on the surface of the moon, was, I guess, 99% of human technology.

The changes that have occurred in that 75,000 years.

I guess that's what archeology is all about, trying to come to understand how those changes occurred.

- [Narrator] Over the course of his career, Collins earned a reputation as a brilliant analytical thinker.

In the classroom and the field, he pushed students and peers to apply cutting edge science to extract new data about old cultures.

- He wouldn't let you be right for the wrong reasons.

You had to explain yourself and show why you were right.

And that was his calling card.

It had to be done right.

- [Narrator] At age 38, as a professor at the University of Kentucky, Collins led the largest public works projects in that state's history.

In Texas, he broke new ground about prehistoric life, where highway crews found rare skeletal remains of a Native American woman buried about 10,000 years ago.

All this primed Collins to see potential at another Texas site, a place that would ultimately change his life and our understanding of human history.

(upbeat music) - [Michael] It literally looked like a World War I battlefield, with all of these holes dug everywhere with big piles of dirt beside 'em.

- [Narrator] An arrowhead collector dug up these intriguing engraved stones at Gault.

He sent them to an artifact expert, who alerted Collins and his boss at the state's premier archeological research lab at UT Austin.

- He called and said, "Do you Texas archeologists know what the hell is going on down in your area?

These collectors have dug into a site that has Clovis material in it.

It has engraved stones."

- [Michael] Ever since the Clovis site was found in the 1930s, archeologists in America have honed a theory that Clovis represented the artifacts left behind by the first peoples in the Americas.

- [Narrator] According to the Clovis theory, humans first came here from Asia across the Bering Strait during the Ice Age.

As the ice sheets melted to open up an ice-free corridor, these big game hunters expanded into the rest of the continent about 13,000 years ago.

Distinctive Clovis spear points had been found in Texas and across the Americas, but engraved stones were rare.

- Here is primitive art at what's supposedly the inception of human occupation in the Americas.

This stuff was absolutely unprecedented.

- [Narrator] And absolutely unexpected at a site that professional archeologists had written off after decades of looting by collectors.

- After Henry Gault sold the land in the 1940s, the new landowners later started a pay to dig site.

The biggest problem you have with a pay to dig site is, of course, it removes things from context.

You lose all the story that goes with it.

So, you know, archeologists have a long and checkered history with collectors about that.

- [Narrator] Collins could see beyond the collectors' damage.

- You'd look in those back dirt piles, and here's all kinds of flint flakes.

It was a rich, dense archeological deposit.

That told me in a New York minute that this was a site that still had a lot of potential.

You have two absolutely essential resources for prehistoric people in this part of the world.

You have wonderful flint in abundance and you have reliable water.

Water for themselves and water for the game that they were hunting.

- [Narrator] Collins and Hester asked the landowner, Elmer Lindsey, for permission to dig a test excavation.

- [Tom] Now, Mr. Lindsey didn't give a hoot about the value of archeology.

He told us, "Well, I'm not in this just to be nice to archeologists, I expect you to pay me."

- [Narrator] 25 bucks a day per person.

- [Tom] I don't know of a more cantankerous landowner that I have ever dealt with.

- [Jon] 1991 was a quick strike operation.

Tom Hester was the primary principal investigator, but Mike was the muscle.

He spent a lot of his time thinking about that little corner of the Gault site in a larger context, the kind of geology and the deposits and the stratigraphy.

What were we gonna get over time from that place?

- [Narrator] The natural springs that fed Buttermilk Creek made it an ideal place for life.

Not so much for archeologists digging deep holes and hitting the water table.

- We thought we were done because you can't dig, you know, in the muddy water table, but Mike said, "No, no, we're gonna keep going."

It wasn't my favorite, you know, to be put back in the hole and, you know, the water's over your shoe tops but you're still having to excavate in controlled ways, but he was absolutely convinced that it was justifiable to request that of students who aren't getting paid.

- [Narrator] The team had only 12 days to learn what they could.

- And what we learned was off the graph.

It really was something major.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] He and Hester knew the stones at Gault had more to say and wanted more time.

Elmer Lindsey wanted more money.

With no deal, the team had no choice but to walk away with more questions than answers.

- [Michael] That's life.

You can't force yourself onto these sites, and archeologists are well aware of that.

I went away knowing that the looting was gonna continue out here, and it did.

- [Narrator] Collins had no time to dwell on what ifs at Gault.

He was wrapping up years of analysis of unusual stone tools from a site in Southern Chile called Monte Verde.

There, archeologist Tom Dillehay found startling organic evidence of prehistoric life preserved in peat bog, remains of huts, wooden stakes, even footprints.

- Most of the time in an archeological site, you get some rocks, maybe you get some bones.

Do you get mastodon hide adhering to a plank next to a wooden peg with a little string tied around it?

No, not often.

(laughs) - [Narrator] The findings rocked the profession, and when radiocarbon dating showed Monte Verde 1,000 years older than Clovis, the profession erupted.

For Collins, the data confirmed his long doubts about the Clovis theory of how and when people first arrived in the Americas about 13,000 years ago.

- When I first began to hear that story, it just seemed a little too pat.

That was a major event in human history, major movement of people and animals and changing environments, people adapting to new conditions.

That story has got to be more complex.

Archeologists would find stuff and they'd say, "This stuff's older than Clovis."

Everybody would land on 'em with both feet.

It was just heretical to suggest that Clovis wasn't first.

- [Narrator] A blue ribbon panel of experts verified the age of Monte Verde, but many American archeologists didn't buy it.

- [Michael] We call 'em Clovis firsters.

They don't want it to change, they don't wanna learn anything new.

Why do archeology if you're not gonna find something different and new?

- [Narrator] Collins knew more evidence was needed from more sites.

A phone call out of nowhere led Collins back to a familiar place that still had more to tell him.

The Gault site had changed hands.

Relatives of Elmer Lindsey bought it to keep it in the family and to dig up artifacts.

- Down right there.

- Digging in the dirt.

A lot of people call it work, we call it fun.

- [Michael] They stopped the pay to dig, but then they started digging themselves and they started using a front end loader.

(laughs) You know, it was kind of a frying pan in the fire.

- [Howard] We bought the property with intent of collecting enough artifacts to pay for the place or make payments.

Just have fun collecting and make a little money.

- The way in which we excavate a site, we utterly destroy that portion of the site that we excavate.

Archeology is a destructive science in that regard, and there are decisions that you make in taking a site apart that are irreversible.

- She's always looking for the little stuff.

I'm always looking for the bigger stuff.

(laughs) - They too, when they dig in a site, destroy the site.

Artifacts that are simply ripped out of a site with no contextual information being recorded generally have comparatively little value for understanding the past.

- Howard was on the Bobcat, clearing brush, and I had asked him repeatedly to take the Bobcat and go down there and to start me a hole.

- And so here I come on the Bobcat, and made a little pile of dirt out there.

I thought at that point, she'd kinda leave me alone.

Well, it wasn't 30 minutes later, here comes Doris.

- I took off running, and I had that arrowhead in my hand.

- I thought she'd found a snake, or I didn't know what she'd found.

She was all excited.

- And I put it in his hand.

I said, "Howard, don't you drop it."

- I said, "You found a Clovis point."

- He said, "Go show me where."

He took off running.

He tripped on a briar or something like that, and he fell.

I did not ask him if he was hurt.

I asked him if he broke my arrowhead.

(laughs) - And all of a sudden, we started finding these big bones.

I mean, huge bones like this.

- [Narrator] The Lindseys called UT for help.

Seven years after Howard's uncle forced them off Gault, Collins and Hester were back.

- They had excavated a hole about 20 feet across and about five feet deep, looking for artifacts.

And they were all excited about this large bone down in the bottom of this big hole they dug.

But what absolutely was just astounding to me was in 1998, when Tom and I went out there to look at what turned out to be a mammoth jaw, there were more Clovis artifacts lying around that hole than I'd seen in my lifetime up until then.

I was just flabbergasted.

It was unbelievable.

- Yeah, and his eyes did bug out, and his lips kind of quivered and his hands started shaking.

- [Doris] And he said, "Y'all don't have any idea what y'all have."

- He said, "Guys, I've studied Clovis camps.

I've never seen this many pristine Clovis blades in one group.

Y'all are the only hands that touched these since 12, 13, 14, how many ever thousand years ago."

- I mean, it was obviously a site of major significance.

We knew that in five minutes.

I was really very conflicted.

It was exhilarating and exciting to see such an important site, but it was also a site that was being destroyed by the owners.

We leveraged the mandible into the opportunity to do some work out there.

- Mike related to us, "Guys, y'all are sure destroying a lot of history right here."

I mean, he just put it bluntly like that, because we were.

- [Michael] I don't approve of any of that.

But on the other hand, it's their site.

If you're going to have the opportunity to really investigate this site as it needs to be investigated, you're going to have to figure out a way to work with them, how to maybe sort of compromise your ideals and go with the flow.

(upbeat music) This is work at the Gault site on September 5th, 1998.

Bringing unit 98-4 so we can expose the mammoth mandible, which is under the protective layer of dirt right there.

- [Narrator] The fossil was as fragile as wet toilet paper, eroded by thousands of years of exposure to extreme heat and flooding along Buttermilk Creek.

- When we found this, it was lying upside down with the teeth down.

- [Narrator] The fossil turned out to be the lower jawbone of a young mammoth.

Colombian mammoths went extinct about 13,000 years ago.

- We found about 13 stone tools in the vicinity of this mandible.

These were recognizably Clovis in their technology.

The bone was very soft and crumbly.

We're having to apply hardening chemicals to harden it up.

When we get through, we'll have a paleontological specimen of the mammoths from Gault site.

- [Narrator] After months of working elbow to elbow with the Lindseys, Collins asked for a research lease.

- I just couldn't leave its future to chance.

- [Narrator] His first challenge, overcoming the Lindseys' fears of losing their artifacts or their land.

- The unique thing there was Mike.

Mike's a rancher.

They're ranchers.

He comes across as a bit of a hillbilly, a country gentleman farmer, and he built up that rapport and then he said, "Look, this is what I'd like to do, and I realize it's gonna be a hardship for you.

Let's figure out a compromise.

Let's figure out how we can do this."

- We told him, "We're gonna talk to you about y'all leasing it.

For a three year lease, what's your offer on it?"

Well, Mike's offer was down here.

And I just spoke right up.

I said, "Mike, that's not gonna get it for three years.

What it contains, we're gonna have to have this."

You know what?

Mike didn't blink.

He said, "I think that's a good price."

He was testing us to see if we would take this.

Mike really knew what was under the ground pretty much.

We didn't have a clue.

But we knew that's the only way we could find out.

- Mike had an incredible challenge.

Changing attitudes about things is not an easy thing to do.

Mike didn't do it by preaching at 'em.

Mike did it by engaging them so that they have a personal stake in the future of that place.

- We're gonna go down this- - [Narrator] At last, the Gault site was in the steady hands of Mike Collins.

- When Mike did finally get a three year lease with the Lindseys, well, Mike was like a kid in a candy store.

And he's like, "Dig over here, dig over here, dig over there."

- [Narrator] Collins faced a daunting task.

He had to carefully peel back layers of evidence of about 13,000 years of life, buried here in nine feet of dirt.

When he called for help, an army showed up.

- I brought down a crew of 15 volunteers, mostly from New Hampshire, but a few from other New England states.

When they heard this opportunity to come down and work on a site like this, they jumped at it.

- [Archeologist] Yes!

Way to go, baby.

- You can look at this profile over here.

The goal was to get as many people onto the site to help pull back the overlying strata to get into these questions about what is at the bottom of this deposit.

(gentle music) - [Richard] One of my students found a complete Clovis point, and all my students lined up to take a picture of her holding it in her hand.

- [Jon] It all hinged around Mike.

It was his professional network, essentially, that came and answered the call.

- We have a lot of extra people today, so- - [Jon] I can't count the number of groups that came from across the country on a volunteer basis.

- Here's my mentor who needed help.

He had helped me.

What goes around comes around.

- First thing Saturday morning, we were down here.

We'd be behind a big line of people coming in through that gate.

It was just like a big fire ant bed.

- Everyone was pretty well aware there was Clovis at that site to begin with.

The question was, where can we find Clovis in an undisturbed circumstance?

And that is the key.

The artifacts are fine by themselves, but without context, they have no real meaning.

- [Keith] What's this stuff over here?

- [Archeologist] This appears to be bone.

Appears to be chert.

Several large flakes.

The more we dig, the more we find.

- And every 10 centimeter level, we found a projectile point.

And I'd never been on a dig with that many artifacts in one unit, and I looked over at Mike, and Mike just looked at me and just nodded and smiled, and I was like, "What?"

And he's like, "Welcome to Gault."

(gentle music) - Well, I'm sure they got tired looking at my face a lot of times when they were working, but I loved to see 'em do what they were doing.

It's just phenomenal.

- I could watch 'em about 15 minutes, I'm gone.

(laughs) They had endless patience.

- [Doris] They marked it and put it in their little bag, date it, how many centimeters it was down, the whole nine yards.

- We tell people, "We are not really archeologists, we're CSI prehistoric."

We try to put together all those clues to figure out what happened here.

- No, the holes is filled with cattail.

- [Narrator] Collins' passion caught fire with volunteer, Jill Patton, who came to Gault after years of international field work with Bruce Bradley.

- [Jill] My first memory of Mike was that first time we went to Gault in 2000.

You could hardly take a step without walking on an artifact.

And the whole site was that way.

- Those are elements in Clovis technology.

- And he was explaining to us why Gault was important.

And from that moment on, I was a fan.

He wanted us to learn.

And the more we learned, the happier he was about it.

- [Narrator] There were plenty of challenges.

- I got it all nice and cleaned up, and then it started raining.

- [Narrator] Flash floods wiped out weeks of work.

- [Michael] Trying to get back to where it was.

- [Narrator] Pumping out water from the natural springs that fed Buttermilk Creek was a constant battle.

- [Michael] Just a nightmare.

- [Narrator] Even good natured kidding by the Lindseys kept Mike on guard.

- Every now and then, they'd be down a hole, they'd be gouging, they'd be dusting.

And I'd say, "Mike, I've got that Bobcat.

Y'all sure are slow.

Can I help you out just a little bit?"

Boy, he'd give me that look.

He'd look, you know, and he'd shake his... (laughs) Bobcat was a bad word.

He didn't want it mentioned.

(laughs) - [Narrator] The team found hundreds of blades, multipurpose knives, that showed the ingenuity of Clovis people.

This long, serrated blade was used to cut meat.

- This was the original serrated steak knife, maybe for mammoth steaks, I don't know.

They were working wood, bone, and hides.

They were digging holes.

We have a leather punch where they were probably making tailored clothing, which was necessary in the colder climates of the last ice ages.

- [Narrator] With so much high quality stone at their fingertips, people turned this little valley into a stone tool factory.

- And their misfortune is our fortune, because when they'd sit down to make tools and it would go awry, they would abandon that tool at that stage of manufacture, and we can get all of those and line 'em up and say, "Here were the steps that these people used to produce this kind of stone tool."

- [Narrator] A new portrait of Clovis life was emerging and making news worldwide.

(upbeat music) - This is kind of the potpourri of Clovis lithic artifacts.

These people may have painted themselves.

In cultures around the world today that tattoo themselves, this is exactly the sort of thing they use.

- [Narrator] Evidence showed people camped here repeatedly and stayed long enough to learn how to exploit the area's diverse environment.

These hunter-gatherers mostly ate small animals, including lots of turtles.

- You're right on what we call an ecotone, so it's a boundary between many different kinds of environments.

So you have resources from a lot of different places.

There's like pecan trees, you have mammoths, you have deer, we have antelope, we have rabbit, we have turtle from Gault.

They were eating this wide variety of foods and diets, and it's this really great place on the landscape.

And you can see that, 'cause the archeological record at Gault is people living there, and living there over tens of thousands of years.

It's this beautiful place.

That's why it makes Gault so unique, that the folks knew their environment well enough that they're like, "This is it, this is a good place, where we can stay for a long time."

- This is a remarkable site, and it's one of the very few I've ever seen that deserves the term unique.

There is nothing else like it, period.

- [Clark] We have a stone floor about four inches thick and about seven feet square.

- Maybe the floor of a little hut.

There are only two of those known from Clovis sites in the Americas.

- [Narrator] In less than three years of work, Collins and his team had collected more than 1 million artifacts and data, amassing the most compelling picture of Clovis culture in North America and puncturing new holes in the Clovis theory.

- Gault is, so far as we know right now, the most prolific Clovis site in North America.

All of the other excavated sites together don't add up to as many artifacts from the Clovis interval as we have at this site.

And it's not the numbers here that count, it's the information that we can get from all of those artifacts that makes it important.

We're getting a rich picture of how Clovis people live, and it's not just nomadic mammoth hunting.

- It's the gold standard for Clovis sights, bar none.

- [Narrator] Collins also saw tantalizing clues that people were here at Gault before Clovis.

- We see hints, whispers, that maybe there are some earlier cultural remains there.

Before our investigation of that site ends, we have to know as surely as we can whether there is or is not evidence for pre-Clovis.

- [Narrator] If he found that evidence, Collins knew Gault would rewrite history again.

What he didn't know was that the Lindseys were having second thoughts.

- What they were finding was great, but right at the end of that three year lease, Mike said, "I'd like another three year lease on your property."

And I started shaking my head immediately.

I said, "No, sir.

It was your property for three years.

The lease is up, and no more leases."

(somber music) Man, his feathers was way down.

He was deeply disappointed.

And we were still thinking we could dig enough artifacts to sell and make a payment on the place.

- [Jon] There was a lot of disappointment, sadness.

It was a major turning point, and it was abrupt when it came on.

- [Narrator] The team kicked into overdrive to backfill open excavations, including that puzzling floor.

- We were scrambling to finish the analysis on that until the very last day.

Mike actually had a Bobcat warmed up and running, right there overlooking us, going, "Hurry, hurry, hurry, we need to seal this up."

And we didn't finish that until early evening that night, and he sealed everything up, and that was it.

We left the site.

(gentle music) - [Jon] And what I saw from Mike, he responded professionally, courteously, thoughtfully.

He may have had hopes that he held out for, but we saw an exercise in patience.

- [Narrator] Just days before the team pulled out, Wernecke ominously noted, "Collectors digging nearby."

- The situation that Mike confronted at the Gault site was probably one of the deepest, most concerning kinds of worries that an archeologist will ever have, that you have something that may be unique on the continent, you just need a little bit more to get down to it.

- Collins kept his feelings to himself as he was forced to walk away from Gault for a second time, with much more at stake.

(uplifting music) - I didn't marry to become the wife of an archeologist, but I have grown into the role.

We discovered that he goes out in the field, he does his thing, I go do my thing, and when we get back together, we have really neat stuff to talk about.

We talk about it at the dinner table, and we found that to be a really good way to have a marriage.

Mike has worked all over the world, Honduras and Chile and Israel and France, but here, at the height of his career, he finds a valuable site in our own backyard.

He got so excited over this site.

"Karen, I think there's really something important there.

I want to try to find out if I'm right or not."

And this went on for years.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Collins and his staff stayed in touch with the Lindseys, hoping they would reconsider another lease.

Once again, the Lindseys had a different plan.

- Through the research, we discovered what we were doing, potholing, we were destroying history that was very, very precious to the Indians, to the Native Americans, as well as the archeologists studying them now.

And that's when we decided it'd probably be better if we just sold this place.

- He said, "I think you ought to buy the site and preserve it for research and education.

We're just blue collar folks.

We don't have any right to be the stewards of this important archeological site."

It was so articulate and everything, I was just floored.

- That was a hard decision to change over from keeping it to selling it.

- And I said, "Do you have a price in mind?"

And I thought maybe he'd picked up the Wall Street Journal and read the day's account of the national debt when he told me his price.

But I said, "We will work on it."

- And understandably, the Lindseys wanted more than the value of rocky land in Central Texas.

This was gonna be their retirement nest egg.

We started knocking on doors, we started talking to people, every connection we could get.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] A year passed.

Then four.

No public funding - As landowners, you know, Mike understood their position.

And he's a very patient person, but after five years, he could not think of anything else to do.

- [Michael] There were people who wanted to buy the Gault site and loot it, mine it, for artifacts for sale.

I would just cringe at the thought of people hauling off the scientifically valuable stuff that they only saw as monetarily valuable.

That really worried me.

- I wasn't sure that he would be the same person if he didn't manage to save this site.

He was looking at it as a priceless heritage for Texas.

Or, well, the archeological world, the United States.

- When's a funding coalition gonna come together?

Who's gonna step up?

And the answer was nobody.

- Nobody else believed in his dream like maybe we did.

(gentle music) So, one evening, sitting at the dinner table, eating supper, Mike was telling me the latest bad news.

To me, it seemed like at this stage of his career, we could not let this chance pass.

So, I'm eating, he's eating, and all of a sudden, I say, "You've got this money that your dad left for you.

Just go buy the damn place."

- [Narrator] As evening turned to night, Mike quietly mulled over Karen's proposal and its impact on the family.

- She really surprised me with that.

It seemed like it'd be kind of a selfish use of our joint resources.

- Oh, this was a major step for him and for us.

What I didn't realize at the time was that he didn't have enough in savings.

We ended up mortgaging everything that we owned together.

We borrowed the money to get this site.

- When you talk about commitments, commitment to resources, cultural resources, commitments to special places that bind us together as people, Mike Collins stepped up to put his money where his mouth was.

It's one of the most inspirational stories of professional engagement and commitment to ideals and integrity that I could ever have imagined seeing.

- And it was just (sighs), you know?

"We've done it, finally, after all these years."

In many aspects of our life, she's the hero in the family.

She's the one that comes up with the best solutions to whatever we're trying to decide at the moment.

And this was an extraordinary example of just that.

(gentle music) There's a bench that sits up on the bluff overlooking the site.

Went up there and sat on that bench.

And gradually, the sun began to dissipate the fog, the site was coming into view.

- Your spirits were lifted, but- - Everything.

- A burden of trying to figure out how to preserve that site was like going away with the fog.

- The moment was really symbolic.

I'd spent a number of years trying to preserve that site, I'd spent a number of years trying to promote the study of the first peopling of the Americas, and here, all of a sudden, here was a key to all of that in my hands.

- [Narrator] 16 years after stepping foot onto Gault, Collins donated the 35 acre site to The Archaeological Conservancy to protect it in perpetuity.

He and Wernecke also formed the nonprofit Gault School of Archeological Research to carry on Gault's educational mission.

- He persevered through all that strife and trouble and concern and worry, and what I really respect is he finally got total control, and then he gave it up.

He gave it up for the future.

- [Archeologist] Need to go your way.

- [Narrator] With the site secure, Collins launched his ultimate quest at Gault.

- Mike contacted us and said, "We're back on.

Y'all wanna come down?"

I said, "Sure."

- [Michael] We know we have pre-Clovis artifacts here.

They haven't told us very much yet.

We can see that they were chipping stone a little differently than Clovis people.

Golly, what else were they doing differently?

- We've gotta go down three meters, so, nine or 10 feet, to get to our goal and see what lies below Clovis in this area.

- They knew that there was something bigger down there and that there was a bigger story.

- Got a long ways to go.

It's gonna be a lot of dirt movement to get there.

- Here, we're back about 8 or 9,000 years.

We get down where Ashley's sitting here, 10,000, 10,500 years.

We're interested particularly in finding out about those first people that were here 14 or more thousand years ago.

- I always knew I wanted to be an archeologist from a very young age.

I wanted to study the pyramids and Greece and Rome.

And on a field trip from a class, I went out to the Gault site and met Mike Collins, and nothing was the same after that.

They started taking me under their wing and teaching me how to excavate.

(gentle music) - [Richard] The excavation in the big pit was like a siege of a city.

- [Narrator] They worked in tight conditions under rigorous standards using small hand tools.

- [Clark] It's much finer digging.

Anything larger than a quarter, we map in place so that we have a good record of everything as we go down.

- [Richard] And we had to be careful not to scratch the artifacts.

- [Clark] A lot of Gault was dug with bamboo splinters and chopsticks.

It's very painstaking.

- Now, I remember digging once, and it was towards the end of the day, and there was like a projectile point, like an arrowhead that was coming out in my square.

And I really wanted to do it by the end of the day, but it wasn't quite unburied yet.

And I was like, "Oh, I'm so close to getting it," you know, "Can we wait?"

And Mike's like, "That's been waiting for 8,000 years.

It can wait until tomorrow."

And I think he has that sense of time, you know that even when stuff at Gault got crazy, he had that patience and that dedication to, like, wait it out.

(thunder booms) - [Archeologist] Holy cow.

- [Narrator] Waiting out the challenges of rain and rising springs along Buttermilk Creek.

- A unusual snowstorm came through.

Some of the tents collapsed.

We had to haul the five gallon buckets of deposits 100 yards away, and they were water screening in the snow.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] The economic collapse of 2008 forced layoffs and halted the project.

Collins dipped into his own pockets again, and Wernecke worked for free for a year to keep the project alive.

- I gotta say, we got knocked down a lot, and Mike just kept getting up.

- [Narrator] Finally, four years after they turned that first shovel of soil on the surface of this pit, Jill Patton hit paydirt.

She found the first intact stone tool in older than Clovis soils.

- I looked over at Mike and I said, you know, "Do you wanna do this?"

You know, and he said, "No," he said, "You go do it, yeah, go ahead."

And everybody's coming around with their cameras, and I was really nervous, so, you know, I'm trying hard not to mess up while I'm digging this thing out, handling something that no human has touched for X thousands of years.

- We are literally changing the story of the prehistory of the Americas.

- [Narrator] Through it all, Collins and the team shared the adventure with the public.

- [Clark] At the Gault School, we believe that all archeology is public archeology.

- We're trying to reach school kids and engage them in this excitement as it's happening.

(bright upbeat music) - Look what I found!

- You guys are fast learners.

I think there's probably some... And that's one of the most rewarding things that we have going on at the Gault site.

- Howard and Ricky showed up.

Doris, too.

Along with their beloved Longhorns that captivated the visiting volunteers.

- Okay, I'm done.

- [Narrator] It took three more years to complete the dig.

In the end, Collins' team found evidence of people here at Gault as far back as 20,000 years ago, several thousand years earlier than Clovis.

- They had the time to kind of design and execute a research plan that documented layer after layer after layer of prehistoric occupation, including Clovis, then a layer where there's nothing, and then a layer where there's more artifacts right above bedrock.

And the sequence is complete and intact and should be considered unassailable.

- [Narrator] 150,000 artifacts, tools like blades and small projectile points, unlike anything in the early archeological records of the Americas.

- We've got this little package of time and space at the Gault site that archeologically is different and distinctive.

- [Narrator] For dating, Collins used a method called OSL, optically stimulated luminescence.

It dates the last time the soil was exposed to sunlight by measuring the release of electrons from quartz particles trapped in the dirt.

Dates at Gault line up with those at the nearby Debra Friedkin site and at White Sands, New Mexico.

There, scientists uncovered footprints left by men, women, and children perhaps 23,000 years ago.

Exactly how and when people reached the Americas is still up for debate.

No doubt some walked across the frozen Bering Strait, but did others cross the Atlantic or travel down the Pacific coast?

- The peopling of the Americas has been a very long process, and it has as many pieces to it as the biggest, baddest jigsaw puzzle you ever saw.

- And humans are complicated.

You know, culture is complicated.

So to think that people were doing different things at different times, it makes good sense.

- [Narrator] Ashley Lemke has become a leading researcher of early hunter-gatherers.

- [Ashley] Gault has showed us, and now it's a kind of growing number of sites, is that it has changed this whole picture of people not just running around amok on the landscape.

They can sit and settle and have different kinds of lives than just trying to follow mammoths and hunt them.

- We're humanizing that vast number of people that were involved in the filling out of the continent.

- There was much, much more to their existence than just making a living off the land.

Certainly, Clovis, they had aesthetics, they understood beauty, and they did things that they had no need to do to make a living.

- Right, it wasn't necessary.

- The stones are speaking, and they're telling us that these people were very sophisticated.

We'd probably have a great conversation if we knew 'em.

- [Michael] Oh, yeah.

- [Narrator] All this adds to the wonder and mystery of Gault, especially the meaning of those engraved stones.

- [Ashley] Archeology isn't just stones and bones.

You can get at people's lives and their culture.

And we see that at Gault, that people had this life where, you know, they weren't just focused on what's for dinner.

They had all these other aspects of their lives just like we do.

- Imagine the men and the women and the children.

(gentle music) It must have been just a wonderful place to come and see, meet, learn, make friends, find mates, trade information, explore the continental landscape.

This is one of the reasons that I got into archeology in the first place, is it allows you to make a connection with folks that you've never seen, you'll never know, but you're connected to them.

- As an archeologist, one of the first questions you always get asked is like, "What's the coolest thing you've ever found?"

After you tell them you don't dig dinosaurs.

I work underwater.

I've been to Romania, I've dug in Spain, I've dug at all these places, but my answer still is the stone artifact that I found at the Gault site.

I found this tool, and it was beautiful, but it was broken in half, and I thought, "Oh, they must have been so mad."

And it was that crazy, like, I just thought what someone 8,000 years ago was thinking, you know?

It was that connection that I knew that emotion that they had.

And it's being able to read the rocks in a way that I can only do 'cause Mike Collins taught me that.

- It's opening up a new respect for what people were able to accomplish in the past.

Whether they're Native Americans, Asians, from different parts of the world at different times, folks is folks.

We're in it together.

We have a lot more in common than we have separating us, and looking at the distant past is a great way of doing it if we let our minds be open.

(gentle music) Here it is.

This is the spot.

That's pretty exciting.

- It really was.

- [Clark] Gault proved to be extraordinary.

As we got deeper in it, you realized the implications of those incredible things.

The first art of the Americas or mammoth kill site or a possible house floor.

Earlier cultures than Clovis.

All those things were major game changers.

- [Narrator] Game changers for history books and thousands of volunteers who helped Collins save Gault.

- Mike's legacy is twofold.

The research at the Gault site and the people that he trained and launched into the profession.

- I'm the archeologist I am because of Mike Collins.

I'm the teacher I am because of Mike Collins.

And being able to meet him and experience and work at the Gault Site just changed my entire trajectory of who I am, really.

- I consider that label, teacher, to be one of the most honorable tags that somebody can have.

- [Clark] We have an immense amount of data here, 2.6 million artifacts.

That's a lot of stuff that can help to tell stories.

- [Narrator] All that from only 3% of the site that's been excavated.

- [Clark] And as people come up with new instrumentation, new ideas, new theories in the future, Gault is one of those places that's a repository of all this knowledge that could be dug up and analyzed in new ways and come up with new ideas.

- It could be a laboratory in the future that we can't even envision.

- Absolutely.

- [Narrator] Collins draws comfort knowing the land is safe in the hands of The Archaeological Conservancy and under the watchful eyes of Doris and Howard Lindsey.

They live adjacent to Gault and run cattle on the site to help guard it.

- [Michael] It really is a remarkably special place.

- [Narrator] Collins hopes Gault will inspire each of us, especially private landowners, to do all we can to preserve other cultural sites before we lose more of our shared story as humans on planet Earth.

After a lifetime of preserving the past, Collins' sense of his own past is fading.

Alzheimer's, diagnosed in 2022, is clouding his brilliant mind.

(gentle music) Yet Collins still holds enduring memories of Gault.

- Taking this site and nurturing it, sharing what the story is there, preserving it for future generations, and then watching those newer generations come along, that's extraordinarily rewarding.

It's been a great journey.

It really has.

(gentle music continues) (tool buzzing) (tool tapping) (upbeat music) - See how careful the driver is?

He's very careful.

He's gentle.

- [Archeologist] Yeah!

You're a rockstar.

A rockstar.

- Yeah!

(cheers) - Oh my gosh, Mike, look at that.

(gentle music) - Boy, look at that.

(uplifting music) - [Karen] Beautifully done.

- Thank you all, and all the others that aren't here.

(all applauding and cheering) - [Karen] Thank you very much!

- [Narrator] Funding for this program made possible by Clements Foundation, Still Water Foundation, LaNoe and Paul Scherer Family Foundation, and Summerlee Foundation.

Additional funding provided by... (uplifting music) And by... For more information and a full list of funders, please visit us at thestonesarespeaking.com.

(glass clinks) (whimsical music)