In honor of San Jacinto Day, archaeologist and GHG member Roger Moore was on the cover of today's issue of the Houston Chronicle:
_____ Artifacts shed light on San Jacinto battle By ALLAN TURNER HOUSTON CHRONICLE April 20, 2009, 11:14PM Nick de la Torre Houston Chronicle Archaeologist Roger Moore shows off a Mexican bayonet found near the battleground. Time has taken its toll on the Mexican bayonets, but their rust-pocked remains still hint at a lust for blood. The balls Santa Anna's men loaded into their muskets fared better. Still round, they glisten like sinister grapes. A grenadier's badge gleams as proudly as it did when, 173 years ago today, Texans struck the winning blow for freedom at San Jacinto. Today, these and more than 400 other artifacts - fruits of a recently completed archaeological project near the famed battlefield - are helping fill the gaps in the oft-told story of Sam Houston's routing of the Mexican military. Archaeologist Roger Moore believes the trove of artifacts gleaned from the recent dig are the armaments discarded by 200-400 Mexican soldiers before they surrendered to a handful of victorious Texans. Funded through grants administered by Friends of the San Jacinto Battleground, Moore led a brigade of 20 professional and amateur archaeologists in scrutinizing a 50-acre site about 1.5 miles south of the battlefield. "There had been folklore, word that had filtered around from illegal collectors that artifacts had been found on that property," Moore said. "That's what piqued our interest." Land choked by trees The site, located on land owned by NRG Energy, was an archaeologist's nightmare. Though open prairie at the time Santa Anna's troops beat a hasty retreat, the land Moore faced was choked with an almost impenetrable tangle of Chinese tallow, an invasive tree species. That's when Moore called in the heavy archaeological artillery - a massive Woodgator whose spinning toothed drum mowed down trash trees as easily as cutting a lawn. After a few test clearings, in came a volunteer expert in the use of metal detectors. "With 50 acres," said Friends of the San Jacinto Battleground president Jan DeVault, "the possibility of pinpointing anything was pretty dicey. The first day out, we hit the jackpot." With the first find, more test clearings were made. Moore and his colleagues soon discerned a pattern. The artifacts seemed concentrated in a swath of land roughly 130 yards long and 20 yards wide. "I'm an archaeologist," Moore said. "I'm not a historian." Still, he believes the pattern of his findings suggests the site may be the point at which soldiers under the command of Santa Anna stalwart Juan Almonte gave up. As Moore re-creates the scene, Almonte's men - surprised like other Mexican troops by Houston's midafternoon raid - retreated through boggy ground and prairie until they reached a gully shielded by trees. In that brief respite, the Mexican commander organized his troops into formation, then ordered them to discard their weapons before marching forward under a white flag. The action was an almost anticlimactic ending to an afternoon - the battle lasted less than 20 minutes - that reversed Texan disasters at San Antonio and Goliad. When the battle smoke cleared, 630 Mexicans were dead and 730 captured. On the Texan side, nine were dead and 30 wounded. Moore said artifacts retrieved from the site eventually will be exhibited through the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. New interest DeVault said the project points the way to more exploration. "It just blows you away," she said. "I think people became very lax. They just assumed that the battlefield was picked over by souvenir hunters. Now we have tools that are very sophisticated - magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar, a generation of metal detectors that can penetrate far below the surface. "The first systematic archaeological survey of San Jacinto began in 2002 and 2003," DeVault said. "We believe we have just scratched the surface." [email protected]
