Stone Trails

The Geoheritage of Prehistoric Lithic Caches

July 2026 – Spring 2027

For more than 12,000 years, Native American hunter-gatherers moved across the Texas landscape using stone tools long before metal was available. In areas where high-quality stone was limited, people transported tools and sometimes created caches—stored collections of tools and raw materials left for future use. These caches offer insight into movement across the landscape, material selection, and technological practices, while also linking human activity to the deeper geological history of Texas.

Stone Trails features six lithic caches from the Southern High Plains, spanning from the Clovis-age Green Cache—among the earliest in North America—to the Protohistoric Apache Post Wallace Cache, the largest known in the region. The exhibit includes Plainview spear points from the Ryan Site, Late Archaic tools from the Yellowhouse cache, and early-stage nodules from the Davis and Yater caches, all produced from regionally significant materials such as Alibates Agate, Tecovas Jasper, and Edwards Group chert.

Viewed through a geoheritage perspective, these caches reflect the relationship between human behavior and geological resources. They document patterns of movement, raw material use, and technological decision-making, revealing a landscape where cultural practices were closely tied to the distribution of stone across the Southern Plains.