Border Wall Construction Threatens 6,000 Years of History on Private Lands | WIRED

Overview

Border Wall Construction Threatens 6,000 Years of History on Private Lands

Outrage has exploded over border infrastructure that recently began tearing up pristine desert landscapes in Big Bend National Park. But there’s a quieter battle taking place on private lands in Texas, where the US border wall is set to cut across some of North America's richest archaeological sites, digging up ancient indigenous artifacts and fracturing millennia-old rock art in its path.

Details

The US Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection awarded billions of dollars in contracts this year toward the construction of a wall and other barriers in West Texas along a remote 500-plus-mile (800-plus-kilometer) riverfront expanse of the US-Mexico border that includes Big Bend National Park and other idyllic parklands.

Bipartisan backlash against border wall construction in the national park was swift, ultimately prompting DHS to scuttle plans for a 30-foot steel bollard wall, instead replacing it with miles of riverside vehicle barriers and 200-plus miles of road construction. Bulldozers began clearing along the Rio Grande corridor near Santa Elena Canyon on August 6.

Construction has since been paused in the park in response to lawsuits. But the agency is still planning to construct the wall, as well as a web of road construction, over mountains and across canyons outside the national park. That includes private property that ranchers and other landowners say have archeological sites worth protecting, too. And they’re concerned that construction of the wall will bifurcate their own land and damage archeological sites, many of which have yet to be fully studied.

Archeologist Bryon Schroeder has been digging on rancher Jeff Fort’s property for two years. Schroeder runs Sul Ross University’s Center for Big Bend Studies, a research program dedicated to studying the cultural, historical, and archeological legacy of the region. He removes 4 inches (10 centimeters) of sediment at a time, and his meticulous digs have uncovered pottery and melted adobe slick building material from as early as the year AD 800. He’s found turquoise, too, and marine shells, both signs of trade outside the region. Evidence shows the site is related to Paquimé, an UNESCO World Heritage site that’s 200 miles away in Mexico.

Schroeder’s dig site, Canta Recio, is directly in the path of the proposed wall. Some of it is set to be bulldozed over. If the wall is built, other parts of the site will also become effectively inaccessible.

Schroeder likens Canta Recio to how Egyptians set up shop along the Nile, surmising the site was settled four or five times between 800 and 1400 by groups who were likely drawn to fertile land afforded by routine floods. Of course, those floods also mean that groups were eventually forced to move on when the Rio Grande overtopped its banks, only for another group to eventually settle the area once the silt firmed up. A settlement, a flood, an exit, on repeat.

“There's some bigger, cooler sites up the river that are just insane,” Schroeder said. “They have so much pottery, they have Mesoamerican copper bells, they have turquoise. They have all sorts of crazy stuff.”

The paradox facing Schroeder and other archeologists: They can't fully measure what's at risk because many of the archeological sites exist on private ranches and have never been studied.

That means construction may erase history before anyone gets to record it. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told WIRED that the agency is conducting environmental and cultural reviews to minimize impacts and balance operational needs with responsible land stewardship.

But previous studies haven’t stopped historically important sites from being sentenced to destruction. A 30-foot bollard wall is set to go right through the Polvo site, in Redford, Texas, which is home to a prehistoric village complete with burial ground dating back to the 1300s. The same site also has evidence of a Spanish mission that was built in the 1600s. Eagle Nest Canyon in Langtry, one of the most significant and intensively studied archeological sites in all of Texas, is also slated to see some form of barrier erected through it. That site includes the southernmost bison jump site in the US, where Native Americans hunted the animals en masse by funneling them over a cliff.

Patrick Zuberbueler, a rancher 350 miles downriver in Comstock, Texas, population 268, spent his youth picnicking in the shadows of 6,000-year-old rock art, with some displays up to 50 feet tall and hundreds of feet wide, across his family’s property. The government took some of that land by eminent domain in the 1960s and 1970s, forming the Amistad Reservoir and Seminole Canyon State Park, but he and his family still hold onto thousands of acres.

As a child, Zuberbueler would catch minnows in a stream running through Painted Shelter, a limestone rock shelter on his family’s property. To him, it was “a place we’d go picnicking.” To archeologist and rock art expert Carolyn Boyd, it’s “one of the most important archeological sites in the region.”

Painted Shelter has three distinct styles of rock art, painted between 6,000 and 1,000 years ago. Rock artworks encode stories and cosmologies, and are “libraries of human knowledge,” says Boyd, a research professor at Texas State University in San Marcos who founded Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center in 1998.

Painted Shelter is also right in the path of border construction.

“A vehicle barrier going in just immediately above it will destroy the stream, and it will potentially destroy the paintings themselves,” says Boyd, one of the nation’s leading scholars on rock art.

Vibration from construction could potentially cause the limestone to spall, or sheet off, she says, leaving the rocky canvas in tatters. She knows of 12 other rock art sites across the region that are also at risk from construction, while another 79 will become inaccessible.

The region around the Zuberbueler ranch, known as the Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archeological District, was designated as a National Historic Landmark on January 13, 2021, under the first Trump administration. Federal law dictates that agencies “to the maximum extent possible undertake such planning and actions as may be necessary to minimize harm” to National Historic Landmarks. But with the National Historic Preservation Act one of dozens of laws waived by the Department of Homeland Security in its pursuit of a border wall, those requirements to minimize harm are off the table.

For Zuberbueler, pushing back against the border barrier isn’t just about the archaeology his land holds. It’s about the legacy of his great-grandfather, who started working the land in 1898.

“The ranch continues to shrink and shrink and shrink, and you can't effectively ranch something that way,” Zuberbueler says. “They're hurting our livelihood as producers.”

Boyd, who has dedicated four decades to unearthing the history behind the region’s rock art, says she feels like she’s living a nightmare. “Maybe it’s wishful thinking,” she says, but she hopes she can get the government to understand the significance of the region’s archeology and revise its plans to rely on technology to patrol the area rather than physical infrastructure.

But time is seemingly running short to make that case. Several miles of steel bollards lay in piles at staging areas, and several temporary workforce housing “man camps” have cropped up on newly cleared land across the region. Locals say wall contractors have already bulldozed private property before they were legally allowed to, damaging irrigation systems and clearing vegetation. But some locals aren’t ready to give up. And there are signs of resistance to development on private lands elsewhere, including suits filed earlier this month by residents in San Ygnacio, which sits about 275 miles further south of the Big Bend region.

“It's almost unfathomable to even put it into context, the different ways that this can be detrimental to us,” Zuberbueler said about the border construction. “We're not going to go down without a fight.”

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Key Takeaways

Border Wall Construction Threatens 6,000 Years of History on Private Lands
Outrage has exploded over border infrastructure that recently began tearing up pristine desert landscapes in Big Bend National Park
The US Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection awarded billions of dollars in contracts this year toward the construction of a wall and other barriers in West Texas along a remote 500-plus-mile (800-plus-kilometer) riverfront expanse of the US-Mexico border that includes Big Bend National Park and other idyllic parklands
Bipartisan backlash against border wall construction in the national park was swift, ultimately prompting DHS to scuttle plans for a 30-foot steel bollard wall, instead replacing it with miles of riverside vehicle barriers and 200-plus miles of road construction
Construction has since been paused in the park in response to lawsuits