08/16/2026
Who knew!
The Arcane Texas Fact of the Day: Less than a mile from the Judge Roy Bean's Jersey Lily Saloon in Langtry in Val Verde County is the Bonfire Shelter archaelogical site, which is one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in Texas. It lies in Mile Canyon, about a mile above the canyon’s junction with the Rio Grande. The large rock shelter, which is on private land, preserves evidence that prehistoric hunters repeatedly used the canyon as a buffalo jump, stampeding herds over the cliff and then butchering the animals below. It is both the southernmost known bison-jump site in North America and the earliest, predating any others by 6000 years.
The shelter contains three major bone beds separated by layers of sediment. The oldest, Bone Bed 1, dates to roughly 14,000 years ago and contains remains of Ice Age animals including mammoth or elephant, camel, horse, and bison. Whether humans were responsible for accumulating all of those animals remains debated. Bone Bed 2, dating to roughly 12,000 years ago, contains the remains of about 120 extinct giant bison along with Folsom and Plainview projectile points. Archaeologists have traditionally interpreted it as evidence that Paleoindian hunters drove bison over the cliff, although more recent researchers have debated exactly how the animals reached the shelter.
Thousands of years later, people returned and did it on an even larger scale. Bone Bed 3, dating to the Late Archaic period, contains the remains of hundreds of modern bison, possibly representing around 800 animals across the site. Bonfire Shelter was extensively excavated in 1963–64 and again in 1983–84, with newer investigations beginning in the 2010s. The site is particularly important because it shows that large-scale communal bison hunting occurred far south of the Great Plains and over an extraordinary span of time.
Photo courtesy Texas State University archaeologist David Kilby.
