Heritage, Volume 16, Number 4, Fall 1998 Page: 12
31 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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This plan view of Mission Dolores, an 18th-century structure in San Augustine, shows the relationship of Features 3, 8, 12, and 18 to buildings and walls.
Once the architect had the data needed for
the reconstruction, the archaeologists returned
to the laboratory to begin the arduous
task of analyzing the data recovered
from the excavations in hopes that the
final analysis would not only reveal more
about Sterne, but more importantly about
the society of which he and his family were
a part. In truth, the real job of the archaeologist
had just begun.
While Adolphus Sterne left a fairly extensive
diary (McDonald 1969) covering a
number of the years (1838-1851) that heresided at the site, he did not write about
most of what he was doing nor much about
the culture of Americans as expressed by
residents of the Republic of Texas and state
of Texas in early 19th-century
Nacogdoches. While Sterne railed about
Sam Houston, went to dances, ensured the
proper delivery of the mail, built a barn,
planted an orchard, and celebrated the
defeat of Cherokees, he never talked about
what his family ate (a lot of pork), what
they drank, or what kind of tableware they
used. He never discussed the economic
sphere in which those pigs, the whiskey, or
the Staffordshire dinner plates existed.
Later excavations at the Sterne plantation
were directed toward clearing a rightof-way
for new electrical lines and a French
drain, finding out what was under his house
(when the deteriorated gallery floor was
replaced), and during the 1985 Texas Archeological
Society Summer Field School,
more about Sterne and the other inhabitants
of his hill. As it turns out, the Sternes,
and the Hoya family that followed them,
were not the only people to live there.Previous excavations had recovered some
European ceramic sherds that were too
early for the Sterne occupation and suggested
that someone had lived there from
ca. 1780 to the early 1800s. Sterne had
purchased the land from Jose Rodriguez in
1831, who had acquired the property in
1786. While the deed to the land did not
mention a structure, the 1809 census indicated
that Rodriquez lived on the property
in a casa de madera (post-in-the ground,
earthen floored house). Possible post holes
found underneath the gallery floor of
Sterne's house and a number of artifacts
clearly showed that some sort of late Spanish
Colonial presence had indeed preceded
Sterne. Nacogdoches had been settled in
1779 by the inhabitants of Los Adaes (near
Robeline, Louisiana), the capital of Spanish
Texas until 1775.The development ot
modern Nacogdoches had seemingly obliterated
the archaeological evidence of this
period of the town's history. In addition.
little was known about the culture of the
earlier inhabitants of New Spain's northern
frontier. As a matter of fact, more ii12 HERITAGE *FALL 1998
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Texas Historical Foundation. Heritage, Volume 16, Number 4, Fall 1998, periodical, Autumn 1998; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45399/m1/12/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Foundation.