Book Description

This report describes the results of the historic excavations performed by the Institute of Applied Sciences at the Lewisville Lake project. This field work, conducted in 1988, consisted of excavation of five prehistoric and three historic sites determined eligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. The prehistoric sites include possible Middle Archaic to Late Prehistoric II occupations spanning the past 5,000 years. New information was obtained pertaining to resource utilization, past environments, and adaptative strategies (see Ferring 1990). The historic sites are three farmsteads, 41DN401 (1870s/80s to 1940s/50s), 41DN404 (1870s to 1920s/30s), 41DN429 (1850s to 1950s), containing well-defined sheet-refuse deposits, and architectural and archaeological features. These sites are the best-preserved historic farmsteads in the Lewisville Lake project area. The historic data recovered during this project indicates that the area was occupied primarily by farmers, who were largely self-sufficient prior to the Civil War, and sharecroppers, tenants, and landholding cash-crop farmers after the Civil War. A number of small communities were located in the area, and major economic trends (e.g., railroads, cash-crop farming, the decline of small-scale farming in the twentieth century) that affected other pants of the U.S. and Texas, also impacted the project area. The lifeways of the area changed greatly between the early settlement in the 1840s and the construction of Lake Dallas, and later, Garza-Little Elm (Lewisville Lake). The number of historic farmsteads remaining when this project began, and within the project area, is small.