Blog

An accident of fate landed this writer in Abilene for some of the best times of her life.

China’s first emperor built a clay army to protect him in the afterlife.

I am not a bumper sticker person, but if I were, mine might read, “I dig cemeteries.” Not to be irreverent, I explore old graveyards to unearth facts not easily found in travel brochures. I don’t have a macabre personality, but rather, a keen interest in history and the people who lived it. I seek…

Covered by a tarp that flutters under a hot July sun, a half-dozen men and women, most of them graduate and undergraduate students at Texas Tech University, huddle in a cavity of West Texas earth that was once an ancient watering hole. In pairs or singly, the students scrape small areas of dirt, each about…

Along the Brazos River in southeast Bosque County, Albert Redder’s patient digging uncovered the small skull of a juvenile in the earth of a rock shelter. Redder and his friend Frank Watt, avocational archeologists who lived near Waco, had been excavating the site on weekends since 1967. During the summer of 1970, they made the…