Adair-Steadman Site

The Handbook of Texas says artifacts found in Fisher County suggest that people first arrived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and that Paleo, Archaic and Historic cultures have all left evidence here. Lipan Apaches had settled in the region by the sixteenth century. Around 1700 the Comanche (Numunuu) and Kiowa drifted in from the north, and Pawnee, Wichita and Waco hunters sometimes worked the upper Brazos valley. The county's northern third drains to the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos and the rest to the Clear Fork, through rolling prairie of mesquite and grass.

What the plaque says

In this vicinity is a prehistoric archeological site discovered in 1969 near the Clear Fork of the Brazos River. Archeologists have conducted extensive scientific excavations and attribute most of the cultural materials to the Paleo-Indian Period. The Adair-Steadman Site was a large base campsite for makers of fluted points, who were part of the distinctive Folsom culture between nine and eleven thousand years ago. Prehistoric peoples chose to live here because of the availability of water at the time of occupation and the presence of a large stone resource area nearby. Stone tools and other material recovered include fluted point fragments, point preforms, channel flakes, scrapers, gravers, and large bifaces. Future archeological, geological, and paleontological studies of the site may yield sufficient data to reconstruct the physical appearance of the site during its period of occupation. One of the most significant locations of Folsom artifacts in North America, the Adair-Steadman Site is important as a valuable source of information on the prehistory of the state, the nation, and the entire continent. It is protected from disturbance by federal and state antiquities laws. (1984)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pioneer Museum — 21 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 24 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.
• Frontier Texas! — 29 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.

More markers nearby

• Newman Community and Cemetery — 5.9 mi
• Neinda Community — 8.9 mi
• Royston Townsite — 13 mi
• D. W. Stephens No. 1 Discovery Oil Well — 13 mi