The 4200-year-old bag from Horseshoe Ranch Cave, in Texas, with its fascinating contents shown in order of their removal by analysts in 1936. The cache offers a rare glimpse into the traditions of Lower Pecos people. The bag has been described as a hunter’s pouch and a medicine bundle [587×800]

> In 1936, archeologists  from the University of Texas working in the arid Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas uncovered what they described as “a find of unusual interest”: a twined-fiber bag, filled with multiple objects, buried under layers of fiber matting and lying on a rabbit fur blanket inside a high cave.  Still securely fastened after more than 4000 years in its dusty nest, the fragile bag and its protective layers of mats, fur, and plant materials were brought back intact to Austin to be carefully opened and examined in the UT Laboratory of Anthropology.

> The objects inside—numbering over 200—were gingerly removed, piece by piece, to the increasing fascination of the analysts. First came a small packet, or “kit,” crafted of woven plant strips and containing a chipped stone biface, two balls of sinew bound with plant fibers, and piece of pigment. This was followed by a buckskin thong nearly 18 inches long,  3 deer antler tools,  a small fragment of deer hide,  a freshwater mussel shell,  2 chipped-stone bifaces, a crude dart point preform, 10 stone flakes, and a small, heavily scratched, pebble or hammerstone. Near the bottom of the bag lay perhaps the most intriguing items: 11 jackrabbit mandibles, a small turtle carapace, nodules of red and yellow pigment, nearly 200 buckeye seeds, and 38 Mountain Laurel seeds.

> Variously described as a hunter’s kit, a medicine bundle, or perhaps something combining both purposes, the cache—and the circumstances of its burial—have puzzled archeologists for decades.  Was it a largely utilitarian tool bag, hidden away for the owner’s return? Or was it a special item carefully packed and buried in the cave for spiritual or symbolic reasons?

[https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/spotlights/hunterspouch/hunterspouch.html](https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/spotlights/hunterspouch/hunterspouch.html)