The contemporary tribes of Texas and the surrounding region — the federally recognized nations with traditional connections to these landscapes — maintain their own understandings of their histories and their connections to the land.

Those understandings are encoded in oral traditions, in ceremonial practice, in the specific knowledge of particular places that constitutes the living culture of a people with roots in this land.

The archaeological record and the oral traditions do not always align in ways that are simple or comfortable.

The archaeological evidence for 8,500 years of continuous human presence in the Guadalupe corridor, or 7,000 years of cemetery use at a single sinkhole on the Edwards Plateau, is both a confirmation and a complication of tribal identity narratives — a confirmation that the Indigenous connection to these landscapes is genuinely ancient, and a complication in that the specific populations documented archaeologically may not be traceable through an unbroken line to any contemporary tribal nation.

This is not an accusation.