Some of the Olivella shells found in interior Texas sites have chemical signatures consistent with Pacific coast sources — suggesting that exchange networks extended not just from the Gulf coast to the interior, but from the Pacific coast across the entire breadth of the continent.

Pacific shells in central Texas, eight thousand years ago.

This is not a detail that fits neatly into popular images of Archaic hunter-gatherers as isolated bands of people barely surviving on the margins of existence.

It speaks, instead, to a world of connection — a continent crisscrossed by routes of travel and exchange, maintained by relationships between groups that extended across enormous distances.

The Edwards Plateau — A Landscape Of Archaeological Memory