While Bering Sinkhole was attracting scholarly attention on the Edwards Plateau, a different and even more striking discovery was unfolding along the lower Guadalupe River in Victoria County, in the coastal plain region southeast of the plateau.

The Buckeye Knoll site, designated 41VT98, sits in the Guadalupe River floodplain in the southern part of Victoria County.

Unlike the sinkholes of the Edwards Plateau, Buckeye Knoll is not a cave.

It is an open site — a cemetery on the surface, or just below it, established by Archaic hunter-gatherers along the rich resources of the Guadalupe River valley.

But its age is extraordinary.

Radiocarbon dating using tooth and bone collagen samples from multiple individuals placed the earliest burials at Buckeye Knoll at approximately 8,500 years before present — the beginning of the Early Archaic period in Texas, a time when the last of the great Pleistocene megafauna were disappearing and the continent was still adjusting to the climate of the post-glacial world.