The megafauna — the animals that had shaped the environment and the subsistence strategies of the Paleoindian period — were mostly extinct.

The climate was shifting toward something closer to its modern pattern, though the transition was not smooth or uniform.

In this transformed world, the people of Texas were making a fundamental shift in how they lived.

The specialized megafauna-hunting strategies of the Paleoindian period — optimized for pursuing mammoth, horse, giant bison, and other large animals across open parkland — were being replaced by the diversified, flexible strategies of the Archaic.

People were becoming experts at exploiting a wider range of resources: deer, pronghorn, smaller game, fish, shellfish, plant foods, and the underground storage organs of various plant species that they learned to process in earth ovens.