Dering Finds History in Familiar Places

By Bill Sontag
bill.sontag@delrionewsherald.com
Staff Writer, Del Rio News-Herald

Reprinted with permission of the Del Rio News-Herald
Published August 13, 2005

Phil Dering may be a recent resident in Comstock, Texas, but he's hardly a newcomer. In fact, he has been literally digging around in Val Verde County and other ancient sites in Texas for 30 years.

Moreover, for the past 15 years Dering has specialized in the field of archeobotany, the discipline of searching archeological remains for plant materials. More precisely, his special talent is isolating and examining bits and fragments of plant materials – seeds, fibers, pollen and char – to identify species and age of the soil matrix from which the material was taken.

The plants are critical clues to the people who used them, and learning about ancient lifestyles, even behavior, is the gift of archeobotany to archeology. "My entire research is focused on 'How did they do that?' and 'How did they live off the land?'" Dering said Thursday. "We need to know what ancient people ate, and, if they're practicing agriculture, what they grew."

Dering's expertise in answering such questions revolves around highly analytic detective work among cultures spanning thousands of years. In a dig north of Austin, he discovered charred bulbs of camas, a blue-flowered lily-like plant in the family of agaves that were dated within 100 years as 8,000-years-old. For variety, Dering also analyzes samples from 19th century farmsteads and historic dwellings in urban areas.

But the geographic and chronologic spread of his duties requires little travel now. Field archeologists send him boxes of dirt from as far east as Mississippi, and as far west as California. The majority of dig samples Dering receives come from Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, but there are tantalizing exceptions.

For the Texas Historical Commission, he analyzed plant materials from the bilge of "The Belle," one of four ships commanded by René Robert Cavalier, better known among historians as Sieur de La Salle. "The Belle" ran aground on the coast of Texas in 1686. "I recorded plant materials from two or three continents, demonstrating how so many Old World and New World plants were exchanged during the period of exploration and colonization," Dering said.

From "the Old World," Dering identified coconuts, English walnuts, olives, dates and peaches, and from "the New World," he found dewberries, persimmons, grapes, pecans and prickly pears. Dering called the continental exchanges of plants and animals during the exploration eras "one of the greatest biological upheavals ever experienced on Earth."

Texas projects have also included analyses of 19th century pit toilets from historic properties in Houston and San Antonio. "Privies are amazing collectors of information," Dering quipped, explaining, "People use them for awhile, and then they fill them with trash." Lifestyle clues from Houston's holes have included "thousands of dewberry seeds, tomato seeds and family silverware, accidentally tossed with table scraps."

Other cultures unwittingly provided evidence of lifestyles by burning their house down, not cleaning up after an accidental fire, or leaving foodstuff behind in shallow earth ovens and cooking pits. "When the wickiup became infested with termites and body lice, they'd just burn it and build another one," Dering explained. The charred remains, more often found in accidental fires, yield valuable information, pieces of the archeological puzzle.

In June 2003, Dering built the sparsely furnished, highly efficient laboratory and library adjoining the home shared with his wife, Dr. Carolyn Boyd, founder and director of Shumla School. The couple moved from professorships at Texas A&M University to pursue their shared passion for ancient lifeways, Phil as scientist, Carolyn as educator.

The quiet in Dering's lab is interrupted pleasantly with his favorite classical music, and by the occasional delivery of old dirt. The move from College Station was a bit of a gamble, but any doubts about customers finding him in this small west Texas town were erased as soon as he set up shop. A New Mexico archeological company sent Dering two tons of New Mexico and Arizona soil.

"The Border Patrol still can't believe I'm being sent shipments of dirt," Dering chuckled.

The lab work relies heavily on "flotation analysis" of these soil samples. Two gallons of dirt are poured into a five-gallon bucket, of water, then stirred, not shaken, with a metal rod. The bucket is gently rocked back-and-forth, and materials separate into a bottom layer, and a floating layer. The former includes bits of bone, rock, charcoal of nuts or heartwood. Floating materials include plant material – possibly charred – that is screened to catch the smallest fragments such as tobacco seed.

Slowly dried, the sunk and floating specimens are finally examined under Dering's stereomicroscope for identification. Carbonized materials provide opportunities for dating prehistoric samples, giving hard evidence of the time period of the level from which the box of soil was taken. Dering prepares such specimens and sends them to a radiocarbon laboratory, more often than not, Data Analytic, Miami, Fla.

Though he works the samples sent, Dering does have preferences. "My favorite sites are agricultural and pithouse sites in the southwest, mainly because the preservation is good there. You see a lot of different things." To help recognize some of those things, Dering maintains a flourishing, flowering garden of "cultigens," plants that mimic or replicate their prehistoric counterparts. Seeds, fibers and woody samples from his garden offer comparisons with specimens under his lab microscope.

His business has been steady, at times overwhelming. Working with an average of 25 archeologists each year, Dering typically performs his scientific alchemy on 600 samples in the same period. The uncertainty is when samples will arrive.

"Sometimes they call me ahead of time, and sometimes they just send them. They just show up on my door," he said.

Dering is confident that his business, Shumla Archeobotanical Services, will thrive as long as archeologists continue to harvest soil from the prehistoric "hot spots" and need someone to unravel the clues to ancient mysteries.