Big Country landowners: Could your backyard hold clues to Comanche history?

COLEMAN, Texas (KTAB/KRBC) – The Penatuhkah Comanche Trails Partnership is collaborating with a vast network of organizations and individual landowners to help discover and catalog significant Native American sites throughout Texas.

An arrowhead, a tree bent in just the right way, or even a specialized hole in the ground can all be signs of a historic Native American presence. The Penatuhkah Comanche Trails Partnership has a twofold mission. First, they aim to locate and protect traditional cultural properties with the help of landowners and various organizations. Second, they seek to collaborate with these entities to use their findings for education and fundraising purposes. Montie Guthrie, the Executive Director of the Penatuhkah Comanche Trails Partnership, provides details about a discovery that could be found on your own property.

“In this area, there are a lot of what are called bedrock mortars. They’re big pieces of rock that are the size of a pickup with holes in them as much as two feet deep, where the Comanche’s process their travel meat,” Guthrie explained.

Members of the Penatuhkah Comanche Trails Partnership, along with the Coleman community, gathered at the Coleman Museum to discuss awareness of this program in the area, hoping to identify potential sight locations for the organization. Sara LeMoine Knox, President of the Coleman Heritage Arts and Preservation Society, discussed the exciting prospect of helping to preserve undiscovered Native American history.

“While right now we’re not for sure of any particular sites within our community, we hope that maybe we can find those, preserve them, work with landowners, and also work with the Comanche culture so that they can preserve their history, and we can also be educated on their history as well,” Knox shared.

Click here to learn more about the Penatuhkah Comanche Trails Partnership and how you can report a potential archaeological find.