The Bodies in the Cave

hen Bryon Schroeder moved to Alpine, Texas, in 2016, he was amazed at how few rules there were. In Texas—unlike in Wyoming, where he grew up, and in Montana, where he got a Ph.D. in archeology—if you have permission to dig on someone’s land “you don’t really have to do any permits or anything,” he told me. “Here, you can’t tell landowners not to do stuff. This is Texas, goddammit!”

Schroeder is thirty-eight, with a tangle of curly hair and a taste for Hawaiian shirts. He came to Alpine to work for the Center for Big Bend Studies, which he now runs. The Center, a research institute focussed on archeology and history, is affiliated with Sul Ross State University, an agriculture-focussed school that calls itself “the frontier university of Texas.” At Sul Ross, Schroeder is the only full-time faculty member in the anthropology department, and he sometimes finds himself teaching introductory courses to all of four people. But living in Alpine gives easy access to craggy limestone country, where the history of human occupation dates back at least ten thousand years.

By Rachel Monroe