Preservationists from the Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A&M University’s College of Architecture are working in two dusty Texas locations to preserve the recent past, the remains of a fortified Texas town, and a much, much more distant past, a giant meteorite crater.
Approximately 50,000 years ago, a giant meteorite slammed into the Earth, just nine miles away from the present-day city of Odessa.
Bob Warden, director of the Center for Heritage, is using the center’s high-tech equipment to create 3-D imagery of the Odessa Meteor Crater.
Warden, professor of architecture, is joining with Mark Everett, professor of electromagnetic geophysics at Texas A&M, in the effort.
“It’s a visualization project to put together scan data of the meteor crater and Everett’s subterranean data, so we can create a surface and subsurface map of the crater,” said Warden.
The crater, the largest of several smaller craters in the area, is 550 feet in diameter. Originally 100 feet deep, the crater is now only 15 feet deep at its lowest point, having been filled through milennia by soil and debris.
In the more recent past, the town of San Ygnacio, Texas was established in 1830 by settlers from a Mexican ranch just across the Rio Grande river.
In those days, Indian attacks were common.
In his book, “Lost Architecture of the Rio Grande Borderlands,” author Ricardo Paz-Treviño writes in San Ygnacio “a seemingly inexhaustible supply of flint arrowheads possibly meant for my ancestors litters the terrain.”
“In response to this lethal threat, many of the surrounding ranching communities developed creative methods of constructing secure, fortified houses with locally available materials … unfortunately, only a handful of these fortified houses survive,” said Paz-Treviño.
Warden, David Woodcock, professor of architecture, and Alston Thoms, a professor in Texas A&M’s Department of Anthropology, are part of a consortium of architects, engineers, archeologists and state and local government officials who have united to help preserve San Ygnacio’s unique architectural heritage.
