Exploring his property, he had found petroglyphs carved on boulders, shards of pottery, and more than a hundred rock shelters. Schroeder met Jeff Fort, who owned a sixty-thousand-acre ranch that spanned a stretch of dramatic canyons in the Big Bend region of West Texas. More than ninety-five per cent of Texas is privately owned, so nearly all digs require coöperation from a landowner. But living in Alpine gives easy access to craggy limestone country, where the history of human occupation dates back at least ten thousand years. 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. He came to Alpine to work for the Center for Big Bend Studies, which he now runs. Schroeder is thirty-eight, with a tangle of curly hair and a taste for Hawaiian shirts. “Here, you can’t tell landowners not to do stuff. 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.
In Texas-unlike in Wyoming, where he grew up, and in Montana, where he got a Ph.D. When Bryon Schroeder moved to Alpine, Texas, in 2016, he was amazed at how few rules there were.
