Saturday, October 24th @ 3:00 PM – 3:50 PM                                        WES & JACE TUNNELL                                                                                      Omni Westside Hotel, Houston Texas (open to the public)

“Pioneering Archaeology in the Texas Coastal Bend: The Pape-Tunnell Collection”

John W. Tunnell Jr. and Jace W. Tunnell

With a foreword by Thomas R. Hester and contributions from Harold F. Pape, John W. Tunnell Sr., and Thomas R. Hester

When Harold F. Pape moved to Gregory, Texas, in 1927, he quickly became fascinated by the wealth of Native American artifacts along the nearby shoreline of Corpus Christi Bay and what is now called Port Bay, a southern arm of the larger Copano Bay. A lifelong natural history enthusiast and collector, Pape met and married Lucile H. Tunnell, a widow with three young sons. Before long, John W. Tunnell, Lucile’s oldest son, was accompanying Pape on his field studies in surrounding areas and the wider Texas Coastal Bend.

Working in the days before much of the development that now covers the region, Pape and Tunnell studied more than two hundred sites throughout the Coastal Bend, making meticulous logs, maps, and notes of their discoveries.

John W. (Wes) Tunnell Jr. and Jace Tunnell have organized and documented their family collection and present it, along with brief biographies of the two collectors, as a survey of the state of knowledge in the late 1920s and 1930s, as well as a tribute to these two important early researchers and their body of work.

JOHN W. (WES) TUNNELL JR. is associate director and endowed chair of biodiversity and conservation science at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies and regents’ professor, Fulbright scholar, and Professor Emeritus of biology at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi.

JACE W. TUNNELL, formerly director of research and planning at the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program, is the director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, where he oversees research, environmental monitoring, and educational outreach.

Publisher:  Texas A&M University Press, 5/5/15, ISBN:  978-1-62349-274-8
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