T Anchor tidbits

A few facts from City Manager Alan Taylor's T Anchor Lake presentation at the Amarillo City Commission meeting on Tuesday:

-- The cost estimate for construction of a park at T Anchor Lake, which lies north of Interstate 40 at Nelson Street, is $11.5 million.

-- The bulk of the cost -- almost $6 million -- would go for earthwork. A lot of dirt will have to be moved to make some areas habitable and dig other areas deeper so that the lake still has enough capacity to handle the drainage it receives from a surrounding 4-square-mile area.

-- Fingers of the area that drains into T Anchor extend south, beyond Interstate 40, to Southeast 34th Avenue; west to downtown Amarillo; and, north to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway tracks.

-- The city is awaiting new Federal Emergency Management Agency flood plain maps that are expected to raise the 100-year flood plain level of T Anchor by a couple of feet, Taylor said.

-- That means the earth moved to make the area habitable for a park will need to be piled a couple of feet higher than it would have under the old maps. The finished floor level of anything built in a 100-year flood plain area must be 1 foot higher than the elevation level set by FEMA.

-- Parts of the site lie more than 30 feet below flood plain level. And the deepest part of the lake is about 50 feet below flood plain level.

-- An estimated $1.63 million of the estimated $11.5 million cost of a park would pay for drainage system improvements and pipe to carry water and prevent flood issues.

-- The pump that takes stormwater out of T Anchor when it fills sends water westward through a pipeline to a stormwater drainage system in downtown Amarillo. That system moves the water north to Thompson Park.

T Anchor's bones

Some who have commented on today's article about options for developing the T Anchor Lake area recalled an ancient discovery made in the early 1980s.

On June 15, 1982, a 16-year-old boy walking his dog in open fields in the lake area found a partially exposed skeleton that turned out to be more than 2,600 years old, according to Amarillo Globe-News files.

Police removed the bones, taking them out -- to a West Texas State University anthropology professor's delight -- intact in chunks of earth. Professor Jack T. Hughes said he was "pleasantly surprised" at the care with which the skeleton was exhumed.

Almost a year later, the university received the results of carbon-14 dating tests on the bones, revealing them to be about 2,670 years old. They are believed to be the remains of an early American Indian.

Carbon dating is a process in which a radioactive carbon isotope, which is contained in all carbon-containing matter, such as bones, is activated to determine the age of an object.

No artifacts were found with the remains, which left researchers with no clues as to the Indian's cultural associations.

The sex of the skeleton also could not be determined because the pelvic bone was missing at the time of the discovery.

Judging by the size of the bones alone, it was believed to be a woman of average size. However, one characteristic of the skull is generally associated with males, according to a May 27, 1983, Amarillo Daily News article.

"The one really unusual thing," Hughes said, "is that the skull has heavy eyebrow ridges. It tends to be an ancient trait."

Hughes said the heavy eyebrow ridge was an indication the Indian may have been around during the Neanderthal period.

The eyebrow ridge was not as heavy as that of a Neanderthal, but heavier than Hughes had seen on any other Indian skull.

A Texas Archaeological Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin did the carbon-dating. The coverage said the remains were being kept by WT, but "belong to the Texas Antiquities Commission."