Published: April 16, 2009 04:28 pm      

Archaeologists say spot of Mexican surrender found

DALLAS (AP) — Archaeologists believe they've found the place where hundreds of Mexican soldiers surrendered to the Texas army during the Battle of San Jacinto 173 years ago.

Unfired musket balls, bayonets and cavalry ornaments were found in rows in an area about 20 yards wide and 200 yards long near an NRG Energy power plant.

The Dallas Morning News reported Thursday that the heavily wooded area was long suspected to be a gold mine for artifacts from the battle that sealed Texas' independence from Mexico on April 21, 1836.

Archaeology consultant Roger Moore thinks the commander who organized the surrender was Col. Juan Almonte. The top Mexican official was educated in the U.S. and could have negotiated with the Texans in English.

Moore theorized that Almonte had a hard time persuading the defeated soldiers to stop running. Moore said he might have managed it because the spot a few miles southeast of the main battlefield is near a gulley that would have slowed their flight. Fleeing soldiers who didn't surrender were killed on the San Jacinto battleground, about 25 miles east of downtown Houston.

"The artifacts tell an unmistakable story of military discipline in the face of otherwise disaster," said Moore, who led the dig and will present the findings at the annual Battle of Jacinto Symposium at the University of Houston on Saturday, three days before the anniversary of the surrender. "It probably saved their lives."

Corporate ownership and the dense overgrowth of trees made the area unfriendly to artifact looters, thus preserving the site. The group Friends of the San Jacinto Battleground won $50,000 in grants to search the area, including $20,000 from NRG Energy.

The archaeologists used a large tractor-like machine to cut through the overgrowth, then relied on volunteers to sweep the ground with metal detectors.

The artifacts were sent to Texas A&M University for cleaning and preservation, and they will be given to the state for display at San Jacinto State Park.

"I'd say this is a pretty big deal," said James Crisp, an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and an expert on the Texas revolution.

Crisp said the artifacts offer evidence historians can use to corroborate written accounts. For example, there are reports that Almonte offered his sword to the Texans in surrender and that Sam Houston, leader of the Texas army, thought at first the surrendering soldiers were reinforcements.

"If you've got three or four different kinds of evidence and they all tend to say the same things, like the written reports from the fields, the memoirs," Crisp said. "If all of those tend to agree, the technical word we use in the historical field is 'truth.'"