As waters recede, drought reveals lake relics

While waters receding because of the drought revealed this month whole vehicles submerged in Lake Travis, the episode was not the first time strange and sometimes grisly artifacts have poked their heads out of the banks of the Colorado River during severe dry spells.

The river was dammed in a series of massive projects in the first half of the last century to control flooding and provide steady water supplies for Central Texas. As a consequence, the lakes that formed swallowed up whole bits of history.

The drought "reveals things that haven't been seen in a long time," said Brian Block, executive director of Keep Austin Beautiful, which runs an annual cleanup of Lake Travis.

In August 2006, during the last drought that gripped Central Texas, an Austin man riding a watercraft on Lake Travis found a skeleton that archaeologists later estimated to be a female at least 700 years old...[Link]