Houston Archeological Society wins E. Mott Davis Award for Excellence in Public Outreach from Council of Texas Archeologists

At a ceremony in Austin at the April 7, 2017 meeting of the Council of Texas Archeologists, representatives from the Houston Archeological Society, Prewitt and Associates, Inc. and TxDOT were presented with the E. Mott Davis Award for Excellence in Public Outreach from the Council of Texas Archeologists for the Frost Town project in downtown Houston.

Shown from left to right, Dr. Scott Pletka, TxDOT, Louis Aulbach, HAS, Bob Sewell, HAS, Linda Gorski, HAS, Doug Boyd, PAI, Inc. and Dr. Jon Lohse, president of CTA who presented the award.

For those of you who are not familiar with the project, here’s some background. Beginning in June 2016, the Houston Archeological Society participated with The Texas Department of Transportation, and Prewitt and Associates, Inc., in a data recovery project at the Frost Town site in conjunction with the replacement of Elysian Viaduct. The project impacted the remains of the Frost Town community, a ca. 1840s German immigrant settlement, which evolved to a mixed European/African American community, and then a Hispanic neighborhood, before its disappearance in the 1950s. In addition to a massive screening project by HAS, several other public outreach activities were conducted as part of the first phase of this project including archival research, much of it done by HAS member Louis Aulbach, oral history and documentary video-taping, radio broadcasts, an exhibition of recovered artifacts at the International Archeology Day celebration in 2016 at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, monthly articles in the HAS newsletter, The Profile, and a webpage on the HAS website,

For more information about the Frost Town Project go to the Current Projects section of our website

To learn more about the Houston Archeological Society contact the President: president@txhas.org