Pull tabs from Festival Beach, Austin

Awesome shipment sent by Evan Jaworski in the Pull Tab Archaeology project. These pull tabs come from ‘Festival Beach’ Austin, Texas. Evan included a detailed description of the place and context where the pull tabs were found and included a GIS map indicating the area of the finds. And most importantly, Pull Tab Archaeology inspired him a lot, he wrote! That’s a thing we LOVE to read for sure!

Festival Beach has an interesting festival history that started in the 1960s when the Colorado river was dammed. The festival was discontinued at some point, but Evan says there still is no other place in Austin where pull tabs are so abundantly present. Here is an historical documentary about the festival.

There is an interesting thing going on with a few of these tabs. They are folded in half, along their longitudinal axis. I have never seen that before. Although tabs get bend and battered regularly when trucks drive over them or lawnmowers hit them, this exact shape is almost ’too perfect’ to be the result of such an event.

My guess is they were deliberately folded by hand, but even that is pretty hard without tooling. As I have never seen this before, it might be a typical local habit, perhaps a cultural trait, to fold pull tabs like this. As we tend to say in archeology, likely a ritual deposition! (insider joke: it something archaeologist always say when we don’t understand what is going on ;-))

Also see the video we made with Evan a few months ago.