快猫短视频

The first archaeological investigation of the site of a century-old massacre at the US-Mexico border has unexpectedly found bullets and cartridge casings for US military weapons.

On the morning of 28 January 1918, Texas Rangers and local ranchers, escorted by the US Army鈥檚 8th Cavalry, rounded up 15 boys and men of Mexican descent from the town of Porvenir, Texas, and shot them execution-style. None of that is disputed. But new evidence suggesting that both civilian and military weapons were used raises questions about whether the soldiers may have also participated in the massacre.

鈥淭he big deal about this is it strongly suggests military involvement,鈥� says , an archaeologist at Sul Ross State University in Texas.

In 2015, Keller and his colleagues conducted an archaeological survey of the massacre site after being approached by Glenn Justice, a Texas historian. The full findings were not published until recently.

At the massacre site, near a low rock bluff surrounded by a sandy landscape dotted with shrubs and cacti, the team recovered 13 bullets and bullet fragments, including a bullet containing an embedded bone fragment 鈥� though it is unclear if it came from a human. The archaeologists also found four cartridge casings that would have been ejected from guns after the bullets were fired.

An analysis of the bullet and bullet fragment locations suggested the exact spots where the victims and shooters likely stood more than 100 years ago.

Douglas Scott,聽a professional firearm examiner and retired National Park Service archaeologist, performed a forensic ballistics analysis that identified at least nine or 10 guns used at the massacre site. Contrary to expectations, most of the ammunition found was fired from military-issued pistols or rifles.

While this could mean the US military fired some of the bullets, there is no eyewitness testimony or written evidence to back up the idea that the soldiers participated in the killings, says at Texas Tech University. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know how we can say this is direct evidence that the Army was involved in the execution of these innocent civilians,鈥� he says.

Another possibility is that the Texas Rangers used some military weapons in the massacre. Documents in the Texas State Archives seen by 快猫短视频 show that Captain J.M. Fox, head of the Texas Rangers company responsible for the Porvenir massacre, had a contract to purchase weapons from the US Army.

鈥淔ox acknowledged shooting Mexican 鈥榮uspects鈥� in previous years, posed in grotesque ways reminiscent of lynching photos with their corpses, acknowledges that men under his command killed people at Porvenir, his men were named by eyewitnesses and other authorities as committing the murders and he was discharged for this incident,鈥� says at Loyola University Chicago.

The Porvenir massacre represented 鈥渢he most extreme incident in a range of similar incidents鈥� during the border turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, says Julie Prieto at the . Amidst mass migration from Mexico and cross-border raids, the Texas Rangers of hundreds and possibly thousands of people of Mexican descent between 1914 and 1919.

Regardless of whether Army soldiers killed people during the Porvenir massacre, they were still present in the lead-up to the killings. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e certainly complicit in some way in what happened, whether or not they actually did the shooting,鈥� says Prieto.