Film highlights archaeologist Michael Collins' quest to save the Gault Site

By Michael Haederle

On a cool, rainy morning in February, I found myself traveling south on Interstate 35 with my friend Olive Talley, bound for a patch of pasture and woodland lying along a small creek in central Texas. It’s a trip she has made dozens of times in the course of making a documentary about one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in North America. Her film, The Stones Are Speaking, tells the story of the Gault site, which preserves a rich record of human presence as far back as 20,000 years, and focuses on the role of Michael Collins, the respected Texas archaeologist so determined to preserve the site for future generations that he bought it and donated it to The Archaeological Conservancy.

Archaeologist Michael Collins and documentary filmmaker Olive Talley. Photo by Kenneth Garrett

The documentary premiered last October at the Austin Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Texas Independent Feature Film. In late March, it aired on Texas PBS stations, and the full 85-minute version of the film is now available on streaming platforms (Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play, as of press time), all of which can be accessed here at the film’s website.

Clearly, the project was a labor of love, even as she had to dip into her own savings to see it through. “I feel like if I don’t make a penny, I’ve been enriched—in that I’ve grown and I’ve learned and I’ve been challenged, and my world has expanded,” Talley said. “You can’t put a price tag on that. I sort of look at it as I’ve been going to archaeology school, and I think how lucky I am.”

I have known Talley, an award-winning Texas journalist, since we worked together nearly 40 years ago. True to her country upbringing on a farm outside of Houston, she is one of the most gracious and hardworking people I know—and on the job she is fiercely tenacious. She has been an investigative reporter for major newspapers, worked as a news producer for two television networks, and won a prestigious Nieman journalism fellowship at Harvard University.

I wanted to know what it was about Gault and Mike Collins that motivated her to pour herself into a project that would consume the better part of five years. So, we planned a road trip from Talley’s home in Dallas to the Gault site, nestled in a small valley about 50 miles north of Austin, hoping it would afford me a chance to pose some questions.

The way she tells it, the story begins on a ship bound for Antarctica.

Mike Collins works in the dirt at Area 15 in its early stages of excavation in the late 2000s. Photo courtesy of GSAR

Talley took a National Geographic-sponsored Linblad Expeditions trip to Antartica in 2017, which featured talks by some of the magazine’s celebrated photographers. Famed American photographer Kenneth Garrett, with a decades-long career shooting archaeological sites across the world, lectured on the peopling of the Western Hemisphere.

“He mentioned a site in Texas that he characterized as pivotal in adding another piece of critical evidence to the debate about when and where people were in the Americas,” she said.

Excavations at Gault suggested people had been shaping stone tools and spearpoints there much earlier than 13,000 years ago, when the Clovis culture was presumed to have marked the first arrival of humans in North America.

“I never heard of this place, and it begged the question, how could I not know about this as a journalist who has covered Texas all of my life and devoured media coverage of all things Texas?” Talley said. Her curiosity piqued, she pestered Garrett for more details, and by the end of the trip he told her, ‘When you get home, just put your list of questions to Mike Collins and he will answer them for you.’”

This is an excerpt of ‘The Stones Are Speaking,’ in American Archaeology, Summer 2025, Vol. 29, and No. 2. Subscribe to read the full text.

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