This one-of-a-kind journey through more than 16,000 years of Texas history will document the rise and fall of nations up to Mexican Independence in 1821.

Among other things, visitors can:

• See St. Francis Santo, a figure used more than 200 years ago to teach the tenets of Catholicism through storytelling. The exquisitely sculpted santo of St. Francis of Assisi was used by Spanish missionaries working in and around San Antonio beginning in the 18th century. 
• earn about the men and women who established vast trade networks across the Americas. View weapons, jewelry, tools, and imagery representing the diversity of early American Indian civilizations who cultivated the lands in what we now call Texas.
• Test the strength needed to provide food for your family as you pull back a bow and imagine releasing an arrow.
• Understand European ambitions to colonize North America by exploring early European maps of North America, weapons, heavy Spanish leather armor, and gold from a 1554 sunken treasure fleet that never returned to Spain.
• Discover French explorer La Salle's failed 1684 attempt to establish a colony in the Gulf of Mexico. Examine the expedition's 300-year-old ship, La Belle, excavated off the Texas coast. See thousands of items of cargo found in the hull, including colonial household items, a bronze cannon, navigation tools, weapons, and trade goods.