By Lauren Butero
Today was the UNM fieldschool’s first day in Chaco Culture
National Historical Park. Sunday evening, we arrived and set up camp within the
park. We were greeted this morning with a huge, waning moon above the cliffs
that surround the canyon and a beautiful sunrise, complete with pink NM skies. The
Fieldschool Director, Dr. Wills, met with representatives from the park around
7 am, including one of the park archeologists, Dabney Ford, and interpretive
staff member G.B. Cornucopia. After loading up, our train of black Chevy trucks
pulled into the site. After much anticipation (weeks of it, in fact—three weeks
to be exact) we are finally here! For many of us, working in the shadow of the
massive ruins of Pueblo Bonito could only be described as surreal and dreamlike.
Few archeologists are able to work in the Park at all, let alone so near to
Chaco’s most famous ruin, and fewer students still. This is an amazing
opportunity for all of us, professorial staff included.
No cattle to battle here, the park has had no grazing for
over 30 years. Thankfully, that means our pin flags, which we use to mark
artifacts and boundaries, are safe from munching. Our strings that serve as
unit boundaries also won’t be tripped over and ripped out of the ground by
wanton hooves. The crew began by clearing ground. New Mexico, including the San
Juan Basin and Chaco Canyon, received late downpours in both Summer and early Fall,
and we had a crop of weeds in areas of sparse groundcover. We spent nearly two
hours clearing two track ways perpendicular to Pueblo Bonito’s south wall in
the open space immediately to the west of the ruin where the Wetherill
Homestead was located.
The field school is working to define the extent of the
Wetherill Homestead and Trading Post, which was in operation prior to the land
becoming a national monument. Richard Wetherill, of the Mesa Verde Wetherills, came
to the canyon and was part of the first excavations at Pueblo Bonito and stayed
on to ranch and operate a trading post where he traded with local Navajo
families. In prior years, the field school had excavated a well that dangerously
reopened near Pueblo Bonito. This season we are back to work at uncovering more
of the original foundations and features of his homestead with one of the
graduate students, Leigh Cominiello, as part of her dissertation work.
The Teaching Assistants, Leigh Cominello and Jenny Sturm, and
Dr. Wills relocated points that had previously been used to set up the site
grid; they used several maps, historic photographs, and Ground Penetration
radar data to determine the best places to work this season. Josh Smith, one of
our students, began working to uncover walls just below the surface.
Using the total station, we laid in 4
units of varying sizes. In groups of two, we were able to finish excavating the
first level in most of our units. The artifacts showing up in our screens stood
in strong contrast to what appeared near Cabezon. Instead of solely Archaic
material, we were running into historic ceramics, glass, and metal. However,
because the Wetherill Homestead actually sits adjacent to Pueblo Bonito, there
was still prehistoric material that might have washed in from surrounding areas
over time.
Some of our most comic moments came while interacting with
visitors and staff in the National Park. Excavations in parks like Chaco are
not all that common, and especially not in such public places. We were
practically excavating on the visitors’ trail! Another trail rises along the
mesa top cliffs to the north of us, and several times we caught Park staff
watching us from an eagle’s vantage point. We had a fellow archeologist and
visitor drop by, and also a gentleman who mistook us for maintenance staff and
none-too-meekly suggested that we should be maintaining the road instead.
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