Rob and I took a trip to New Mexico this week to scope out some sites that he will excavate this summer. He's running a field school with five students. They're going to dig and survey for about six weeks, all over southern New Mexico. We talked to some really nice ranchers who will let the students stay on their land.
We also drove around looking for other places he can take the students on weekend trips and for archaeology lectures. Here are the amazing Gila Cliff Dwellings.
You can see the small, shallow caves from a distance in this picture.
Inside are pueblo room blocks. This site was occupied in the 13th century by the Mogollon people. It was dated using tree rings. If I remember right, the last cutting date (outside ring of a tree with bark on it still) was around 1280 or 1290. The families living in this site grew corn along the Gila river and hunted deer and other small animals nearby. They wore cotton clothing and plant fiber sandals. They made corrugated pottery and black on white pottery in which they cooked and stored seeds and water. 
This next picture is a close-up of the lintel over the doorway of one of the rooms in the cliff dwelling. It's cool for a couple of reasons. First, it's cool that the wood is still preserved 700 years later. Second, you can see where dendrochronologists came and took a core sample of it for dating (apparently sample #74a). If you look carefully, you can see these bore holes in many archaeological sites around the southwest. Next time you visit one, see if you can spot them. The other cool thing about this lintel is that in the mortar above the wood, you can see pieces of the matting that would have covered some of the supports for the roof (or ceiling). See? Right above the bore hole and another one a little to the left. This would have been covered with mud plaster when they were building the roof.
It was a great trip and I have many more pictures to share if anybody wants to see them. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of New Mexico as Rob works through the summer.
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4 comments:
Very neat! Please continue to educate me! I wish I were in field school again, that was so much fun.
Good stuff. This would make a great advertisement to recruit students for field school.
What is corrugated pottery? Is it corrugated like a corrugated box?
How long ago did the dendrochronologists come in and do their dating? Did you know any of them?
Hi mom! Corrugated pottery is kind of like cardboard because it is bumpy on the outside. It happens when the coils of clay that make up the pot aren't scraped smooth or when the pot is stamped with a design while the clay is soft. It makes the pot less slippery to handle and it may make it cooler to touch.
The dendrochronologists probably came in the 70's and they all came from our lab. I don't know exactly when it was dated, but I'm sure we know the guys who did it.
Please-more pictures and commentary. So fascinating to see what you do and how you do it--so much more interesting than an office job!
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