Island in the Sky

I arrived at Crow Canyon two weeks ago today and I'm finally pretty well settled in.  I live in a "rustic" cabin, maybe about eight by ten feet.  One of the interns calls it her shed.  My grandma said it looked like an outhouse.  I'll let you decide.  It works out pretty well - I don't have heat, AC, running water, or electricity - but I can get all of the above in the nearby lab building (where I am now).

Home sweet home

I spend my days in the field, and by that I mean inside a one meter deep hole.  Crow Canyon's participants (middle schoolers, high schoolers, and adults) do most of the digging at the site, but that leaves all the finishing touches and documentation to the archaeologists, Grant and Steve, and to us interns.  This is the last year of the project, so there's a lot of work for us to finish up in the field.  This week I should finish digging my unit, which is part of a midden (think: trash heap) that's probably a thousand years old - I have to look at the pottery I've found to get a better idea.  Ancient trash.  Cool.

Hanging out at Woods Canyon Pueblo

Since there are a bunch of new interns on campus, we've been taking a lot of trips to nearby sites.  Susan Ryan, one of the research archaeologists, took us to Albert Porter Pueblo and Woods Canyon Pueblo to the north.  Porter and Woods were among a group that Crow excavated earlier in the 2000s.  You have to have a sharp eye and be able to read the landscape and surface scatter of artifacts to figure out where sites are.  It was a little more obvious at Woods Canyon - as you can see below.

The interns at Aztec

We also had the chance to visit Lowry Pueblo, which is at Canyon of the Ancients National Monument.  Like many of the sites out here, Lowry was excavated and preserved early in the 20th century.  It has a very large kiva (or as my adviser would say, a "big ass kiva") - a kiva being a subterannean structure used as a gathering place for religious and community purposes that exhibits some signs of influence from Chaco Canyon (you'll be sick of hearing about Chaco by the time I leave in October).  This Friday we took an intern field trip to Aztec, a site in New Mexico that was most likely a colony or "outlier" of Chaco Canyon.  It was a neat site, and we had fun hanging out with the Park Service archaeologists and becoming junior rangers.

Courthouse Rocks at Arches Nat'l Park

Yesterday a couple of us also took a day trip to Utah to check out Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.  I must say, it was pretty darn cool.  We took a few fun hikes in Canyonlands (Islands in the Sky district - so aptly named!), and the views were just breathtaking.  It was drizzly for most of the afternoon, and rained for the drive back to Colorado, but the clouds made nature look all the more mystical.

Mesa Arch at Canyonlands