Golden Aspens and Golden Brews

Last Wednesday, amidst storm clouds and rain showers, Mom and Dad flew out to Colorado for a visit.  We packed a lot into four days - a winery, three breweries, seven mountain towns, explorations of the Great Sage Plain (where I live) - and Mom and Dad even made it out to see the red rocks of southwestern Utah.

 

San Juan Mountains outside of Telluride

The mountains:  It's a beautiful time of year up north in the mountains of Colorado.  The aspen trees turn to gold and shed their leaves onto fir trees, creating an almost Christmaslike spectacle.  We drove along the San Juan Skyway - north first through Dolores, then passed Rico on the way to Telluride, where we spent the night.  Telluride is a pretty snazzy, yuppie ski town - plenty of neat restaurants and expensive-like-woah real estate.  It was a fun place to stay.  We took the gondola more than two thousand feet up the mountain (we were very proud of Mom, but that didn't keep us from teasing her mercilessly) and ate a delicious dinner at a little Italian bistro on the main drag.  On Saturday we drove northeast through Ridgway, Ouray, Silverton, and Durango on our way back to Cortez.  The drive between Ouray and Silverton (known as the "Million Dollar Highway") was a breathtaking drive.  The road is cut into the mountain, so you're right there in the wilderness.

Million Dollar Highway

The brews: When I arrived in Colorado several months ago, I found out that the region is well known for its brewpubs.  Pretty much every town of at least moderate size (even with populations less than a thousand) has a thriving pub that brews its own beer - I believe the philosophy is "drink locally," not just "eat locally."  Most of the places have great atmosphere, and a lot of awesome beer to taste.  Mom, Dad, and I visited Cortez's Main Street Brewery, the Dolores River Brewery, and the Silverton Brewery, and also Guy Drew Vineyards during our long weekend.  Silverton hands down had the best beer (I had the delicious Red Mountain Ale), and Guy Drew's wine was excellent - I especially liked all the dry whites.

Mom and Dad on the gondola in Telluride

It's hard to believe that Mom and Dad's visit went so quickly - and that my days out west are quickly drawing to an end.  I only have three more days in the field - finishing up documentation on two 1x1 meter units, and getting to work on a nearby kiva.  I can't say I'll miss the hot sun, but it has certainly been awesome to get hands-on experience doing southwest archaeology.  The wilderness has been giving me some lovely goodbye presents lately - yesterday we heard coyotes calling nearby, and today we saw a big bull snake in the path!  I'm going to miss spending so much of my time out-of-doors.

Chance Encounters

It's been a pretty quiet week - no big thunderstorms, field trips, or life-changing events.  I spent almost the entirety of last work week digging a small test unit (1x1 meter) - it just kept getting deeper and deeper, and I couldn't find any indication of sterile (sans artifacts) soil.  Alas, today my supervisor and I pulled out the big guns - a rock pick - and after some probing, he decided that it's probably an early kiva (circular subterranean structure).  So it looks like I have a lot of digging to go, but at least now I have some perspective.

I sit under this tree during lunch, and also occasionally nap.

This past Saturday was Crow Canyons second annual Open House Festival - visitors came from near and far to explore our reconstructed pithouse and pueblo, learn to throw an atlatl, and enjoy Chef Jim's delicious green chile stew!  It was a beautiful day and a lot of fun to see so many families enjoying campus.  It's days like these when I realize that while I enjoy archaeology, my passion is also to teach and make research accessible on lots of different levels.  As many of you also know, I am quite fond of talking, and it was fun to get to chat with so many different people during the Open House as well.

Friendship dance with the Pow Wow dancers at the Open House

On Sunday I made an expedition to a local coffee shop, in search of some good coffee and a change of scene.  The coffee was indeed delicious (I had the Guatemalan blend, of course), and I had some time to catch up on letters.  I also spent several hours in friendly conversation with a local storyteller (Remember Lorenzo?  This man was like his PG counterpart).  Cortez is such a welcoming place.  The community, if not the landscape, is probably my favorite thing about the area.

Mom and Dad are due to arrive in less than 48 hours - I can't express my excitement!  It will be so much fun to show them around Cortez and Crow Canyon, and I'm especially looking forward to our expedition into the mountains: Durango, Silverton, Ouray, Telluride, Rico, and Dolores.  The best part?  Each town has its own brewery!

On Home, and Hovenweep

All of the sudden, my life here has become almost, well, busy.  I'm down to the last three weeks of my internship, and perhaps for the best, I'll be working a lot, and running all kinds of crazy places before Paul flys out for the "extended" trip home.  I've snagged a sweet babysitting job, Crow Canyon's open house is set to happen this Saturday (somehow I've been assigned to the decorating committee...), and to boot, Mom and Dad are flying out for a visit mid-next week - we'll be driving up north into the mountains for a couple days.  I can't say that I'll miss the gloriously lazy evenings and weekends on campus too much.  I was never very good at being bored - or being motivated to get anything done unless there's a deadline.  As much as I despise beltway traffic and sprawling suburbs, it will be so good to be home.

Home.  It has come to mean so many different things to me over the past few years.  Home, where I grew up.  Home, where I walked colonial streets and figured out what kind of person I wanted to be.  Home, where I walked Spanish colonial streets and figured out what kind of person I wanted to be.  Where there are always people bugging me to bake pie; where leaves fall in the autumn;  where scorpions and rattlesnakes do not roam.  But most of all it's a place where I share my life with loved ones, and where I can be at peace with God.  It's human intimacy - in the best, most wholesome sense of the word - that I miss most when I'm away.  Hugs.  Heartwarming conversations.  Coffee.  Meals.  Smiles.

I remind myself each day that I am living such a wonderful experience out here.  I breathe deep as I walk up to my cabin in the chilly evening air, gazing at the big dipper and the milky way.  I soak in the sun during lazy lunches in the field.  I savor the delicious southwest-style food that the kitchen staff cooks up.  Life won't always be this simple, and this time is truly a gift.

My supervisor pulled one of these out of a kiva on Friday!

Last Saturday we took another intern field trip.  First we visited the Anasazi Heritage Center just a few miles north in Dolores, CO.  It was really cool to see some artifacts on display (mostly some unusual ceramic vessels), and grind maize with a mano and metate (it's really hard work!)  In the afternoon we drove west, across the border to southeast Utah.  A note on Utah: it's really desolate, at least the eastern portion that I have seen, aut at the same time the landscape is absolutely magnificent.  We visited the main site (Square Tower) of Hovenweep National Monument and hiked a few miles into and around the canyon.

Hovenweep's "Twin Towers," a fitting reminder for 9/11

It was a late site, late 13th century, with a whole ton of towers on the rims of canyons.  The function of towers in this period is still in many ways a mystery.  The fact that they built a big one inside the canyon leads me to believe that their function was not just defensive.  In any case, we headed back to Cortez in the early evening for a delicious dinner at the home of one of Crow Canyon's archaeologists, where I ate green chile stew, my new favorite food, for the first time.  I'm serious, this stuff is delicious.  It's like southwestern-style pot pie.  Only better.

The "Castle"

Excited for home, three weeks and counting.  But trying to make the most of every day I have left on the great sage plain.

Field Archaeology 101

It occurred to me a couple weeks ago that the practice of archaeology is a pretty abstract idea in most people's minds.  What do you think of when you imagine an archaeologist working in the field all day?  It's probably a lot different from what you would expect.  Yes, we dig holes, and yes, we collect artifacts - but we also take photographs, keep very exact measurements, make maps of our units, and spend a lot of time recording anything and everything about the soil.

The tools: tarp, buckets, dustpan, trowel and brush

One of the most important things to keep in mind about archaeology is that we record everything.  We want to know exactly where we are digging horizontally (this is where satellite technologies like GIS and GPS come in handy), and vertically, which means taking constant measurements of elevation.  Before you start to dig a unit, you have to plot its location on a map, and lay out its measurements with nails and string.  When you're trying to get a feel for how people used the landscape in the past, you have to be exact.  Most of what you'll learn from an artifact comes from its location (in archaeology jargon, its provenience).  That means digging a unit within the boundary of the strings, and also in vertical levels based on how the soil was deposited.

This unit has already been dug, but I need to document it

Units are usually measured in meters, except occasionally at historic sites.  The photo above is a 1x1 meter unit - this one was part of a midden, or an area where people deposited their refuse.  We find all kinds of things - pottery sherds, flakes from the construction of stone tools, charcoal, bone, and a whole lot of sandstone that was used for construction.

First thing's first - clean off all the crap!

Since the student and adult participants at Crow Canyon do most of the digging, my job is to take care of residual documentation, and get units ready to backfill (throw the dirt right back in).  I first clean the unit, and make sure we have reached sterile soil - that's what was there before people used the land.  It usually has a high concentration of clay, so it's the yellowish-red color you can see above.  This unit looks done - the brown stain in the lower half of the unit was probably caused by rodent activity.

The surface of a pit feature

Sometimes, however, once you get through a layer of soil, you can see the imprint of a feature, something caused by cultural activity that can't be removed from the ground and studied like an artifact.  The above photo represents a pit that was cut into the yellowish-red clay by people who lived here 800-900 years ago.  My job is to excavate the feature, taking lots of notes (and photos!) along the way.

I bisected the pit feature to look at a profile of the fill

All done!  A final photo for this midden unit.

Once everything in a unit is excavated, I take final photographs of the unit.  It is important to provide shade for photos with a tarp, so that the difference in color won't distort the picture (my earlier photos would not be appropriate for a site report - the ones above are much better).  There should always be an arrow or a trowel indicating north in the photo, to best record the orientation.

The tools: clipboard, graph paper, pencil, ruler, line level, tape measure

Finally, I finish up the unit by drawing a profile map to keep track of the change in soil color and texture.  We use a book called the Munsell soil color chart - just imagine a bunch of paint samples in dirt colors, bound together in a book - to try to be as objective as possible about the soil color.  It's more tedious work, but important for understanding how the soil layers were deposited, and thus learning about the relationship of one unit and its artifacts to another.

After that is another story - stay tuned to learn about artifact processing back in the lab!

A Tale of Two (or twenty) Kivas

Last weekend - back when it was still August - the interns took a weekend camping trip to New Mexico.  We're only about an hour from the border, and it took us about two hours to arrive at our first destination: Salmon ruins.  Salmon (pronounced Sal-mun after a local family, not the fish) is a site known as an "outlier" to the political/social/economic system of Chaco Canyon.  Think of the Roman Empire, and the way that Roman architecture spread throughout Europe in the early centuries AD.  Chaco was kind of like that - and associated sites are identifiable by similar architectural traits, burial patterns, kiva styles, and a lot of attention paid to astrological alignment, among other factors.  Salmon archaeologist Paul Reed gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of the site - meaning we got to learn about cool things like potential cremation remains and coprolites (yep, centuries-old poop) - and the destruction and reconstruction of Salmon's great kiva after a huge flood in the twelfth century.

Great House (Pueblo Bonito)

After our tour of Salmon, we drove another hour or two south to Chaco Culture National Historic Park.  Chaco has been on my list of places-to-visit since I first learned about it my freshman year of college.  As I have mentioned before, Chaco Canyon was (debatably) a huge political/social/economic system operating in the southwest between the ninth and twelfth centuries AD.  Chaco is known for its monumental architecture: three or four story "great houses" - village-size communities, and "great kivas," really big variations of the circular underground religious structures still used in modern Pueblo societies.  T-shaped doors, architecture with small, narrow stones and bands of dark stones, and "chinking stones" are also traits associated with Chaco.  (Are you still awake?)

Great Kiva (Chetro Ketl)

T-shaped door (Pueblo del Arroyo)

Banded masonry (Pueblo Alto complex)

We spent the weekend hiking and touring Chaco Canyon's bounty of great houses.  We also saw a lot of petroglyphs (pictures carved into rock), and some pictographs (pictures painted on rock) and did a lot of stargazing - there were some pretty cool shooting stars.  There is very little light pollution in Chaco, and we went to a presentation on astronomy given by a park ranger on Friday night, and even got to look through a gigantic telescope.

Petroglyph

Supernova pictograph

It was my first experience camping since the fateful night freshman year when I sprained my ankle.  Definitely a fun (injury-free!) weekend.  I'm pretty sure I ate my month's allowance of peanut butter in three days.  Peanut butter on both sides of the bread keeps the bread un-soggy from the jelly.  A peanut butter apple with granola is also a lovely breakfast.  Peanut butter is pretty much indestructible, and delicious.