Investigating The Mysteries Of The Shivwits Plateau Though it contains myriad sites, northern Arizona’s remote Shivwits Plateau has, until recently, been ignored by archaeologists. Now researchers funded by the National Park Service are trying to understand the lives of the people who inhabited this challenging environment. By Steve Friess
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he students eagerly gathered around the excavation unit known as Room 4 shortly before noon. Not even an experienced archaeologist like Karen Harry, of the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), could contain her excitement. Earlier in the month, UNLV students Jennifer Durk and Dana Foster, who were participating in a six-week field school directed by Harry, had come across an oblong, golden-colored sandstone slab about the size of a garbagecan lid. The slab had been placed beneath the layer of floor mortar of this room of a pueblo inhabited around a.d. 1150 on the vast Shivwits Plateau immediately north of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Imaginations had run rampant as to what they might find: A burial? A cache of turquoise or some other valuable commodity? But when Foster lifted the sandstone slab they
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found nothing but dirt, a sample of which Durk scooped into an airtight bag. The sample will be analyzed for pollen content to determine the types of plants that grew here some nine centuries ago. Harry later inspected the area beneath the slab and found charred material, suggesting that the Shivwits Plateau Anasazi once had a fire pit in this area. She surmises that the fire pit was capped when the original habitation room was remodeled into a storage room. Her students also unearthed two other similar-looking slabs beneath floor mortar in other rooms, but there was no evidence that they had used it to cap fire pits. A sample of the sandstone will be sent to a geologist to find out where it was quarried. Harry believes it came from somewhere within the Grand Canyon. Harry’s field school is part of her effort to understand
fall • 2010
