American Archaeology Magazine | Summer 2004 | Vol. 8 No. 2 by American Archaeology Magazine

DECIPHERING MAYA HIEROGLYPHS • SUMMER TRAVEL SPECIAL • STUDYING THE FIRST AMERICANS

american archaeology SUMMER 2004

a quarterly publication of The Archaeological Conservancy

Vol. 8 No. 2

Shiloh:

$3.95

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25274 91765

Emergency Archaeology

archaeological tours

led by noted scholars

superb itineraries, unsurpassed service For the past 29 years, Archaeological Tours has been arranging specialized tours for a discriminating clientele. Our tours feature distinguished scholars who stress the historical, anthropological and archaeological aspects of the areas visited. We offer a unique opportunity for tour participants to see and understand historically important and culturally significant areas of the world. John Henderson on the Maya Superpowers tour

ANCIENT CAPITALS OF CHINA

PORTUGAL

with an Optional Yangtze River Cruise This tour focuses on the major capitals of Imperial China, including Beijing, Xian, Luoyang and the garden city of Suzhou. Some of the tour’s highlights are the Longmen Buddhist caves in Luoyang, the famous terracotta warriors and the recently excavated Famensi Temple near Xian, as well as the newly installed museums in Beijing and Shanghai. AUGUST 27 – SEPTEMBER 13, 2004 18 DAYS OCTOBER 13 – 29, 2004 17 DAYS Led by Dr. Mattanyah Zohar, Hebrew University Led by Prof. Robert Thorp, Washington University

This tour explores historically rich Portugal including prehistoric ruins, Roman towns, Gothic churches, medieval monuments, royal palaces and fine museums. We will travel through lovely coastal towns and explore the rugged mountain region of the north, stopping at regional markets and ancient seaports. A highlight of this tour will be a visit to the recently discovered petroglyphs along the Coa River Valley.

CAVES & CASTLES

THE DESERT FRONTIERS OF EGYPT

Our tour studies the outstanding Paleolithic art found in the caves of northern Spain and southern France. Beginning in Santillana del Mar, we visit Tito Bustillo, El Castillo, Las Monedas, Altamira II and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Crossing the Pyrénées into France, tour highlights include the caves of Gargas, Bédeilhac, Le Mas D’Azil, the excavations at Tautavel, Pech-Merle, Lascaux II and the major caves around Les Eyzies-deTayac. We will also visit Roman sites, the fortified town of Carcassonne and medieval villages, castles and fortresses of the Dordogne Valley ending at the extraordinary Prehistory Museum in St-Germain-en-Laye.

An exploration of ancient Egypt’s geographic frontiers and the peoples, goods and ideas that have crossed them. Highlights include border fortifications along the Suez, the ancient remains of a turquoise mine at Sarabit el-Khadim, Coptic desert monasteries along the Red Sea, St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai and the newly opened tombs and temples in Luxor. Our fourday cruise on Lake Nasser will enable us to visit sites not easily accessible to travelers. The spectacular desert landscapes of the Sinai and serenity of Lake Nasser will add to the magic of this special tour.

SEPTEMBER 2 – 17, 2004 Led by Dr. Roy Larick, University of Iowa

OCTOBER 8 – 26, 2004 16 DAYS Led by Prof. Lanny Bell, Brown University

Amidst the picturesque Breton villages, we explore Brittany’s intriguing megalithic sites, including the "great stones" at Carnac, enormous dolmen and cairns dating back to 5000 BC, the covered tombs around Lannion. We visit regional museums, Nantes, parish closes typical to Brittany and the spectacular Abbey of Mont St.-Michel. SEPTEMBER 17 – 30, 2004 Led by Dr. Roy Larick, University of Iowa

14 DAYS

MOROCCO

Our tour is designed to sample Morocco’s 6,000 years of archaeology, art and architecture with emphasis on the Islamic Imperial Cities of Rabat, Meknes, Fez and Marrakesh. As we travel from the Atlantic coast to the snow-capped Atlas Mountains, we will explore the great Roman and Islamic cities and remote kasbahs and ksours of the Sahara Desert. A tour highlight will be the day spent at the excavations at Sijilmassa. OCTOBER 2 – 16, 2004 15 DAYS Led by Prof. Kenneth Perkins, U. of South Carolina SICILY & SOUTHERN ITALY

OCTOBER 21 – NOVEMBER 7, 2004 18 DAYS Led by Dr. Jo Anne Van Tilburg, University of California MAYA SUPERPOWERS

This tour examines the ferocious political struggles between the Maya superpowers in the Late Classical period. At the heart of these struggles was a bitter antagonism between Tikal in northern Guatemala and Calakmul across the border in Mexico. New roads will allow us to visit many of these ancient cities, including Tikal, Calakmul and Lamanai, as well as the large archaeological project at Caracol in Belize. The tour also provides opportunities to experience the stillpristine tropical forest in the Maya Biosphere Reserves. 19 DAYS Our adventure ends in Campeche, a colonial gem recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

GREAT MUSEUMS

BRITTANY

NORTHERN CHILE & EASTER ISLAND

The enigmatic giant statues on Easter Island and the mysterious geoglyphs of northern Chile will be the highlights of this unusual tour. In northern Chile visits include pre-Inca fortresses, the archaeological remains of the Atacameno culture, enormous areas of perfectly preserved geoglyphs, fine museums, lovely old colonial churches and Santiago. Lastly, we study the fascinating prehistoric Rapa Nui culture during our seven-day stay on remote Easter Island.

Berlin, Vienna & Turin This tour will focus on the great museum collections of Egyptian, Classical and Near Eastern Art in Berlin, Vienna and Turin. For all who have visited Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Syria or Iraq, or will visit these places, this tour is an absolute treasure trove of art from their ancient cities. We will also visit major collections of Christian art as well as museums known for their outstanding paintings. As this is the height of the cultural season, there will be opportunities to attend opera, ballet or other performances. OCTOBER 7 – 17, 2004 11 DAYS Led by Prof. Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University THE SPLENDORS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

NOVEMBER 12 – 28, 2004 16 DAYS Led by Prof. John Henderson, Cornell University KHMER KINGDOMS

(Myanmar, Thailand, Laos & Cambodia) This tour focuses on the historical, religious and aesthetic aspects of these four countries. We begin in Myanmar with visits to the ancient royal cities, glittering pagodas and golden temples in Yangon, Mandalay and Pagan and continue to the magnificent 7th-century Khmer temples at Wat Phou in Laos and remote northeastern Thailand. The tour ends in Cambodia with four days at Angkor Wat. These exciting days will be enhanced by colorful markets and traditional music and dance performances. DECEMBER 28, 2004 – JANUARY 19, 2005 23 DAYS Led by Prof. Richard Cooler, Northern Illinois U.

An in-depth survey of ancient Egypt, beginning with six ADDITIONAL TOURS days in Cairo visiting Sakkara and the Giza Plateau, the Egyptian Museum and the Islamic and Coptic sites. We Vietnam; Sri Lanka; Southern India; Eastern India; will also spend a day in the Delta visiting Tanis and in Egypt for Grandparents & Grandchildren...and more. the Faiyum Oasis to see the collapsed pyramid of Meydum and Roman Karanis. With five full days in Luxor we will have time for a thorough exploration of the temples and tombs of Thebes, as well as the temples at Dendera and Abydos before a five-day Nile cruise on the deluxe Oberoi Philae. The tour concludes with three days in Aswan, the newly opened Nubian Museum and a flying visit to Abu Simbel.

Touring includes the Byzantine and Norman monuments of Palermo, the Roman Villa in Casale, unique for its 37 rooms floored with exquisite mosaics, Phoenician Motya and classical Segesta, Selinunte, Agrigento and Siracusa — plus, on the mainland, Paestum, Pompeii, NOVEMBER 2 – 21, 2004 Herculaneum and the incredible "Bronzes of Riace." FEBRUARY 4 – 23, 2005

OCTOBER 9 – 25, 2004 17 DAYS Led by Prof. Lanny Bell, Brown University Led by Prof. Barbara Barletta, University of Florida

19 DAYS NEW

american archaeology a quarterly publication of The Archaeological Conservancy

Vol. 8 No. 2

summer 2004 COVER FEATURE

30 EMERGENCY A R C H A E O L O G Y BY MICHAEL FINGER

Researchers at Shiloh National Military Park excavate a mound that is eroding into the Tennessee River.

UNEARTHING THE COMPLEX HISTORY OF THE IROQUOIS BY STEVE FEATHERSTONE

Archaeologist William Finlayson is investigating the Rife site near Toronto, Canada. This is one of roughly 90 Iroquoian sites he’s investigated.

DECIPHERING MAYA H I E R O G LYPHS BOB SCHATZ

BY JOHN MONTGOMERY

It took scholars decades to decipher these complex hieroglyphs, a feat that has been called one of the great intellectual achievements of our time.

EXPLORING THE ARCHAEOLOGY O F G E O R G I A AND ALABAMA BY JIM AUCHMUTEY

Our summer travel special takes you to a number of fascinating places.

FOSTERING FIRST AMERICAN RESEARCH BY CLAIRE POOLE

The Center for the Study of the First Americans is making a significant contribution to the knowledge of the earliest inhabitants of the Americas.

new acquisition A STARK REMINDER OF THE CIVIL WA R

RICK FISCHER

A brutal battle took place at this site preserved by the Conservancy.

new acquisition KEEPING ARCHAEOLOGY I N T H E N E I G H B O R H O O D A residential development in upstate New York will include an archaeological preserve.

new acquisition C O N S E RVA N C Y RECEIVES DONAT I O N O F ARKANSAS MOUND SITE Having never been excavated, the site has great research potential.

point acquisition TAKING ON THE ROLE OF PROTECTOR The preservation of a prehistoric village is guaranteed as the Conservancy purchases it from its longtime guardian.

point acquisition THE CONSERVA N C Y ACQUIRES IMPORTANT MESA VERDE SITE COMPLEX The site requires expert management and security.

american archaeology

2 Lay of the Land 3 Letters 5 Events 7 In the News Royal Maya Tomb Discovered in Guatemala • Paleo-Indian Projectile Points Found in Quebec • Congress Protects New Mexico’s Galisteo Basin

50 Field Notes 52 Reviews 54 Expeditions COVER: Leaves fall like rain from the surrounding trees during the excavation of Mound A at Shiloh National Military Park. Photograph by Bob Schatz

Lay of the Land

erhaps the best known Indian group in the Eastern United States is the Iroquois of upstate New York and southern Canada. Much admired by the early European settlers, they were romanticized by early American writers like James Fenimore Cooper of Cooperstown, New York, a delightful village now famous for its baseball museum. Actually the Iroquois are a collection of distinct but related tribes that spoke languages of the Iroquoian family and shared a similar lifestyle including agriculture and longhouse villages. Those who survived the Europeans were dispersed to parts of Canada as well as to Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. While the name Iroquois is well

known to modern North Americans, their story is not. In this issue of American Archaeology we focus on the research currently being done in Ontario on the Neutral branch of the family, a part of the Huron Confederacy that often warred with the League of the Five Nations to the south in New York. Archaeologists on both sides of the border are finding out a lot about these people by using the latest in scientific techniques. For example, we now know that they used intense agriculture and that had a dramatic impact on the land, causing them to move often and thus producing many distinct sites. In New York, the Iroquois sites are threatened by development, agri-

DARREN POORE

Telling the Iroquois’ Story

MARK MICHEL, President

culture, and topsoil mining. Looting is also a problem. Today there is a renewal of interest in Iroquois heritage by both the tribes and the public. Working with the tribes, state government, and scholars, the Conservancy is preserving as many of the remaining sites as possible. Each contains a wealth of information that will tell us much about these great people.

Touch the Past. Feel the Presence. Adult Research Program Weeks of August 15 and August 22

Become a member of our research team to experience the excitement and challenge of archaeology firsthand.

Family Excavation

Aug. 8-14, 2004

Make your next family vacation an Archaeology Adventure!

Fall Lab Sept 19-25 and Sept 26-Oct. 2, 2004

Participate in the first opportunity to take a detailed look at this season's collection of artifacts.

Backcountry Archaeology: Oct 9-15 Hiking Southeast Utah's Comb Ridge

Explore ancestral Puebloan structures and enjoy spectacular scenery on this unique adventure.

Limited Space! Make your reservation now. Call 1-800-422-8975 or register online at: www.crowcanyon.org

CROW CANYON Near Mesa Verde in Cortez, Colorado Left: Participants in 2003 made important discoveries at Crow Canyon’s Albert Porter dig site, northwest of Mesa Verde. CCAC’s programs and admission practices are open to applicants of any race, color, nationality, or ethnic origin. CST 2059347-50

summer • 2004

Letters The Mystery of Climate Change I enjoyed your article “The Mystery of the Megafauna” that appeared in the Spring 2004 issue. In addition to the weaknesses of the overkill theory mentioned in your article, it would not account for the demise of other large animals such as the Siberian mammoths, which appear to have died suddenly for no obvious reason. All these extinctions coincided roughly with the last retreat of the glaciers that could only have been precipitated by a sudden and dramatic climate change. The suddenness of this climate change suggests that it may have been initiated by some kind of catastrophic event. Possible candidates for such an event include a sizeable meteor that grazed or passed through the atmosphere and returned to space, generating enough heat to start melting the glaciers, or a comet or meteor that hit in the ocean near North America. William A. Schroeder Carbondale, Illinois Miscategorizing Maryland I read with great interest “The Vestiges of Northern Slavery” in the Spring 2004 issue. The article commendably reveals the excellent scholarship and research being done on these neglected areas of study. However, I’m concerned by the inclusion of Maryland as a Northern state. Aren’t states south of the Mason-Dixon Line, including Maryland, considered to be part of Dixie? I know Maryland now american archaeology

seems more like a Northern state, but that is a post–Civil War phenomenon. Withdrawing Maryland from the Northern states drastically shifts the Northern slave census for 1790 from 152,009 to 48,973 and increases the Southern slave census to 645,234. The inclusion of Maryland in the Northern census strikes me as an attempt to over-inflate the numbers to compensate for undercounting in the past. How is one error preferable to the other? Deborah H. Doolittle Angier, North Carolina

Correcting Historical Myths As always, a new issue of American Archaeology is a great pleasure to read. The recent issue’s impressive report on slavery in the North is outstanding. Archaeology does not always help to destroy widely held historical myths. The Conservancy is fortunate to have a magazine of such quality. Richard Woodbiry Amherst, Massachusetts

Sending Letters to American Archaeology American Archaeology welcomes your letters. Write to us at 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902, Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517, or send us e-mail at tacmag@nm.net. We reserve the right to edit and publish letters in the magazine’s Letters department as space permits. Please include your name, address, and telephone number with all correspondence, including e-mail messages.

Editor’s Corner

t took decades of incremental advancements, but eventually epigraphers accomplished the remarkable feat of reading Maya hieroglyphs. This tale is told in our feature “Deciphering Maya Hieroglyphs.” Though this abstruse script confounded a number of brilliant scholars, it gradually became understandable. Assumptions about the nature and contents of the glyphs were made and then modified or disproved through a process of trial and error. Such unscientific matters as personal biases and intellectual rivalries sometimes colored these assumptions. Finally, the methods of scientific inquiry triumphed over these prejudices, culminating in a remarkable intellectual accomplishment. Another of our features, “Fostering First American Research,” is about another grand intellectual quest: that of identifying the first inhabitants of the New World. For nearly 25 years the Center for the Study of the First Americans has been dedicated to solving that mystery. The center’s researchers employ sophisticated technology and their considerable expertise in investigating ancient archaeological sites to obtain as much data as they can. The center also publishes books and periodicals and sponsors conferences on this subject. First American research, like that of Maya hieroglyphs, is said to be infused with personal biases and political considerations. But this important work continues, and perhaps it, too, will culminate in another remarkable accomplishment.

WELCOME TO THE ARCHAEOLOGIC AL CONSERVANC Y!

he Archaeological Conservancy is the only national non-profit organization that identifies, acquires, and preserves the most significant archaeological sites in the United States. Since its beginning in 1980, the Conservancy has preserved more than 290 sites across the nation, ranging in age from the earliest habitation sites in North America to a 19thcentury frontier army post. We are building a national system of archaeological preserves to ensure the survival of our irreplaceable cultural heritage.

Why Save Archaeological Sites? The ancient people of North America left virtually no written records of their cultures. Clues that might someday solve the mysteries of prehistoric America are still missing, and when a ruin is destroyed by looters, or leveled for a shopping center, precious information is lost. By permanently preserving endangered ruins, we make sure they will be here for future generations to study and enjoy. How We Raise Funds: Funds for the Conservancy come from membership dues, individual contributions, corporations, and foundations. Gifts and bequests of money, land, and securities are fully tax deductible under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Planned giving provides donors with substantial tax deductions and a variety of beneficiary possibilities. For more information, call Mark Michel at (505) 266-1540. The Role of the Magazine: American Archaeology is the only popular magazine devoted to presenting the rich diversity of archaeology in the Americas. The purpose of the magazine is to help readers appreciate and understand the archaeological wonders available to them, and to raise their awareness of the destruction of our cultural heritage. By sharing new discoveries, research, and activities in an enjoyable and informative way, we hope we can make learning about ancient America as exciting as it is essential. How to Say Hello: By mail: The Archaeological Conservancy, 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902, Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517; by phone: (505) 266-1540; by e-mail: tacmag@nm.net; or visit our Web site: www.americanarchaeology.org

5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902 Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517 • (505) 266-1540 www.americanarchaeology.org Board of Directors Vincas Steponaitis, North Carolina, CHAIRMAN Cecil F. Antone, Arizona • Carol Condie, New Mexico Janet Creighton, Washington • Janet EtsHokin, Illinois Jerry EtsHokin, Illinois • W. James Judge, Colorado Jay T. Last, Califor nia • Dorinda Oliver, New York Rosamond Stanton, Montana • Dee Ann Story, Texas Stewart L. Udall, New Mexico • Gordon Wilson, New Mexico C o n s e r va n c y S t a f f Mark Michel, President • Tione Joseph, Business Manager Lorna Thickett, Membership Director • Sarah Tiberi, Special Projects Director Shelley Smith, Membership Assistant • Valerie Long, Administrative Assistant Yvonne Woolfolk, Administrative Assistant R eg i o n a l O f f i c e s a n d D i r e c t o r s Jim Walker, Vice President, Southwest Region (505) 266-1540 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902 • Albuquerque, New Mexico 87108 Tamara Stewart, Projects Coordinator • Steve Koczan, Site-Management Coordinator Amy Espinoza-Ar, Field Representative Paul Gardner, Vice President, Midwest Region (614) 267-1100 3620 N. High St. #207 • Columbus, Ohio 43214 Joe Navari, Field Representative Alan Gruber, Vice President, Southeast Region (770) 975-4344 5997 Cedar Crest Road • Acworth, Georgia 30101 Jessica Crawford, Delta Field Representative Gene Hurych, Wester n Region (916) 399-1193 1 Shoal Court #67 • Sacramento, California 95831

american archaeology

PUBLISHER: Mark Michel EDITOR: Michael Bawaya (505) 266-9668, tacmag@nm.net ASSISTANT EDITOR: Tamara Stewart ART DIRECTOR: Vicki Marie Singer, vsinger3@comcast.net Editorial Advisor y Board Scott Anfinson, Minnesota Historic Preservation Ernie Boszhardt, Mississippi Valley Archaeological Center • Darrell Creel, University of Texas Jonathan Damp, Zuni Cultural Resources • Richard Daugherty, Washington State University Linda Derry, Alabama Historical Commission • Mark Esarey, Cahokia Mounds State Park Kristen Gremillion, Ohio State University • Richard Jenkins, California Dept. of Forestry Trinkle Jones, National Park Service • Linda Mayro, Pima County, Arizona Jeff Mitchem, Arkansas Archaeological Survey • Douglas Perrelli, SUNY-Buffalo Janet Rafferty, Mississippi State University • Judyth Reed, Bureau of Land Management Ann Rogers, Oregon State University • Joe Saunders, University of Louisiana-Monroe Donna Seifert, John Milner Associates • Art Spiess, Maine Historic Preservation Richard Woodbury, University of Massachusetts • Don Wyckoff, University of Oklahoma National Advertising Office Marcia Ulibarri, Advertising Representative 5401 6th Street NW, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87107; (505) 344-6018; Fax (505) 345-3430; mulibarri@earthlink.net American Archaeology (ISSN 1093-8400) is published quarterly by The Archaeological Conservancy, 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902, Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517. Title registered U.S. Pat. and TM Office, © 2004 by TAC. Printed in the United States. Periodicals postage paid Albuquerque, NM, and additional mailing offices. Single copies are $3.95. A one-year membership to the Conservancy is $25 and includes receipt of American Archaeology. Of the member’s dues, $6 is designated for a one-year magazine subscription. READERS: For new memberships, renewals, or change of address, write to The Archaeological Conservancy, 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902, Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517, or call (505) 266-1540. For changes of address, include old and new addresses. Articles are published for educational purposes and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Conservancy, its editorial board, or American Archaeology. Article proposals and artwork should be addressed to the editor. No responsibility assumed for unsolicited material. All articles receive expert review. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to American Archaeology, The Archaeological Conservancy, 5301 Central Avenue NE, Suite 902, Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517; (505) 266-1540. All rights reserved.

American Archaeology does not accept advertising from dealers in archaeological artifacts or antiquities.

summer • 2004

Museum exhibits Meetings

•

Tours

Education

•

Conferences

■ NEW EXHIBITS Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY MUSEUM

Events

Festivals

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.— “Encounters with the Americas” explores the native cultures of Latin America before and after 1492, when the first voyage of Christopher Columbus initiated dramatic worldwide changes. The exhibition considers 16th-century native responses to military and religious missions, the introduction of new plants and animals, and the tragic toll of new diseases. (617) 495-3045, www.peabody.harvard.edu (Long-term exhibit) Canadian Museum of Civilization

Gatineau, Quebec, Canada—Through nearly 200 artifacts and 150 archival photographs, the new exhibition “Across Time and Tundra: The Inuvialuit of the Canadian Arctic” relates the dramatic story of the Inuvialuit, the Inuit (“Eskimos”) living in the western Canadian Arctic that were at one time the largest,

most prosperous Inuit group in Canada. Created in close consultation with Inuvialuit elders and community members, the exhibition features interactive elements such as a virtual tour of a traditional sod house and a drum-dance studio, that help define their culture, which dates to their arrival in the Canadian Arctic from Alaska about a thousand years ago. (800) 555-5621, www.civilization.ca (New long-term exhibit) Pueblo Grande Museum

Phoenix, Ariz.—“Marking Time: Ancient Calendars of the Southwest” explores the science of archaeoastronomy and the methods used by ancient people to measure time. (602) 4950901, www.pueblogrande.org (New long-term exhibit) Heard Museum North

Scottsdale, Ariz.—“Of Grasses, Ferns and Trees: California and Great Basin Baskets” highlights the role of baskets

National Gallery of Art

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Washington, D.C.—The landmark exhibition “Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya” demonstrates the visual magnificence and complexity of life at court, particularly at Palenque, Mexico. In the period from A.D. 650 to 800, kings and nobles transformed Maya art, achieving a peak of dramatic expression and naturalism unmatched in the ancient New World. The exhibition brings together some 130 masterworks. The majority of works from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras are in the United States for the first time. (202) 737-4215, www.nga.gov (Through July 25, then traveling to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, opening September 4) american archaeology

San Bernardino County Museum Los Angeles, Calif.—The new exhibit in the museum’s Fisk Gallery, “Native American Traditions: Hopi Katsinas,” features an eclectic collection of nearly 100 hand-carved katsinas, along with maps and other objects that represent a variety of North American Indian traditions. The exhibit, which demonstrates what the katsinas reveal about Hopi culture, is sponsored in part by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. (909) 307-2669, www.co.san-bernardino. ca.us/museum (Through September 12) 5

Newport News, Va.—The extensive new exhibit “Ironclad Evidence: Stories from the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia” includes never before displayed artifacts and documents from these Civil War vessels. Numerous historic images, personal items, and letters from the men who sailed the vessels provide a close look at the first naval battle between two ironclad warships. (800) 581-7245, (757) 596-2222, www.mariner.org (New long-term exhibit)

throughout history and shows how the art form has played an important role in the lives of people from many cultures. More than 175 baskets are on display. Their purposes vary from food containers to ceremonial caps, and they are made of plant materials ranging from the delicate stems of maidenhair ferns to the stumps of trees. (602) 252-8848, www.heard.org (New long-term exhibit)

■ CONFERENCES, LECTURES & FESTIVALS Native American Arts & Archaeology Festival

San Diego Museum of Man’s 21st Annual Indian Fair June 12–13, Balboa Park, San Diego, Calif. Drawing more than 10,000 visitors, the fair celebrates the arts, crafts, foods, songs, dances, and storytelling of Native Americans from throughout the Southwest. (619) 239-2001, www.museumofman.org

ing, and traditional foods. Contact Robin Hogan at (505) 534-1600, or the Arts Council at (505) 538-2505 / (888) 7587289, www.mimbresarts.org Festival Nueva Paquimé: Esplendor de Culturas

July 16–25, Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico. This colorful multicultural festival celebrates the cultural diversity of Chihuahua with a grand parade, fine arts exhibits, lectures on art and history, music, dancing, Tarahumara pageantry, and traditional foods. Contact Sandy Casillas at 011-52-636-692-4275, omasandi@paquinet.com.mx

July 11–16, Idyllwild Arts, Idyllwild, Calif. The theme of this summer’s week-long festival is “Transcending Borders: Connections Between Mesoamerica and the American Southwest.” Art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and Native American artists will look at culture, arts, and archaeological evidence to discover the fascinating links between these two regions that have so often been viewed separately. (909) 6592171 ext. 365, www.idyllwildarts.org

August 12–15, Bluff Community Center, Bluff, Utah. This year’s theme is “Back to Basics.” An opening reception will be held on the 12th from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding. The weekend includes presentations, symposia, poster sessions, and field trips to local sites, including a ride down the San Juan River. (425) 672-2290, www.swanet.org/ 2004_pecos_conference

Fiesta de la Olla

Indiana Archaeology Month

July 16–18, Fort Cobre, Pinos Altos, N.M. The Mimbres Region Arts Council will hold three days of fiesta at the living cultural museum just north of Silver City. The festival features pottery demonstrations by ceramic artists, pottery and other types of workshops for children and adults, music, danc-

Throughout September at various venues. A wide variety of events including lectures and site tours will be held across Indiana to highlight the rich heritage of past cultures in the state. Contact Amy Johnson at (317) 232-1646, www.in.gov/dnr/historic/archeomonth/ home.htm

77th Annual Pecos Conference

summer • 2004

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF MAN

Events

MARINER’S MUSEUM

Mariner’s Museum

in the

Royal Maya Tomb Discovered in Guatemala

NEWS

Only a few similar tombs have been found.

DAVID LEE

ALEXANDRA WITZE

ecent excavations at the ancient Maya city of Waka have led to the rare discovery of a vaulted burial chamber that contains the remains of what researchers believe to be a Late Classic period Maya queen. Only a handful of other Maya queen’s tombs are known, including those at Copån in Honduras, and Palenque and Yaxuná in Mexico. The find was made in mid-February in northwestern Guatemala, about 45 miles west of Tikal. The tomb apparently dates between A.D. 650 and 750, a time when Waka’s fortunes were beginning to wane, said David Freidel, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Further studies of the tomb and its inhabitant should shed light on Waka’s role in the Classic Maya world as well as the role of women in Maya royalty, he said. Freidel is co-director, along with Guatemalan archaeologist Héctor Escobedo, of a three-year project to excavate the ruins at Waka. The site is also known by its modern name El Perú. The researchers were excavating one of the approximately 20 structures that make up a palace complex. While digging a trench to obtain a stratigraphic construction sequence for the building, archaeologist David Lee broke through the capstones of the tomb chamber. The individual’s body had been laid out on a stone platform, accompanied by 23 complete ceramic vessels. Her skull and femur bones were missing, having been removed in a reverential ceremony decades or centuries after her death, Lee said. Around 2,500 artifacts also sur-

american archaeology

Archaeologist David Lee excavates the Maya queen's tomb he discovered at the ancient city of Waka.

This carved jade jewel was found in the tomb. It may have been part of the queen's headdress.

rounded the royal skeleton. They included plaques, beads, lip plugs, and other artifacts made of greenstone; ornaments made of mollusk and conch shell; black obsidian discs; and freshwater pearls. An elaborately carved jewel made of jade may have been part of her royal headdress, and jade plaques apparently served as a war helmet. Fragmented stingray spines were

found in the area of her pelvis—a sign of royal stature among Maya male elite, who practiced bloodletting from the genitals. To garner such adornments in death, said Freidel, the woman must have been extremely powerful. These artifacts suggest that in some cases the lines between male and female roles were not always clearly drawn. Stephen Houston, an expert in Maya archaeology from Brigham Young University who also conducts investigations in Guatemala, said the Waka find is intriguing because the tomb was found beneath a palace and not a pyramid, where such tombs are typically located. He speculated that the placement could signal a different pattern of royal domesticity at Waka.—Alexandra Witze 7

in the

NEWS

Comanche Rock Art Depicts LeatherArmored Mounted Warriors Petroglyphs reveal pre-gun military tactics.

MARK MITCHELL

University of Colorado at Boulder archaeologist has discovered four petroglyphs depicting Comanche warriors and their horses clad in leather armor. The discovery sheds light on Comanche history and military tactics. Only seven images of armored calvary have been recorded in North American rock art, all of them in Northern Plains’ areas such as Alberta, Canada, and Wyoming. The petroglyphs identified by Mark Mitchell, three of which are in southeastern Colorado and one in central Kansas, are the first of their kind found in the Central Plains. The rock art depicts horses clad in trapezoidal-shaped armor from which the animal’s head and feet protrude. Three of the petroglyphs show armored riders on the horses; one horse is riderless. Native Americans used armored horses between 1650 and 1750, after obtaining them from the Spanish via trading and raiding, and before the availability of firearms, Mitchell explained. This “post-horse–pre-gun” military strategy ended after 1750 when Indians acquired guns from the French and English. The leather armor was likely made from multiple layers of bison hide glued together, making it impenetrable to arrows. “It made the horse a tank,” Mitchell said. “The initial use of horses militarily was

This armored horse petroglyph was found in southeastern Colorado. Two types of 18th-century leather horse armor are thought to have been used on the Plains. One variety includes an armored collar, as shown here, while the second type lacks the protective collar.

not in the way we think of calvary; the Comanche were using them as assault vehicles to break through lines of infantry—the original ‘shock and awe’ technology.” Although Comanche oral history and historical records provide information about the tribe, virtually no Comanche archaeology has been found in southeast Colorado. “We haven’t been looking in the right place. These images help us figure out where to look for 18th-century Comanche archaeology,” said Mitchell. Based on the rock art’s similarity to a related suite of Comanche images, Mitchell determined they created the

petroglyphs. Additionally, he was able to date the rock art to a 50-year window, between 1700 and 1750. “It’s amazing to be able date rock art with that degree of precision,” said Mitchell, because petroglyphs are notoriously difficult to date. Of the significance of the discovery and its ramifications for rock art archaeology, Mitchell noted, “When you look at images in Canada and recognize them in southern Colorado, it means there are commonalities across very large regions. They’re not private individual expressions, they’re cultural expressions.”—Elizabeth Wolf summer • 2004

in the

Congress Protects New Mexico’s Galisteo Basin

NEWS

JAN UNDERWOOD / INFORMATION ILLUSTRATED

The area is one of the country’s richest archaeological districts.

he U.S. Congress has passed legislation to create an archaeological protection district in the Galisteo Basin between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico. The law, which designates 24 specific sites covering 4,591 acres, was approved in April. Sponsored by New Mexico Democrats Senator Jeff Bingaman and Congressman Tom Udall, and supported by other members of New Mexico’s Congressional delegation, the law authorizes public-private partnerships to protect sites on private lands. Sites on federal lands will receive special protection by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Federal funds and expertise will be available to help protect sites from erosion, deterioration, and looting. The BLM could acquire privately owned sites either by buying them or exchanging federal lands for them. “This is a major step in pro-

tecting some prime archaeological sites,” Congressman Udall said. The Galisteo Basin is one of the richest archaeological districts in the nation, containing many important Native American and Spanish colonial sites. Beginning around A.D. 1300, several very large pueblos were established there, including Pueblo San Marcos, a Conservancy preserve that is the largest pueblo ruin in the United States with some 2,000 surface rooms. Coronado visited the area in 1541–42. Beginning around 1600, the Spanish established some of the earliest Catholic missions, but in 1680 the pueblos rose in revolt and drove the Spanish from New Mexico. Already in decline, the Galisteo pueblos never recovered from the effects of the revolt and were abandoned. Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History con-

The red dots on this map are archaeological sites in the Galisteo Basin protected by Congress.

ducted pioneering research there from 1912 to 1915. In recent years, archaeologists from the American Museum, George Mason University, the University of New Mexico, the University of Chicago, and the School of American Research have conducted investigations, but the region’s research potential has barely been touched. —Mark Michel

Scientists Win Another Kennewick Man Ruling Case could go to the Supreme Court.

nother round in the long legal battle between scientists and Native Americans over Kennewick Man has ended, with the scientists winning again. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a request for a rehearing by the full court after a threejudge panel ruled that four tribes could not claim the 9,400-year-old remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The request was filed by the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama, and Colville tribes, who want to bury the re-

american archaeology

mains without a scientific study. The decision was made on April 19 and the tribes have 90 days to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. They haven’t decided whether to appeal, according to their attorney, Rob Roy Smith. “The tribes are thinking about all their options,” he said, which include lobbying Congress to address “problems” with NAGPRA. Kennewick Man’s remains were found in 1996 on federal land in southeast Washington. The remains are kept at the Burke Museum in Seattle. —Michael Bawaya

in the

NEWS

Archaeological Sites Withstand Bombing Investigation shows that Hawaiian island’s archaeology survived decades of U.S. Navy target practice.

KAHO’OLAWE ISLAND RESERVE COMMISSION

he largest archaeological project ever undertaken in Hawaii has revealed nearly 3,000 archaeological features on Kaho’olawe Island, located southwest of Maui. The sixyear, $12-million project, which began in 1998, resulted from the U.S. Navy’s return of the island to the Native Hawaiian community. Since World War II, the Navy used the island as a military target and training area. The current project revealed at least 600 more sites than were previously documented in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some of the new finds include a habitation complex and a large petroglyph field. Though the bombing affected the island’s cultural resources, the sites are in better shape then expected. The Navy contracted with Cultural Surveys Hawai’i (CSH) of Kailua, to work alongside clearance crews, documenting archaeological sites on the island and studying the effects of ordnance detonation on sites. The Navy stopped practice bombing on the island in 1990. Archaeologist Hallett Hammatt, project director for the survey effort, said that there is a greater concentration of archaeological sites on Kaho’olawe than any other Hawaiian island, with the possible exception of Ni’ihau, which has not yet been investigated. Beginning around A.D. 1000, Kaho’olawe Island served as a stopping point for people coming to Hawaii from other islands in the

This shrine, which was constructed and dedicated in 1992, serves as a repository for the remains of past inhabitants of Kaho'olawe that were repatriated to the island from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

South Pacific. Because of factors such as its location, celestial navigation and other sailing skills were taught here. A large concentration of sites has been exposed by erosion on the slopes of Lua Makika, the island’s 1,500-foot volcanic peak. A number of other sites and have been found near Lua Makika crater, the most agriculturally productive area on the island. Well-preserved sites have also been located in valleys on the north coast. Archaeological features and artifacts found during the survey are being mapped, photographed, and put into a computerized database that will be turned over to the Ka-

ho’olawe Island Reserve Commission when the project is complete. The commission, which will manage the island while it is held in trust for a future Native Hawaiian governing entity that has yet to be determined, plans to transform the 28,788-acre island into a cultural preserve. Commission Chairman Emmett Auli said that the state’s primary mandate is to preserve, restore, and protect the resources on Kaho’olawe and its surrounding waters. Given the potential dangers of unexploded ordnance and concern about the security of the cultural resources, access to the island is severely restricted. —Tamara Stewart summer • 2004

in the

NEWS

Paleo-Indian Projectile Points Found in Quebec Artifacts represent earliest evidence of humans in the region.

CLAUDE CHAPDELAINE

rchaeologists working on a terrace overlooking Spider Lake in the Lac Mégantic region of Quebec, Canada, have found fragments of what appear to be the earliest stone spear points found in Quebec. The research team, led by Claude Chapdelaine of the University of Montreal, dated the chert artifacts to between 12,000 to 12,500 years ago based on their characteristic fluted style. The fluted point fragments are similar to the Folsom type or Barnes type in the Great Lakes region and the Neponset/Michaud type in the Far Northeast, considered the typical projectile point for the Early Paleo-Indian Middle Phase. “These fluted point fragments are the first to be found in the entire Province of Quebec,” said Chapdelaine. “They are thus

Fluted points such as this one are changing assumptions about Quebec's earliest occupants.

the indisputable proof of late Ice Age hunters’ presence before 12,000 years ago in our study area, which is considered an extension of the hunting territory of a highly mobile group roving south within what is now northern Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.” He added that the discovery “pushes back the human history of Quebec by more than 2,000 years.” The researchers plan to finish excavations at the first of the four areas where artifacts were discovered, and to excavate the other areas over the next two years. —Tamara Stewart

Lawsuit Challenges Gas Exploration Project Environmental groups claim archaeology in eastern Utah threatened.

everal environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to stop a gas exploration project near Price in eastern Utah. A decision on the lawsuit is expected in late May. The plaintiffs say the project, which would take place on BLM land, poses a threat to ancient rock art, cliff dwellings, and pithouses near Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon, which is renowned for its archaeological resources. The BLM approved the project after conducting an environmental assessment, but the plaintiffs claim the assessment was inadequate. The project, known as Stone Cabin 3D Seismic Survey, was to start in mid-May and cover a american archaeology

57,500-acre area. Its intent is to locate fossil fuel reserves by transmitting seismic waves deep into the Earth. The BLM concluded that with proper mitigation and monitoring, the project would not harm the area’s resources. “Although none of the project is located in Nine Mile Canyon or where the highest concentrations of rock art exist, we went to great lengths to complete a comprehensive environmental review that examined the potential impacts to all of the resources,” said Fred O’Ferrall, associate field manager for the BLM Price Field Office. “In the end, we came to a balanced decision that allowed for research of energy resources while still protecting the archaeological and other resources.”

But Stephen Bloch, an attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), said the BLM environmental assessment failed to take into account “hundreds if not thousands” of unknown archaeological resources that could be damaged by the project. He added that known archaeological sites in nearby Nine Mile could also be harmed. SUWA filed suit along with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and the Utah Rock Art Research Association. The subcontractor hired to conduct the exploration recently struck an archaeological site while building a pipeline for the project. — Tamara Stewart 11

Unearthing the Complex History of the Iroquois Archaeologist William Finlayson and his small crew are patiently excavating the Rife site near Toronto, Canada. Rife is one of approximately 90 Iroquoian sites in the region that he has investigated.

William Finlayson (upper right) is assisted by volunteers as he excavates a longhouse.

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STEVE FEATHERSTONE

By Steve Featherstone

This is one of three partially reconstructed longhouses at the Crawford Lake site. Two other longhouses have been completely reconstructed. These reconstructions form an image of what the village once looked like.

he natural beauty of the Crawford Lake region, about 40 miles west of Toronto, Canada, lends the impression of a forest primeval. The lake’s tranquil waters sink deep into a limestone chasm formed by a sink in a 350-mile ridge known as the Niagara Escarpment. Cool mists drift through the trees along its shores, and turkey vultures soar on thermals from ridge to ridge searching for prey. Where the ground isn’t covered in nettles and ferns, it’s studded with moss-covered boulders that haven’t moved since the ice age. William D. Finlayson, president of This Land Archaeology Inc., a contract archaeology firm in Ontario, has american archaeology

spent the past 33 years scraping and sifting the thin soil of this, the Crawford Lake region, in an effort to uncover the complex history of the Iroquoian peoples who lived here from A.D. 1000 to 1650. Few archaeologists spend their entire careers in one area. But Finlayson wouldn’t have it any other way. He spent the first 25 years searching for as many Iroquoian sites as possible and subjected these to test excavations to gain a sample of artifacts in order to determine which Iroquoian tribes lived there and when. This done, he can define which questions he wants to investigate and select the sites which are best suited to answering them. The firmness of the dirt beneath his feet, a rock that 13

seems out of place, even the shape of a tree trunk reveals another piece of the puzzle. “This is what we call a dancing birch,” Finlayson says. He kneels on the damp earth and lays his hands on a twisted birch tree trunk. Its roots rise nearly three feet above the ground like knotty legs. The tree is more than a natural curiosity; it marks the location of an ancient Iroquoian village. How Finlayson arrives at this conclusion is a good example of the methods he applies, which includes an analysis of the archaeological data he’s produced, a careful study of historical records, and a keen understanding of the local terrain. “When Iroquoian peoples originally settled this land, it was a beech-maple climax forest,” Finlayson points out. “There would’ve been big beech trees and big maple trees and not a lot of undergrowth like you see now.” In other words, the natives cleared the beech and maple trees to plant corn, beans, squash, sunflower, and tobacco. Eventually they abandoned the fields, which regenerated into an oak-pine second-growth forest. European pioneers cleared away most of the pine and used the stumps to make fences. Some pine stumps were left standing, and when they began to rot, birch seeds fell into them and started to grow. In time, the host stumps rotted away completely, leaving the mature birch tree roots exposed. “If I walk through the bush and I see dancing birches,” Finlayson says, “I can say there were cornfields here, and that there must be an Indian village nearby.” The old pine stump fences, many of which are still visible today

at the edges of meadows, farm fields, and roadsides, hold secrets as well. When his excavation sites are blanketed in snow, Finlayson spends his winters cataloging artifacts and analyzing data. One winter he mapped the locations of all the pine stump fences around Crawford Lake, which revealed a northern boundary to his study area. “I can draw this line, and I don’t have to look for Indian villages north of it because there’s no pine stump fences,” he says. “Where there’s no fences, there’s no corn fields, and thus no Indians living there—no Iroquoian Indians, anyway.” The Iroquoian peoples were slash and burn horticulturalists, and they shared a common language, although archaeologists divide them into three main groups. The Huron Confederacy inhabited the greater Toronto region. They often warred with the League Iroquois, better known as the Five Nations, who still live in what is now upstate New York. Acting as a buffer between these two groups in the Crawford Lake region was the Neutral Confederacy. Finlayson estimates that there are 200 Iroquoian sites in his study area, approximately 90 of which he’s investigated. By counting the number of documented pine stands and pine stump fences where he has yet to conduct archaeological surveys, Finlayson estimates there are 110 sites still to be found. The two sites Finlayson presently investigates, Rife and Metate, keep him plenty busy. Rife, the more significant of the two sites, takes its name from the past owners of the property. Due to its rocky soil, the Niagara Escarpment has many densely

Across a gently sloping meadow, past the rusting hulks of abandoned vehicles, a handful of volunteers excavate an historic Neutral Iroquoian midden near Crawford Lake, Ontario. They are participants in archaeologist William Finlayson’s Adventures in Archaeology program. Finlayson began the program three years ago as a way to fund his research in the Crawford Lake area. Groups of volunteers (he likes to keep them to 10 or less) pay a small fee to dig for a weekend, or five days, at the Metate site. Finlayson, who is also a research associate with the Canadian Museum of Civilization, says the overwhelming majority of the archaeology being conducted in Ontario—“In excess of 95 percent”—is cultural resource management projects, meaning the work is being done in advance of a construction project. This archaeology is funded by the organization responsible for the construction, the work is often done hastily, and the standards, according to Finlayson, are generally low, and the emphasis is clearly not on research. In fact, the current interpretation of Ontario’s law stipulates that the recovered artifacts and the reports written about the work belong to the archaeological contractor, and therefore scholars like Finlayson are unable to study them. Participants in the Adventures in Archaeology program excavate a He believes that cultural resource management projects midden at the Metate site. make up the vast majority of the archaeology taking place in the rest of Canada as well. The Canadian government, through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, does support research archaeology, but many of the projects it funds take place outside of Canada. Finlayson estimates that it would require about $200,000 Canadian a year for 10 years to properly excavate the Rife site. He will continue to approach granting agencies for funds, but he’s not optimistic. —Steve Featherstone For more information about Adventures in Archaeology visit the Web site www.adventuresinarchaeology.com

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STEVE FEATHERSTONE

A Paucity of Research in Canada

The village at Rife may have once resembled this virtual model of the Draper site, an early 16th-century Huron village east of Toronto.

wooded areas such as Rife that have not been disturbed by farm plows. Broken pottery, flakes of chert, arrowheads, and other such artifacts are often discovered lying on the ground beneath the leaves. Finlayson can’t afford to bushwhack every inch of the Niagara Escarpment, of course. He lacks the resources to investigate even those bush lots close to Crawford Lake. Instead, he relies on members of the local community to inform him of artifact finds. That’s how the Rife site came to his attention. One day in the early 1970s, the Rife family’s nephew did what any young, enthusiastic, and thoroughly untrained archaeologist would do on a sunny afternoon: he went into the woods to find an Indian village. And find one he did, Finlayson notes with a laugh. Word soon reached Finlayson about the discovery, and in 1973 he began an investigation. After digging a test trench, Finlayson’s team found two middens and the walls of a longhouse, which were excavated primarily by a graduate student from 1974 to 1976. For more than 20 years Finlayson worked on other sites. He returned to Rife in 1999 after publishing Iroquoian Peoples of the Land of Rocks and Water, A.D. 1000-1650, a four-volume, 1,711page compilation of his research.

RICK FISCHER

On a cool autumn afternoon,

Finlayson and a handful of volunteers carefully scrape away topsoil to reveal what were once the outside walls of Rife’s second longhouse. Longhouses were the basic structures of Iroquoian villages, and their frames were made from american archaeology

wooden support poles, which were then covered in bark. The wood has long since disintegrated, but the yellow subsoil is stained dark where the poles were driven up to 18 inches into the ground. A light rain patters the leaves overhead, dampening the earth and making it easier to see the stains, known as postmolds. Occasionally, a volunteer will stick a drinking straw into the center of a postmold to mark its location. The forest clearing bristles with plastic straws. Finlayson estimates that this longhouse was home to around 120 people. The figure is based on 17th-century ethnohistorical writings by French explorers and Jesuit missionaries, among them Samuel de Champlain. These early observers provided detailed descriptions of longhouse interiors and arrangements, noting that two families shared a hearth in the longhouse’s central corridor. The longhouse Finlayson is excavating at Rife is preEuropean, but it has a similar physical layout to those in the historical accounts. By extrapolating 200 years into the past from the point of European contact—a technique called direct historical approach—he can estimate the number of people who lived in the longhouse simply by counting the number of hearths (nine) to get the number of families (18). Iroquoian families typically consisted of six people. That amounts to roughly 120 people living in a single structure. Over a period of 20 years or so, 120 people leave behind a lot of artifacts. “If this site had been plowed, everything would’ve been mixed up, and then people come along and collect the artifacts,” he says. “Artifacts disappears. But here we get everything in its exact layout.” 15

STEVE FEATHERSTONE

The interior of this reconstructed longhouse at the Crawford Lake site shows the main corridor and its centrally placed hearths. Sleeping platforms are seen next to the walls.

In the past five years Finlayson’s team has recovered 50,000 artifacts from the about one third of the longhouse floor, and the excavation is far from finished. “The large majority of the Longhouse #2 remains to be dug,” he says. “But it needs to be dug slowly, because it’s not being threatened with destruction. It’ll always be here.” The Rife site is an open-air laboratory of sorts. Finlayson employs techniques that he says are not commonly used in Canadian archaeology. His team digs one-halfmeter-by-one-half-meter squares rather than the standard one-meter-by-one-meter squares, and they sift the excavated dirt through screens with a 1/8-inch mesh. Because the squares are smaller they dig more of them, and Finlayson says this enables him to more accurately map the locations of the artifacts. Sifting the dirt through the finer screens (1/4-inch mesh is standard) results in an astonishing increase in recovered artifacts. For example, one square of a particularly rich midden produced 10,000 artifacts, 9,500 of which were so tiny they would’ve slipped through a standard screen. Finlayson plots the exact location of every recovered artifact on a digital map of the longhouse using computer software. The spatial distribution patterns of the artifacts give clues not only about the artifacts themselves but also how they might have been used. “You can say there’s the 16

fireplace, and maybe they were sitting around the fireplace making arrowheads,” Finlayson says. “And they’re discarding debris under the benches. But they keep the central corridor clear because they don’t want to be stepping on pieces of chert and cutting their feet. That’s what makes this site unique. Everything is where it was dropped 500 years ago, and we can capture it as it was.”

Based on radiocarbon dates

obtained at Iroquoian villages located in other parts of Ontario, it was assumed that Rife existed from A.D.1370 to 1390. But Finlayson believes the site was occupied from 1445 to 1475. His conclusion is based on core samples taken from the bottom of Crawford Lake. This is one of the very few known lakes in Canada that, due to the absence of oxygen, has no living organisms on its floor. Nor does the lake experience a flow of water from top to bottom, as most lakes do. Consequently, sediments on the bottom remain undisturbed for hundreds of years, and a regular pattern of sediment deposits has been identified. Each year is marked by a single white layer of calcium carbonate deposited in the summer months; a dark layer of silt is then deposited on top of it when the lake is frozen during winter. This makes it easy to determine dates by counting the summer • 2004

WILLIAM FINLAYSON

lived in the Crawford Lake region between 1445 and 1475, a figure he bases on the size of the villages and the assumption, suggested by archaeological evidence from other sites, that each acre contained about 250 people. He believes this population density is unprecedented in all of northeastern North America prior to European contact. He argues that as tribes began to rub up against each other’s territory, village identification became increasingly important. Evidence for this hypothesis is found in the unusually elaborate material cultures revealed by the artifacts he’s found, which seems to emphasize distinctions between the occupants of the various villages. At the Winking Bull site, for example, Finlayson found three times the number of bone beads, which were used for personal adornment, that he found These Iroquoian artifacts are representative of those found at the Rife site. From left, clockwise, at Rife. Members of one village decorated their smoking pipes with an average of six are dog and bear tooth pendants, a decorated bone armband, and whelk shell pieces that were lines; a village three miles away used an averinlaid in wood. age of three lines. Pipes from one community have three or four relatively large punctates decorating annual layers in a core sample. If, for example, botanical the space underneath the horizontal lines, while pipes from remains, such as corn pollen, are found 1,000 layers from another community have many smaller punctates. “Thus, the top of the sample, the corn pollen is thought to be each village has a distinctive material culture recognizable to 500 years old. people from other villages in the area,” Finlayson says. Roger Byrne, a palynologist in the Department of It’s well documented in the historical record that war Geography at the University of California at Berkeley, and played an important sociopolitical function in Iroquoian Finlayson analyzed the botanical evidence from a core society. Finlayson argues that the high population and sample taken at Crawford Lake. From their analysis they close proximity of Iroquoian villages around Crawford assume there was a period of land clearance and agriculLake during the Middleport period were made possible ture from about A.D. 1405 to 1445 which represented the only through alliances. One of the big questions he hopes first phase of occupation of the Crawford Lake village, to answer by excavating the Rife site is how such alliances which is next to the lake and the nearby Unick village. were created and maintained. Villagers also hosted feasts From approximately 1445 to 1475 there is no evifor members of nearby settlements with whom they dence of land clearing and agriculture, and Finlayson bewanted to trade or keep the peace. Finlayson suspects that lieves the residents of these two villages deserted them and the large number of high-collared vessels and smoking moved to the Rife site. His conclusion is based on the pipes excavated at Rife, and at contemporaneous villages similarities he’s found in the ceramic artifacts recovered nearby, is evidence of increased feasting at council meetfrom the three villages. ings where alliances were continually negotiated. “If you The sediments from Crawford Lake indicate that want to create an alliance, the first step is to start trading there was another period of land clearance and agriculture with people,” Finlayson says. “You trade with them first, around the lake from about 1475 to 1505. It’s thought and then you feast with them.” that some of the people from Rife returned to settle at the He wonders if the pertinence of his research could exCrawford Lake site, while the remainder moved to create tend well beyond the endeavors of the Iroquois. “If you another village, VanEden. Finlayson believes that, having think about this whole process that’s going on, of creating exhausted the natural resources due to their slash and alliances to let people who live close to each other live in burn techniques, the Iroquoi moved from place to place peace—is there something we can learn from them? Is about every 30 years. there something about what these guys were doing in the Finlayson’s excavations have revealed at least five Iromid 1400s that will help us better create peace in the quoian villages—Rife, Winking Bull, Itldu, Retreat, and world today?” Pipeline—that were occupied at some time during what’s called the Middleport period, which lasted from A.D. 1405 to 1505. Finlayson estimates that as many as 5,000 people STEVE FEATHERSTONE is a writer and photographer from upstate New York. american archaeology

Deciphering Maya Hieroglyphs Scholars have spent decades studying these complex hieroglyphs. Now many of them can be read, a feat that has been called one of the great intellectual achievements of our time. By John Montgomery

ew archaeologists ignore the value of written records or eyewitnesses to interpret the past, whether a papyrus scroll or an account by Herodotus. Prehistoric archaeologists, of course, rarely encounter such luxuries and are forced to make due with excavation data. Hieroglyphic inscriptions of the ancient Maya, retrieved from the jungles of southeastern Mexico and Central America, offer an important exception. Although once thought all but unreadable, Maya hieroglyphs at last are yielding their secrets, providing details about the ancient past that seemed almost unimaginable only a few decades ago. The cracking of the “Maya code” has been called one of the great intellectual achievements of our time by the

This scene appears in the Grolier Codex, one of only four intact Maya books. The Feathered Serpent, a warlike Venus deity, replete with bird-claw feet and snake headdress, approaches an enemy temple. At the far left of the page are mathematical hieroglyphs consisting of dots and bars. Each dot equals one, each bar five. These calendrical signs precede the column of glyphs that repeat the sign for earth.

summer • 2004

renowned archaeologist Michael D. Coe. Tough challenges confronted epigraphers, the decipherers of ancient inscriptions, at every turn. Not least was the glyphs’ extraordinary complexity. While today’s epigraphers understand about 80 percent of the roughly 1,000 signs, the wide variety of signs and the longer, more florid inscriptions can still confound even the most knowledgeable reader. Thousands of carved and painted inscriptions survive, mostly from the peak of Maya civilization called the Classic Period (A.D. 250–900). Ancient inscriptions occur as friezes on architecture, as components of artistic programs carved on wall panels, on upright stone shafts, and on thrones, altars, jade and shell jewelry, and on objects of wood. Painted inscriptions extend around the rims of polychrome pottery and serve as captions in murals. Above all, the Maya wrote books, or codices, that were made from bark paper covered with stucco to form the writing surface and folded multiple times in accordion fashion. Scribes wrote hieroglyphic inscriptions long after the 16th-century Spanish conquest, but writing fell into disuse as Catholic authorities suppressed Maya religious beliefs and the number of literate Maya dwindled. So it was that by the opening decades of the 1800s no one knew how to read the glyphs, and for all intents and purposes Maya hieroglyphic writing had become a dead script.

JOHN MONTGOMERY

MAYA HIEROGLYPHS CONSIST OF TWO

types of graphic forms. The first type consists of abstract geometric signs. The second type represent “personified” signs that depict human or supernatural individuals distinguished by gender, age, and clothing. Both types occur as large main or dominant signs and small affix signs that cluster around the larger ones. Together, main signs and affixes combine into more or less square blocks, and the blocks form a grid pattern of columns and rows. Hieroglyphic inscriptions generally mix geometric and personified signs, both of which can abstractly express words, parts of words, or clauses. Personified forms can also represent the individual expressed by the word. Glyphs combine into sentences formed from the basic grammatical rules of Mayan, which most frequently requires a verb at the beginning, followed sometimes by an object, and lastly the subject. Typically, hieroglyphic sentences conform to the pattern, “Kicked the ball John.” Other parts of speech include adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and pronouns. Phonetic complements offer clues to how a word should be pronounced, while semantic determinatives identify which of several possible meanings the writer intended. Hieroglyphs frequently serve as captions within artistic scenes, naming the depicted individuals, objects, or events. Long hieroglyphic inscriptions either accompany artistic scenes or stand alone. The more extensive inscriptions commonly refer to the life of the king, telling of his birth, designation as heir, accession to the throne, principal american archaeology

Emblem glyphs function as the name of a Maya city, of its ruling lineage, or of some other site-specific feature. Rather than spelling a word syllabically, emblem glyphs consist of a series of logograms that represent entire words. In this example the main sign, which is an animal skull, refers to Palenque, in Mexico. The affix signs mean “divine” and “lord.” Thus the glyph is read “Divine Palenque lord."

accomplishments, and death and burial. They also name the king’s gods, wives, parents, children, prisoners, and important political subjects. One of the more fascinating discoveries of recent years is that artists signed their names on monumental art and painted pottery, allowing scholars to track the careers and output of royal sculptors and scribes. Maya kings and queens reigned in luxury over powerful kingdoms, collecting tribute from subject towns and aggrandizing their power to form ever-larger states. Not only do glyphs specifically recount tribute tallies of beans, chocolate, woven textiles, and other goods, they explicitly relate acts of rebellion, civil war, and political alliance between districts. They also identify the locations of historical and mythological events, and record an assortment of rituals, including temple dedications, the completion of stairway memorials, sculptured monuments, and plazas. Not least

Many Maya hieroglyphs function as a syllabic or consonant-vowel sign and are combined to spell a word in the Mayan language. Here the affix sign “ka,” (a representation of fish fins which the scribe wrote twice for aesthetic reasons) combines with the personified main sign “ka” (the head of the fish), along with the affix sign for “wa.” This spells the sequence “ka-ka-wa,” or “kakaw,” which in several modern Maya languages means “chocolate.”

past and future. While the chief calendar tallies the days, months, years, and epochs elapsed since the creation of the world, which inscriptions identify as equivalent to August 13, 3114 B.C., the Maya’s oldest known date falls trillions of years before scientific estimates of the Big Bang. Additional calendars track phases of the moon and date the movements of various planets, particularly Venus as morning and evening stars.

THE METHODS, AND THEREFORE THE

Inscriptions and artistic scenes from Maya books provide vital clues about how to read the hieroglyphs. In this scene found in the Madrid Codex a bird is caught in a noose. Due to Diego de Landa’s work, it was thought that one sequence of the inscription’s syllabic glyphs spelled the word “le-e” (which is shortened to “le”), meaning “noose.” Since Mayan grammar indicates the next glyph will represent the subject of the text, and the illustration contains a bird, the glyphs should seemingly name a bird that was caught for food. Another sign known from Landa, “ku,” is the first sound of the bird’s name. Therefore it’s likely the next sign reads “tzu,” which combined with “ku” forms the word “kutz," meaning “turkey."

JOHN MONTGOMERY

are the records of bloodletting, the piercing of genitals and other body parts, and human sacrifice, including decapitation by axe. The Maya used hieroglyphs as the basis of several calendars that incorporate specialized mathematical and period signs used to track far into an extraordinarily remote

progress, of glyph decipherment were frequently influenced by the biases epigraphers brought to the task. While journeying through Central America during the 1830s and 1840s, American travel writer and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens decided the hieroglyphs recorded history, just as most original scripts of the ancient world tend to. Yet no genuine decipherments occurred in Stephens’ day, and no real discoveries were made until 1862. In that year, while searching the Royal Academy of Madrid in Spain, the French abbey Brasseur de Bourbourg found a condensed copy of a manuscript written about 1566 by the Bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa. Zealous to maintain Christianity among his Maya wards, Landa had burned many of the hieroglyphic books, then compiled an account of Maya culture as his defense against charges of abuse. This account, condensed by unknown writers in Spanish Colonial times, included brief examples and a short description of how the writing system works. Because the Landa manuscript provides only signs with the same phonetic sound as letters in Spanish, de Bourbourg and others after him decided Maya writing was alphabetical, and set about deciphering the script accordingly. Most of these attempts generated meaningless results, precisely because the script did not function as an alphabet. Other scholars were much less certain of the nature of the script. By 1900, opposing German and American

These signs taken from inscriptions at Piedras Negras in Guatemala and Yaxchilan in Mexico represent the major events in the life of the inscription’s subjects, who were usually kings, queens, or other individuals of rank. The glyphs are transcribed into syllabic signs and logograms, then into the corresponding Mayan words, and finally into English. There is a question mark after the logogram "JUB" under the third glyph because epigraphers aren’t certain this is the corresponding phonetic value for the glyph, though they’re confident the glyph indicates war.

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schools reflected deep divisions between how scholars interpreted the glyphs. The German school, spearheaded by the Royal Librarian of Dresden, Ernst Forsteman, insisted the glyphs were essentially signs for ideas related to calendrical and astronomical matters. At the time, this was the only type of information epigraphers had discerned in the glyphs. According to this view the glyphs were ideograms, not a written language. Forsteman and his adherents concluded this because they believed the Maya lacked the sophistication to develop a written language. In contrast, the American school, led by Cyrus Thomas of the Bureau of American Ethnology, insisted the glyphs contained both astronomical and historical information, and that they were used to represent phonetic sounds, which implied that the glyphs were written language. Though this would eventually prove to be the more accurate of the two views, Thomas was severely criticized for espousing it. Vessels such as this one include a formulaic inscription that runs around the rim, known as the Primary He later yielded to his critics, Standard Sequence (PSS). The PSS tells what type of vessel it is, who it was made for, and identifies its saying the glyphs were not a lan- contents. Occasionally the PSS includes the name of the artist who painted or carved the vessel. guage to be read phonetically. spell words syllabically (such as “ka-ka-wa”). He also deThe Englishman J. Eric S. Thompson was the most duced that in all cases the vowel from the final syllabic sign celebrated epigrapher of his day and for much of the was to be dropped, thus “ka-ka-wa” becomes “ka-ka-w” or 1900s he fiercely opposed the notion that the glyphs were written Mayan. His scathing criticisms of phonetic deci“kakaw,” the Mayan word for chocolate. In addition, pherment pressured colleagues to accept Maya writing as Knorosov argued that the glyphs included signs for whole largely ideographic, a view similar to that of the German words, or logograms, and were therefore a mixed logo-sylschool. Such was Thompson’s influence that, during the labic script. But Thompson’s relentless criticism and the Stalinist years following World War II, when a 30-year-old errors that Knorosov made applying his theory convinced Russian scholar announced he had cracked the writing the Euro-American community that Knorosov was wrong. system, almost no one lifted an eyebrow. This was the In the late 1950s Heinrich Berlin, a German schoolCold War period and Thompson denounced the claim as teacher working in Guatemala, identified glyph sequences Soviet propaganda that was at best an exaggeration and that he suggested might represent place-names or refermore likely a fraud. ences to regional ruling lineages or some other site-specific Yuri Knorosov understood both Egyptian hieroglyphs feature. These came to be known as emblem glyphs. Emand the writing systems of ancient India. He could read blem glyphs implied the system contained historical inJapanese, Chinese, and Arabic, making him a far better formation, but it was another Russian, an expatriate epigrapher than Thompson suspected. Knorosov assumed named Tatiana Proskouriakoff, who definitively changed the glyphs were written Mayan, and his solution was to Maya decipherment. identify the signs given by Landa as syllables rather than While studying the possible meaning of Maya inalphabetic letters. These consonant-vowel combinations scriptions during the early 1960s, it occurred to her that (for example, “ka”) were meant to be strung together to monuments at the archaeological site of Piedras Negras, in american archaeology

JOHN MONTGOMERY

This inscription is taken from the rim of a pottery vessel. The sequence of syllabic spellings and logograms identify the type, purpose, and owner of the vessel. The English transcription given just above the line of glyphs offers a literal reading of the text, which can be paraphrased as: “The vessel was made for the young royal lord to drink flavored chocolate.”

Guatemala, comprised a series of chronological groups each no longer than a normal human life span. Proskouriakoff thought the depictions of human figures on these monuments might represent rulers or kings or some other public figure. But more significantly, she suggested that certain glyphs accompanying the figures at the beginning and end of each chronological group could refer to the births and accessions of these kings. But, like Berlin, and unlike Knorosov, Proskouriakoff made no attempt to read the glyphs as written Mayan. In 1974, scholars from around the world met to synthesize what they understood about Maya civilization at a conference in Palenque, one of the architectural gems of the pre-Columbian world located in southern Mexico. It was here that Linda Schele, who by some estimations became the most celebrated of all Mayanists, made her debut. The pivotal discussions known as the Palenque Mesa Redondas, or Palenque Round Tables, saw Schele and her collaborator, a young Australian named Peter Mathews, employ phonetic decipherment of the script with the apparent evidence of historical content noticed by Proskouriakoff. Armed with expectations about what the glyphs said, and convinced they were written Mayan, Schele and others realized that if Knorosov was right, the number of syllables in the script would match the syllables in the Mayan language, a limited set of some 100 consonantvowel combinations. They also realized that the glyphs should conform to the structure and inflectional system of the language, and that they could test proposed syllabic values by seeing if those syllables could be joined to form words that were used in spoken Mayan. This was essentially the same approach Knorosov used, but with a better understanding of how Mayan language functioned in the glyphs and what they recorded. In this way, after decades of trial and error, epigraphers identified hieroglyphs for nearly all possible syllables and for many whole words. 22

Dozens of epigraphers have since made their mark on the history of decipherment. Schele’s protégé, David Stuart of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, is generally credited as the leading epigrapher, followed by Nikolai Grube of the University of Bonn, Stephen Houston of Brigham Young University, Simon Martin of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, and Alfonso Lacadena of the Laboratorio Hermeneumatica in Madrid, Spain. These and other scholars have made it possible to fully read the great majority of inscriptions, including the longest narrative accounts that run to hundreds of individual signs. Because of professional rivalries and personality conflicts, neither Knorosov nor Proskouriakoff, the two most influential modern epigraphers, accepted the combined phonetic and historical approach. Nonetheless, this method has met no serious challenge. But points of technical disagreement linger, such as the question of which Mayan dialect (out of about 30) the glyphs record. Although David Stuart and Stephen Houston argue for what they refer to as Classic Maya that is expressed only in the glyphs, other scholars point to evidence that suggests the glyphs were used to write both the Cholan and Yucatec dialects, which survive in modern forms today. Other points of contention concern inflection on verbs and how the glyphs represent differences in vowel length, which make a crucial difference to the meaning of words. By and large, scholars wholeheartedly embrace glyphic decipherment, and the results of that decipherment have influenced archaeological projects throughout the Maya area. Many archaeologists direct excavations on the basis of glyphic information. Scholars today place such emphasis on epigraphy that, in a number of respects, we can speak of an investigative revolution, one that is transforming almost everything we know about the ancient Maya. JOHN MONTGOMERY is an epigrapher and author of the book How to Read Maya Hieroglyphs. summer • 2004

Summer Travel Special

Mounds A, B, and C (from right going clockwise) at Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site in Georgia. Mound A, the largest of the group, has never been excavated. Mound B has been partially excavated, and Mound C has been completely excavated and reconstructed.

Exploring the Archaeology of Georgia and Alabama

GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES

By Jim Auchmutey n the South, William Faulkner once wrote, the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. While the novelist was referring to the Civil War and its aftermath, he could just as easily have been talking about more distant history. People have inhabited the region for thousands of years, making the Southeast rich territory for an archaeological road trip. Our tour begins in Atlanta, a relentlessly modern metropolis of 4 million people. To appreciate what was here before the skyscrapers and subdivisions, the Atlanta History Center, in the upscale Buckhead neighborhood, provides a useful introduction. Before the city was founded as american archaeology

a railroad terminus in 1837, this was Creek Indian country. A trading village on the Chattahoochee River, Standing Peachtree, lent its name to a trail and eventually to Atlanta’s central thoroughfare, Peachtree Street. The museum documents that era with native artifacts and a reconstructed pioneer cabin. But most of the space is devoted to a more recent chapter. During the Civil War, Atlanta became one of the very few American cities ever to be conquered and ravaged by an invading army. An entire wing of the museum covers the siege and its aftermath. A display of debris— charred bricks, melted glassware, twisted gun barrels— 23

ALABAMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A man leans against a brick column at Old Cahawba Archaeological Park. These columns once supported the two-story porch of a 19th-century house.

BOB KEEBLER

eloquently attests to the fiery destruction that consumed much of the city when it fell to Union troops in 1864. Half a dozen battles were fought in and around Atlanta during the war. Most of the sites have been disfigured by development. One of the best preserved is Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, 20 miles northwest of the city. Take I-75 north to exit 269, and follow the signs. The museum at the welcome center gives an excellent overview of the Atlanta campaign. It was June 1864, and the Union army had outflanked the Confederates in a series of engagements through northwest Georgia. General William T. Sherman sent his forces against dug-in enemy lines on the slopes of Kennesaw. It was a bloody mistake, one of few he made during an otherwise triumphal campaign. On the steep hike up the mountain you pass rifle pits and artillery ramparts. In another part of the battlefield, Cheatham Hill, Confederate trenches zigzag toward the point where a Northern assault faltered under withering fire. A stone arch preserves the entrance of a tunnel Union soldiers dug in an effort to get beneath Southern fortifications and blow them to kingdom come. Earth moving of an even grander scale can be found 20 miles up the road at our next stop, the Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site. Take I-75 to exit 288, and follow the signs through Cartersville. Etowah, which has six platform mounds, was the site of a Mississippian town with a population of perhaps 1,000. Etowah’s residents grew beans, squash, and corn, with the latter crop playing an important role in their ritual activities. They were also concerned about their security, judging from the remnants of a dry moat and archaeological evidence of log palisades that once guarded the site. The largest mound, which is thought to be a temple mound, rises 63 feet and affords a commanding view of the floodplain of the Etowah River. It has never been excavated. A smaller burial mound nearby has, and the artifacts found there speak volumes about life at Etowah between A.D. 1000 and 1500. The natives were skillful potters and wood carvers, and they fashioned a wide range of weapons, ornaments, and vessels. The most striking objects found in the burial mound are a pair of painted marble effigies that show a kneeling woman and a man sitting cross-legged. The figures are on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago, where a major exhibition on ancient Indian art in the Midwest and South will debut this fall. Replicas will be displayed in the Etowah museum when it reopens—probably this summer— after an extensive remodeling. Return to I-75 and drive 62 miles north to exit 350, which leads to the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. The park memorializes the fighting around Chattanooga in 1863 that preceded the Atlanta campaign. Chickamauga, where the Confederates scored a rare victory in the western theater, was a two-day melee that saw fierce hand-to-hand combat and some of the worst casualties of the war. It’s best seen by taking the park’s seven-mile driving tour. Follow signs to the nearby Chattanooga battlefield across the state line in Tennessee, where the Union regained the advantage. Confederates took advantage of the high ground around Chattanooga to lay siege to the Union Army. After almost two months the imperiled Union troops stormed the high ground and drove the Confederates back into Georgia. Some of the clashes occurred on the

The Wilder Brigade Monument graces Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. The monument honors Union troops who fought under Colonel John Wilder.

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NPS

These artifacts were recovered from Ocmulgee National Monument. The majority of them are Mississippian, dating from approximately

MOUNDVILLE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK

A.D.

900 to 1100. The effigy figure in the left of the photograph has a hole in the back of its head and once served as the spout of a pot.

bluffs of Lookout Mountain, high above the city, and the serpentine turn in the Tennessee River known as Moccasin Bend. Enshrined as Point Park, it’s one of the most scenic killing fields in America. For our next stop, descend Lookout Mountain and get on I-24 west. Exit at U.S. 72 and drive 13 miles south into Alabama to the turnoff for Russell Cave National Monument. Russell Cave has a record of intermittent habitation dating back roughly 12,000 years. After viewing the orientation film at the visitors center, take the short hike along a boardwalk to the mouth of the cave, where a limestone overhang forms a shelter that resembles the underside of an enormous clamshell. Small bands of people once lived here and later used it as a sort of hunting lodge. In the 1950s and ’60s, archaeologists excavated 30 feet into the earthen floor of the cave mouth and discovered artifacts, campfire deposits, and human remains as old as 9,000 years. Some of the objects are displayed at the visitors center: fish hooks, grinding stones, spear tips of every era, leather scrapers and awls made from animal bones, even hairpins and shell jewelry. Limestone hoe blades and pottery fragments indicate that the one-time nomadic hunters eventually practiced agriculture and led a more settled existence. It’s more than 200 miles from Russell Cave to our next destination, which is near Tuscaloosa. Return to U.S. 72 and go south to Scottsboro. Turn east on state 35, cross the Tennessee River and pick up I-59 south at Fort Payne. If you want to break up the drive, consider getting off the interstate in downtown Birmingham to visit the american archaeology

Perched atop of Mound B, Moundville’s largest structure, is a reconstructed version of the paramount chief’s house.

FORT TOULOUSE-FORT JACKSON STATE HISTORIC SITE

In an 18th-century reenactment at Fort Toulouse-Fort Jackson State Historic Site, a staff member repairs cracks in a small boat by wedging rope into them and then sealing the rope with pine tar.

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a museum that documents the crusade to win equal rights for all Americans. The complex faces Kelly Ingram Park, where police in 1963 turned their fire hoses and attack dogs on civil rights demonstrators during a dramatic confrontation. Continue from Birmingham on I-59/20 to Tuscaloosa. Exit at state 69, drive another 13 miles south and you’ll find yourself at the remarkable Moundville Archaeological Park. Moundville was the Atlanta of its time, the largest population center of the Mississippian era in the Southeast. At its height between A.D. 1200 and 1300 perhaps 10,000 Indians lived here and in the surrounding river valley. Even after the settlement began to decline, it seems to have remained a popular burial spot. More than 2,000 graves were excavated in the early 20th century. You can’t grasp the proportions of Moundville until you enter the park. There are 29 mounds, though not all of them can be easily seen. They form a ring around a vast grassy plaza on a bluff overlooking a bend in the Black Warrior River. They were platforms for temples, council houses, chieftains’ homes, and other important structures. 26

Radiocarbon dating indicates that most all of the mounds were built approximately between A.D. 1200 and 1300, which is an amazing achievement. Seeing so many mounds in one place, you can appreciate how awesome they must have seemed to early settlers, who mistakenly believed that such a feat of engineering had to be the work of the lost tribe of Israel or some other wayward branch of Old World civilization. Archaeologists have been digging at Moundville for more than a century. Some of their best finds are displayed on site at the Jones Archaeological Museum, named for Walter B. Jones, the state geologist who directed the most extensive excavations during the 1930s. There are shell gorgets and intricately incised pottery pieces and elbow-form pipes in which the Indians smoked a blend of tobacco, sumac, and dogwood bark called kinnikinick. The natives were wide-ranging traders, judging from the materials they used in their tools and ornaments, which include copper from the Great Lakes, greenstone from Appalachia, and shells from the Gulf Coast. The best known Moundville artifact, exhibited here, is the “rattlesnake disc,” a foot-wide piece of stone carved with summer • 2004

building foundations, and a few ramshackle houses and solitary chimneys. Dense woods draped in Spanish moss have overtaken most of the site. The most evocative ruins are the Crocheron Columns, a set of brick pillars that once accompanied a grand antebellum mansion. In their way, they seem as lonely and mysterious as an Indian mound. Leaving Cahawba, return to state 22 and follow it into Selma. Turn east on U.S. 80 and cross the Alabama River on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the humpbacked span where state troopers clashed with marchers in a famous 1965 civil rights battle. Follow 80 to Montgomery, get on I-65 north, and then take the 152 bypass east. Exit onto U.S. 231 north and follow the signs to Fort Toulouse-Fort Jackson State Historic Site. It’s easy to see why the Indians, French, and Americans all wanted to build fortifications here. The park sits on a triangle of high ground commanding the junction of the Tallapoosa and Coosa rivers. Creek Indians, looking to check British colonial expansion, invited the French to

NPS

the images of two snakes coiled around a human hand, an eye peering out of the palm. Recent scholarship suggests that the eye, a common image at other Mississippian sites, represents a portal to the afterlife. From Moundville, it’s a 75-mile drive to our next stop, Old Cahawba Archaeological Park. Take state 69 to Greensboro, state 61 to Uniontown, and U.S. 80 to County Road 45. Go south on 45 until it ends at state 22. Turn east and drive three miles to County Road 9 and then follow the signs. Old Cahawba served as Alabama’s first permanent state capital from 1820 to 1825. After the government relocated, Cahawba thrived as an antebellum cotton port on the Alabama River and counted 3,000 residents on the eve of the Civil War. Then a flood struck and the county government, which had also been located here, was moved to nearby Selma. By 1900, Cahawba had been mostly abandoned, its structures burned or collapsed or dismantled for their bricks. Cahawba can be haunting. All that remains of the town is a grid of mostly dirt roads that link cemeteries,

Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian peoples have occupied Russell Cave at various times. An excavation of the cave in the 1950s yielded shell jewelry, pottery sherds, hoe blades, grinding stones, and spear and arrow points. One of the more remarkable discoveries was a partial Clovis point.

american archaeology

JAN UNDERWOOD / INFORMATION ILLUSTRATED

establish Fort Toulouse here in 1717. A full-scale reconstruction of the fort, complete with a clay and plaster bread oven, brings to life the French’s efforts to recreate the niceties of home on the frontier. After the British defeated the French, Fort Toulouse was abandoned. Fort Jackson, an American fort, was built and used between 1814 and 1816. You can see the earthworks and reconstructed stockades of this short-lived outpost, which was named after General Andrew Jackson. A combined force of Old Hickory’s militia, the U.S. Army, and the Cherokees routed the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, 40 miles upstream on the Tallapoosa. At Fort Jackson, the Creeks were compelled to sign a peace treaty surrendering most of their lands. Given that outcome, another feature at the park—the eroded, overgrown remnant of an Indian mound—seems rather sad. From Fort Toulouse-Fort Jackson, get back on U.S. 231 and follow it south to I-85. Take the interstate east to exit 42, just past Tuskegee. Pick up U.S. 80 and cross the Chattahoochee River into Georgia, through Columbus and into Macon, the site of the Ocmulgee National Monument. Seven mounds rise from the plain beside the Ocmulgee River, a testament to the settlement of perhaps 2,000 Indians who lived here between A.D. 900 and 1100. The museum in the visitors center displays their skilled craftsmaking with exhibits of pottery and elaborate copper ornaments. Most of these artifacts were recovered from a funeral mound, where archaeologists found more than 100 burials in the 1930s. 28

A path leads from the museum to the mounds. The first one you come to, the earth lodge, is a reconstruction of a meeting place where community leaders assembled in a chamber within the mound. Duck through the lowceilinged entryway, and the lodge opens into a dim rotunda with 50 earthen seats facing a clay platform shaped like an eagle. The space is sheltered by a reinforced thatched roof covered with soil, making it all look, from the outside, like a pleasingly symmetrical hill. Farther down the path, Ocmulgee’s much larger temple mound looms 40 feet above the plain, seeming to dwarf the modest skyline of Macon visible in miniature across the river. From this perspective, you can understand what the naturalist William Bartram meant when he beheld these mounds in the 1770s and marveled at “the wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients in this part of America.” It’s an 80-mile drive back to Atlanta on I-75. To close the circle on this survey of Southern artifacts, consider stopping by the World of Coca-Cola, an entertaining museum in downtown Atlanta that follows the centurylong story of perhaps the most advertised product in history. This shamelessly promotional museum raises an interesting question: Could those ubiquitous green bottles become artifacts that future archaeologists will study centuries from now? JIM AUCHMUTEY is a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who often writes about history. summer • 2004

IF YOU GO ATLANTA HISTORY CENTER 130 West Paces Ferry Road, Atlanta, Georgia (404) 814-4000 www.atlantahistorycenter.com Hours: 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon–5:30 p.m. Sundays Fees: $12 adults, $10 seniors, $7 children

BIRMINGHAM CIVIL RIGHTS INSTITUTE 520 16th Street North, Birmingham, Alabama (866) 328-9696 www.bcri.org Hours: 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1–5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays Fees: $8 adults, $5 seniors, children free

KENNESAW MOUNTAIN NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD PARK Near Marietta, Georgia (770) 427-4686 www.nps.gov/kemo Hours: 8:30 a.m.–5 p.m. daily, 8:30 a.m.–6 p.m. on weekends during daylight savings time Fees: free admission

MOUNDVILLE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK Near Tuscaloosa, Alabama (205) 371-2234 www.moundville.ua.edu Hours: 8 a.m.–8 p.m. daily Fees: $4 adults, $2 seniors and children

OLD CAHAWBA ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARK Near Selma, Alabama (334) 875-2529 www.bama.ua.edu/~almuseum/a_ahc.htm Hours: 9 a.m.–5 p.m. daily Fees: free admission

ETOWAH INDIAN MOUNDS HISTORIC SITE Cartersville, Georgia (770) 387-3747 www.gastateparks.org/info/etowah Hours: 9 a.m.–5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 2–5:30 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays Fees: $3 adults, $2.50 seniors, $2 children

FORT TOULOUSE/FORT JACKSON STATE HISTORIC SITE Near Montgomery, Alabama (334) 567-3002 www.preserveala.org Hours: 8 a.m.–5 p.m. daily Fees: $5 adults, $4 ages 6-18, under 6 free

CHICKAMAUGA AND CHATTANOOGA NATIONAL MILITARY PARK Near Chattanooga, Tennessee (706) 866-9241 www.nps.gov/chch Hours: 8 a.m.–4:45 p.m. daily Fees: Chickamauga: free admission. Point Park on Lookout Mountain: $3 adults, $1.50 seniors, children free RUSSELL CAVE NATIONAL MONUMENT Near Bridgeport, Alabama (256) 495-2672 www.nps.gov/ruca Hours: 8:30 a.m.–5 p.m. April through October, 8 a.m.–4:30 p.m. November through March Fees: free admission

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OCMULGEE NATIONAL MONUMENT 1207 Emery Highway, Macon, Georgia (478) 752-8257 www.nps.gov/ocmu Hours: 9 a.m.–5 p.m. daily Fees: free admission WORLD OF COCA-COLA 55 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Atlanta, Georgia (404) 676-5151 www.woccatlanta.com Hours: 9 a.m.–6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Sundays Fees: $7 adults, discounts for seniors and children

DAVID ANDERSON

Emergency Archaeology summer • 2004

While excavating a Mississippian mound that is eroding into the Tennessee River, researchers discovered a site far more complex than they imagined. By Michael Finger american archaeology

NPS archaeologists Chuck Lawson and Chris Lydick (with shovel) clean the eroding mound face. 32

summer • 2004

DAVID ANDERSON

fter cinching the nylon climbing harness tighter around his legs, waist, and chest, Chris Lydick strapped on a safety helmet, braced his boots against the slippery dirt face of the cliff, gripped the rope tightly, and carefully lowered himself over the edge. Above him was the sloping face of a Mississippian mound; some 80 feet below were tangled underbrush and the rocky banks of the Tennessee River. After descending about 15 feet, Lydick tied off the rope and began to scrape away at the face of the cliff with a trowel. The day before, he and his co-workers had used chain saws and machetes to remove roots and vines. On a hot summer afternoon, after hours of hard work, they were finally able to clear the surface and distinguish brightly colored stripes of clay—intermixed layers of brown, gray, yellow, and red. “That was a good way to get a clean profile without having to dig an arbitrary trench across the top of the mound,” said Lydick, resting in the shade afterwards. “But working off the cliff was the closest I’ve ever come in this profession to being Indiana Jones.” Lydick is an archaeological technician with the National Park Service (NPS). He and other NPS archaeologists have spent recent summers working at Mound A, the largest of seven Mississippian mounds overlooking the Tennessee River within Shiloh National Military Park. In 1862, a ferocious battle took place here, claiming some 24,000 Union and Confederate casualties. More than 140 years later, the National Park Service has been fighting another kind of battle: trying to excavate and study the massive Mound A before it collapses into the river far below. In 1894, the federal government established Shiloh National Military Park to preserve the battleground. The park’s first superintendent had an active interest in the site,

DAVID ANDERSON

excavating one of the smaller mounds in 1899. A far more extensive series of excavations was conducted across the site in 1933 and 1934. “That was a New Deal program to provide work for people during the Depression,” said archaeologist David Anderson of the University of Tennessee, who has been directing excavations at the site for the past five years with John Cornelison of the NPS Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC). “Unfortunately, while a lot of archaeology was done, very little was published, and even the map showing where the excavations occurred has been lost. Paul Welch, an archaeologist at Southern Illinois University, has spent a great deal of time reconstructing the earlier work at the site, and John Cornelison and I have used remote sensing and test excavations to locate some of the 1930s trenches, in kind of an archaeology of past archaeology.” The 1930s fieldwork found evidence of large buildings around the base of Mound A, although there is no record that they excavated the 22-foothigh, 120-foot-diameter mound. From Welch’s analysis of the ceramics, Shiloh is known to be a very early Mississippian mound center, probably dating from ca. A.D.1050 to 1350. Once samples collected during the current project are dated, the age of the center should be more accurately defined. Shiloh was a large site by Mississippian standards. “Paul Welch, who is working on a book about all the work done in the past here, has mapped some 70 to 80 smaller mounds,” said american archaeology

The crew built an elaborate roller-coasterlike conveyor system of wooden planks, heavy beams, and sections of steel rollers to handle the hundreds of barrels of dirt taken from the top of the mound.

Anderson. “If each one represents a house that held three to five people, that would add up to a population of three or four hundred. A palisade encircles the site away from the river, and runs for more than a mile. Just to have enough people to defend it likely meant everybody would have come here from miles around in the event of trouble.” As recently as the 1930s Mound A, constructed along the western bank of the Tennessee River, was in no danger, with some 100 feet separating it from the bluffs. But when a series of dams built in later years made the river navigable to barge traffic, the wake of these vessels and the fluctuating water levels began to steadily erode the bluffs. In the 1970s the NPS began to investigate the threat to the mound group, and by the 1990s had completed engineering studies indicating portions of the site would be lost despite a major effort to stabilize the bluff below the mounds that involved the construction of massive retaining walls to halt the erosion. “Preservation is always the preferred alternative, but the engineering study indicated that, even with the stabilization effort that has been undertaken, we are still going to lose, with 100 percent certainty, at least 25 feet of the mound in the next two decades,” said Anderson. “We are digging what is absolutely assured of being lost.” The work at Mound A got under way in the summer of 1999 with remote sensing and limited test excavations. Following extensive 33

The researchers discovered that some stages of the mound were composed of brightly colored white, reddish-brown, yellow-orange, and deep-red silts and clays. 34

hat we did was approach this project cautiously,” said Cornelison. “The reason we’ve been able to do so much so quickly now is because we learned, through careful initial excavations and surveys, how to dig this mound. You start off slowly and figure out what is there, and then you can dig faster.” For three months in 2002 and then for five months in 2003, the SEAC team returned to Mound A and began to excavate in earnest. “The logistics of a large excavation are as complex as the actual archaeology itself,” said Anderson. “That’s something most people aren’t aware of.” The crew built a safety fence near the bluff edge, erected a mesh screen to shield the workers from the relentless summer sun, and placed hunting stands in nearby trees to provide good vantage points for photography. “There have really been a lot of challenges,” said Cornelison. “Just getting those guys 40 feet up in summer • 2004

DAVID ANDERSON

planning meetings over the next two years with various experts, including some of the country’s best known Mississippian archaeologists, Anderson and Cornelison returned in the summer of 2001 to conduct an intensive testing program on the mound. This work included remote sensing and the excavation of an exploratory trench, stretching more than 100 feet up the slopes and across the top of the mound. The trench exposed portions of the upper stages of the mound, and the researchers discovered that some stages were composed of brightly colored white, reddish-brown, yellow-orange, and deep-red silts and clays. The work indicated that the outer surface of some of the earlier mound stages was colored clay. This is contrary to most all interpretive paintings that show these mounds covered with vegetation. Importantly, “the 2001 work determined that the area of the site to be lost contains cultural resources of national significance,” said Anderson. Those discoveries, which suggested that the construction of Mound A was relatively complex, set the stage for the major excavations that began the next season.

Archaeologists found rectangular and squared arrangements of postholes surrounding hard, compact clay floors in several places on the summit of Mound A.

BOB SCHATZ

surrounding trees to string the sunshade, getting the safety fence operational, getting things ready for the rappelling…it was a lot of work.” The crew also hauled in a house trailer to securely store supplies, installed a 2,500-gallon tank to provide water for the screening of samples, set up a pump and ran 300 feet of hose down to the river, arranged hundreds of bales of hay and silt screens to soak up water run-off (federal law prohibited draining silt-laden wastewater directly into the river), and set up gasoline-powered generators to provide power for the tools, computers, and pumps. A rented house just outside the park entrance served as project headquarters, while many crew members stayed in rental properties at Pickwick Lake, a popular resort 15 miles away. The crew built an elaborate roller-coaster-like conveyor system of wooden planks, heavy beams, and sections of steel rollers to handle the hundreds of barrels of dirt taken from the top of the mound. This system required a bit of experimentation. “This design is actually version three or four,” said Cornelison. “We had to adjust it as the work progressed.”

american archaeology

The barrels, which could weigh up to 250 pounds apiece depending upon the clay content of the soil, rolled down a ramp and stopped at the water-screening station some 30 yards north of the mound. There the contents of 50 to 100 barrels were dumped into wire screens each day. The crew used hoses to wash away the dirt, and the artifact-laden screens were then carried to drying racks, where anything remaining was bagged, tagged, and sent to the SEAC labs in Tallahassee. “We have a very active volunteer program,” said crew chief Steven Kidd. “That means we have people with varying levels of expertise. We can’t expect everyone to recognize an artifact, so basically everything that doesn’t go through the screen, we take back to the lab with us.” Wielding shovels and trowels, the crew sliced away at the surface of the mound. Every layer of clay and any evidence of occupation, such as traces of posts, were photographed and their locations precisely documented. “Ultimately, all the drawings and profiles that you see on graph paper will be taken back to the lab and digitized,” said Lydick, flipping through a stack of three-ring binders 36

filled with sheets indicating every detail of the excavation. Smudges of dirt applied to some sheets by wetting a sample and daubing it on the paper (soil smears) even showed the color and type of soil that was found. This information will be entered into a database, at which point “you’ll be able to plot it out into a graphically illustrated format,” Lydick said. “You’ll pretty much rebuild the mound level by level in cyberspace.” The higher stages of Mound A revealed very few artifacts and no evidence for burning, which has sometimes been found at other Mississippian mound groups. This in itself was revealing. While structures were found on the stage summits, most appeared to have been dismantled, with the posts pulled up, and the area swept clean of debris. “The fact that this center never burned—or at least there is no indication it ever burned—tells us this principal temple was likely never sacked, and that would imply they were powerful enough to live at peace with their neighbors,” said Anderson. So what happened to the culture that thrived here? There are many theories about the disappearance of the Mississippians who once dominated this area. Cornelison suggested that the political organization could have broken down for some reason. “It could have even been the weather,” he said. “They were political and religious leaders, but if they couldn’t get the corn harvest in for their people, things might have gotten unstable.”

ound A at Shiloh was built in a series of successive construction episodes, or stages, each with associated buildings on top,” said Anderson. “At least five major stages have been recognized in the mound in the work to date. Some of these stages were apparently used over and over again, with old structures torn down and new ones put up.” When the mound was about half its present summer • 2004

DAVID ANDERSON

A rare find was made during the excavation: a hearth filled with what appeared to be pieces of burned textile.

size, said Anderson, “a ‘tiger-striped’ stage was built using elaborately colored soils of red, gray, yellow, and dark brown. The top of the mound was then used over and over again before a new stage was finally built over it.” How long the stages were occupied is presently unknown, pending further analysis of the samples recovered, but Anderson believes this tiger-striped surface was used for a century or more. “Mississippian mounds, the work at Shiloh indicates, can have highly complex histories,” he said. Past excavations in the Southeast had sometimes unearthed colored clays, but their significance was not clearly understood. “Obviously someone went to a lot of trouble to lay these bands down,” Anderson said in reference to the various types of clay. “And that’s what we are learning—that this mound was put together with incredible effort and ceremony.” Samples of the clay are being analyzed to determine their origin. Many artifacts were discovered at lower, earlier levels of the mound, including incised pottery sherds, a small piece of worked copper, a perforated shell probably drilled to make a bead, and a delicately incised bone needle that Cornelison believes was used as a hairpin or a fastener for clothing. In mid-August, one of the excavators made a rare

steel under the bottom of the pedestal and placed a heavy wooden open-topped box around it. The entire mass was wrapped in plastic film, and then strips of cheesecloth dipped in plaster were wrapped around everything. When the plaster-soaked coverings dried, the massive object was carried to a nearby pickup truck and, with the other textile samples, was hauled in a rental truck to Adovasio’s laboratory in Pennsylvania. “The hearth sample ended up weighing about 400 pounds,” said Anderson. “It took eight of us to get it off the mound, and nearly killed us!” An ini-

David Anderson tial examination conducted by Adovasio and conservationist Jeffrey Illingworth at the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute revealed the samples were indeed modified plant material. More detailed analysis will be conducted later. “Some of them appear to be bundles of what might be flooring, vegetable material that was arranged but not necessarily sewn together, to be put down on a floor that people would walk on,” said Adovasio. “This is interesting because it will be one of the first times, if not the first time, that anything of this nature has come out of Tennessee from that time period.” Another hearth, a remarkably preserved one of fired clay, was similarly encased and shipped by truck to the SEAC labs in Tallahassee. “This hearth was very unusual,” said An-

BOB SCHATZ

John Cornelison find, a hearth filled with what appeared to be pieces of burned textiles. Soon after other pieces of charred material were found on other parts of the summit. Getting these fragile items to a laboratory for further study proved quite a challenge, since the charred textiles crumbled at the slightest touch. After e-mailing photographs of the object to James Adovasio, an archaeologist at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on prehistoric textiles, and then consulting with him by cell phone, the field team removed the features containing the textiles slowly and carefully, in blocks of soil. Ehren Habela, a crew member who had worked on paleontological expeditions, supervised the process, which used procedures essentially identical to those used to remove and transport fossils. The hearth was the most challenging to extract. The crew first removed all the soil around the feature so that it rested on a pedestal of dirt approximately one foot high. They then slid a three-foot-square piece of quarter-inch american archaeology

derson. “It had two small bowl-like depressions in one end, possibly where something was burned, such as incense.” Rectangular and squared arrangements of postholes surrounding hard, compact clay floors were found in several places on the Mound A summit, indicating up to several structures were present on each stage surface. As the excavation reached the bottom of the mound, some 22 feet below the surface, it became clear that the original ground surface under and around the mound was actually up to eight feet below the present surface. Apparently much of the area surrounding Mound A had been built up, perhaps as part of a final and uncompleted episode of 37

mound building, or perhaps to better define a sacred precinct around the mound. “An appreciable portion of this mound, representing all of the early stages of its construction, is thus deeply buried,” said Anderson. “The plaza is built up too, as much as two or three feet in some places. One of the things we’ve learned in recent years at prehistoric mound sites such as

Workers remove a freshly cut stump from the mound summit. 38

Cahokia and Poverty Point is that as much work goes into the areas around the mounds as into building the mound itself. Whether the apron was the start of a major new stage that was never completed is unknown, although it appears more likely that it was designed to raise the approach to the mound from the plaza, making the Mound A area even more impressive to the people of the time.” The original plan was to excavate the entire portion of Mound A that will be lost to erosion in the near future. At the present, the excavations are about half done, but whether more work will occur is unknown. ”Funding a project of this magnitude is a challenge for an agency as pressed as NPS is,” Anderson noted, “and we are lucky and grateful to have been able to accomplish as much as we have.” Both he and Cornelison are working with Shiloh Superintendent Hayward “Woody” Harrell, who has strongly supported the work to date, to find ways to continue the excavations. At this writing, whether funding for future excavations will be available to complete the work is unknown. “This has been a phenomenally successful and important project,” said Anderson. “It’s the largest and most dramatic mound project—both in terms of visual impact and scientific discoveries—that has occurred in this region in a long time. Just about every archaeologist who has come out here has been blown away. Most people in their entire professional careers never get to see mounds like this.” MICHAEL FINGER is a senior editor of Memphis magazine and The Memphis Flyer. To learn more about the Shiloh excavation, visit the Web site www.cr.nps.gov/seac/Shiloh2001/shiloh-2001.htm summer • 2004

DAVID ANDERSON

The barrels of dirt are rolled down the conveyor system to the waterscreening station some 30 yards from the mound.

Robson Bonnichsen (right), the founder and director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, and Mike Waters, the associate director, examine a blade recovered from the Gault site in central Texas.

JIM LYLE

Fostering First American Research Rob Bonnichsen and his team at the Center for the Study of the First Americans are contributing to the knowledge of the New World’s earliest inhabitants. By Claire Poole american archaeology

obson Bonnichsen was in a hurry. It was 11:30 a.m and he had until noon to file a request for a grant to fund a dig for archaeological evidence at a site near Houston where he believes one of the oldest dated mammoths in Texas has been found. The request was finished, but an assistant burst in and reminded him that a cover letter had to be written. He made his apologies to a visitor before rushing back to his office to compose it. “This could really help us,” he said. The 63-year-old Bonnichsen is slim and of medium height. He works long hours, including nights and 39

corridor until about 13,500 years ago, so early hunters would have encountered an ecologically poor landscape and their travels would have been hindered by the many lakes formed by glacial melting. There are also a number of sites that have yielded evidence suggesting people may have been in the Americas long before the Clovis arrived. That’s led some to believe that early people may have “coast hopped” along the Pacific Rim from Asia to the Americas around the end of the last ice age just before the Clovis period. But there is no hard evidence to support travel by boat along the coast of the Americas because rising sea levels have flooded ancient shore lines. Still others believe the early colonists may have reached North America by boats coming from Europe along the North Atlantic ice shelf or from Australia to South America across the South Pacific.

The Evolution of the CSFA On his 40th birthday in 1980 Bonnichsen, then an archaeologist at the University of Maine at Orono, was contacted by representatives of a charitable trust. They were interested in funding first American research, but uncertain as to how to go about it. He was “shocked” that they

JIM LYLE

weekends, pursuing his passion, the study of the first Americans. For 47 years he has conducted fieldwork, taught classes, contributed to and edited books, and organized symposia regarding the original inhabitants of the New World. The first inhabitants question is one of the more hotly debated topics in American archaeology. As director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans (CSFA), Bonnichsen is in the thick of this debate. Traditional models have the first Americans arriving about 13,200 years ago. They were the Clovis people, who hunted mammoth and other animals with distinctive spear points. They are believed to have crossed the Bering Land Bridge between northeast Asia and Alaska as they followed their prey, eventually passing down through an ice-free corridor between two ice sheets that covered all of Canada and much of the northern U.S. at the time. Their projectile points were first found in New Mexico in 1932. But a number of experts, including Bonnichsen and the CSFA’s associate director, Michael Waters, find this model to be unconvincing for a variety of reasons, one of which is that no archaeological evidence has been found in northeast Siberia of a people who were a logical ancestor of Clovis. Another is that recent geological research suggests glacial ice closed the northern end of the ice-free

Chris Cook and Charlotte Pevny examine an end scraper for evidence of use. The CSFA has two state-of-the-art microscopes capable of magnifying specimens up to 500 times their size.

summer • 2004

JIM LYLE

Heidi Luchsinger examines sediment cores in one of the CSFA’s laboratories. Archaeological, geological, and biological samples are analyzed in these laboratories.

approached him, but he took advantage of this opportunity to propose the creation of an educational center that would foster research of and disseminate knowledge about the origins of people in the New World through research, publications, and educational programs. Bonnichsen made the considerable leap from assistant professor to director of the Center for the Study of Early Man when the trust made a grant to the university in 1981 for $100,000 a year for five years to support this ambitious project. An additional grant of $500,000 was made at the end of the five-year period as seed funding to start an endowment. In 1990, the organization changed its name to the Center for the Study of the First Americans. Bonnichsen moved the center to Oregon State University in 1991 for personal and professional reasons. In July of 2002 the CSFA became part of the anthropology department at Texas A&M University. During the spring of 2001, Bonnichsen and Waters crossed paths at Topper, a pre-Clovis site in South Carolina, and started talking about first American research. “We finished at 3 a.m,” Waters said. Bonnichsen intimated that he wanted to move the center to Texas A&M, which has a Ph.D. proamerican archaeology

gram in anthropology with an archaeology focus that incorporates expertise from various other disciplines ranging from agriculture to computer science. “It offered a better framework than other institutions, including the organization and the people,” Bonnichsen said. “As nearly as we know, we’re unique,” he said of the CSFA. One of the reasons he gives to support this appraisal is the center’s “intercontinental focus:” Bonnichsen and Waters, in concert with researchers from other countries, are reexamining a number of Paleo-American sites in North and South America. “There’s lingering doubts about these potentially early sites and there are now ways to answer the questions,” said Bonnichsen. These answers can be provided by technological advances such as better dating methods. “The whole field’s evolved,” he said of archaeology. This summer Waters and his crew are going to two localities of pre-Clovis age this summer. The first is the Hueyatlaco site, near Puebla, Mexico, south of Mexico City, where archaeologists in the 1960s found artifacts and animal remains under a layer of ash that was dated to approximately 200,000 years ago. The lingering doubt in this case 41

found that may be 15,000 to 16,500 years old. “These are pretty convincing sites,” Waters said.

Researchers employ sophisticated technology to extract information from artifacts like these Clovis bifaces.

is the accuracy of the stratigraphy and dating of the site. The stratigraphy, if correctly described, would indicate that the artifacts are at least as old as the ash. But Waters and Bonnichsen suspect the previous ages derived on the volcanic ash are incorrect and the site might be 20,000 years old based on some radiocarbon dates close to the sites. Waters, an expert in geoarchaeology, intends to redate the ash using luminescence, which dates the last time sediments were exposed to light, and other techniques that didn’t exist in the 1960s. The original investigators lacked the capability to date the artifacts, which is another thing that Waters plans to do. “New dating methods will be the key,” Bonnichsen noted. “It has the strongest potential to be a pre-Clovis site,” Waters said. CSFA will be working with archaeologists from Mexico City–based Instituto Nacional Antropologia y Historia, which has done some fieldwork on the site. “They’ve found big pieces of the puzzle,” Bonnichsen said. “But the evidentiary record needs to be cleaned up and we need to nail it down chronologically. If we don’t have a sound chronology, we don’t have anything.” The CSFA will also visit southern Wisconsin to expand upon the work done by other archaeologists at the Schaefer, Heibor, and Mud Lake sites, where stone tools and mammoth bones with butchering marks have been 42

The CSFA only has three full-time employees, Bonnichsen, Waters, and office manager Laurie Lind—“our right arm,” Waters said. However, other faculty members of the anthropology department contribute to the center’s efforts. Faculty members serve as co-investigators, graduate students do fieldwork, laboratory research, and gather thesis data, and other students perform office chores. In addition to its field research, the center promotes interdisciplinary scholarly dialogue and stimulates public interest in first American studies. It publishes a magazine, The Mammoth Trumpet, and a journal, Current Research in the Pleistocene. It has also published approximately a dozen books. The books require plenty of effort and money— they cost roughly $10,000 to $40,000 per title to publish—but these expenses are recouped through sales. The CSFA is upgrading its Web site to make it a more useful tool to educate people about new research and discoveries. While based at Oregon State, the center designed an environmental archaeology project that was used to educate teachers at the K through 12 levels about the nature of scientific inquiry. “We’ve done some big conferences that have brought people together,” Bonnichsen stated. One of these was the 1999 Clovis and Beyond Conference that was designed to provide an overview and synthesis of the latest advances in the understanding of the earliest cultures and biological populations found in North Americas. One of the factors that precipitated this conference was the Kennewick Man lawsuit and the need for agency decision-makers to understand changing scientific perceptions about the settlement of the Americas. The 9,400-year-old Kennewick Man, one of the oldest and most complete skeletons found in North America, was discovered in southeast Washington in 1996. Kennewick Man has gained fame not merely for his age but also for the legal wrangling he has engendered. The remains were found on federal land and the government declared that they should be repatriated to a coalition of local tribes that claim affiliation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). A group of scientists who are anxious to study the remains, led by Bonnichsen, filed suit to prevent the repatriation. This case has been adjudicated for nearly eight years, with the scientists winning a recent decision by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case could go to the Supreme Court, though Bonnichsen thinks that’s unlikely. The Kennewick Man case is extremely important, he says, because, should the scientists lose it, “It closes the door to study” of ancient remains found on federal lands. summer • 2004

MIKE WATERS

Education and Litigation

MIKE WATERS

Researchers from Texas A&M University excavate the Gault site in 2000. The CSFA endeavors to investigate a number of Paleo-Indian sites, and it has created the North Star Archaeological Research Program to fund these investigations.

Clovis Versus Pre-Clovis Archaeologists who believe the Clovis were the first Americans often dismiss pre-Clovis sites, saying their evidence is sketchy and unconvincing. Monte Verde, a site in southern Chile that dates back to 15,000 years ago, may be the most difficult of these sites to dismiss. Archaeologists found flaking, polishing, and grinding remains, as well as a 60-foot residential structure, a ceremonial structure, wooden spears and mortars, digging sticks, stakes, and cordage. Bonnichsen said there are quite a few other pre-Clovis sites in South America that North American archaeologists know little if anything about. He’s in the process of analyzing cores and flakes taken from Pedra Furada, a site in northeastern Brazil. There are indications that these samples may be 50,000-year-old artifacts. He believes he can conduct a definitive analysis that will determine whether they are or aren’t. “We will do some experimental research,” he said, refusing to divulge the nature of the research. american archaeology

Whether the Pedra Furada samples prove to be 50,000-year-old artifacts or not, Bonnichsen is convinced there were pre-Clovis people. He and other researchers need only find them. He noted that the CSFA takes no position on this debate. “We just want to foster communication to get the evidence out there,” regardless of what that evidence proves. When asked why this issue is so significant to him, he responded, “I think it’s important to understand where our species originated…. I think it’s important to understand human prehistory. And it’s an awful lot of fun.” CLAIRE POOLE is a writer based in Houston, Texas. Her article “Challenging the Clovis Paradigm” appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of American Archaeology. For more information about the Center for the Study of the First Americans, visit the Web site www.centerfirstamericans.com

n e w a cq u i s i t i o n

A Stark Reminder of the Civil War A brutal battle took place at this site preserved by the Conservancy.

ALAN GRUBER

he Mississippi River port city of Helena, Arkansas, is located 70 miles southwest of Memphis. At the beginning of the Civil War, it was a busy agricultural and commercial center. Union soldiers occupied it in July of 1862. Early on July 4, 1863, the Confederates launched a three pronged attack against Union batteries A, D, and C. The 1,339-man force attacking Battery D was pinned down just short of the battery by Union fire and they were eventually ordered to retreat. The Confederates suffered 173 killed, 687 wounded, and 776 missing or captured, a toll far greater than the Union’s casualties. The Conservancy’s acquisition of Battery D ensures the permanent preservation of a portion of an important battlefield that remains intact due to the care and foresight of some of its owners. One of them is John M. Connaway, an archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, who grew up next to Battery D and whose family has owned and cared for the site for years. In 2002 a hunter found human remains near Battery D. It was thought that the remains might be associated with the Civil War battle. John House of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey, Connaway, and other experts visited the site and they noted that the remains belonged to more than one individual. House consulted with the owner of the property and it was agreed that the grave should be excavated and the remains reburied in a cemetery. The excavation revealed a large pit in which the bodies of at least five adult males were hurriedly thrown. The only artifacts found

Archaeologist John Connaway (third from right) describes the fighting that took place at Battery D during the Battle of Helena on July 4, 1863, to Conservancy members. John and his sister, Anne Pope (first person on right), are donating the earthen fortification (background) to the Conservancy to ensure its permanent preservation.

were approximately 25 buttons from the 1800s. Several were found in disturbed contexts, but a few were found by the waists and chests of the remains. None of the buttons were of military styles. Several were made of white porcelain, some of bone, and others of tin-plated iron. One unfired musket ball was found in disturbed soil close to the grave. According to an article in the Arkansas Battlefield Update, the location of the grave suggests the individuals were members of either the 35th Arkansas Infantry Regiment or Hawthorne’s Arkansas Regiment. Both regiments suffered heavy casualties during the battle, and it is likely Union troops hurriedly buried the fallen Rebels after the battle. The Arkansas Archaeological Survey obtained an emergency grant from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Research Council for the forensic analysis of the remains. The analysis is in progress, and it appears that one individual had suffered a

wound from a Minié ball, a conical bullet that was used during that time. A report is scheduled to be released in 2004. The remains and artifacts found with them will be reburied with other casualties of the battle in the Confederate Cemetery at Maple Hill Cemetery in Helena. The situation was a poignant reminder for all involved of how vulnerable archaeological sites are and the need for proper management and protection of such irreplaceable resources. —Jessica Crawford

summer • 2004

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Keeping Archaeology in the Neighborhood A residential development in upstate New York will include an archaeological preserve.

JAMES P. WALSH

or millennia people have intermittently occupied the shore of Saratoga Lake in what is now the city of Saratoga Springs in northeastern New York State. Systematic surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s identified a number of sites, including the pre-ceramic Arrowhead Casino site. Named after the former Arrowhead Inn restaurant and casino, this site and several others were recently donated to the Conservancy by developer Andre Schmid of Woodlands of Saratoga Springs, Inc. The land containing the sites has been made an archaeological preserve within the new Waters Edge/Woodlands at Saratoga Springs development. Arrowhead is one of the few remaining prehistoric sites in this rapidly developing area that has been designated an archaeological district due to its abundance of sites. A portion of the site was excavated in the late 1970s by James P. Walsh of the New York State Archaeological Association, revealing artifacts that indicate intermittent occupation of the area from about 7000 through 1000 B . C . Among the oldest artifacts recovered from the site are three bifurcate-base projectile points, a style usually found in the Southeastern U.S., that are thought to have been made between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago. “Sites yielding bifurcate base projectile points are considered rare in the Northeast, but are about the same age as in the Southeast,” stated archaeologist Edward Curtin in the site’s National Register of Historic Places nomination form. Curtin directed an archaeological survey of the area in the mid-1990s that identified 31 prehistoric sites and demonstrated continuous use of this region since at least 8500 B.C. Other projectile point styles and stone chipping traditions indicate a rare example of the Late Archaic Laurentian Tradition and River Phase, which date between 3000 and 1500 B.C. Sixteen intact hearth features were also discovered at Arrowhead, three of which contained piles of stones that suggest roasting platforms. Grinding stones, pestles, hammerstones, adz blades, stone knives, scrapers, and drills indicate a wide variety of hunting, gathering, manufacturing, and processing activities took place at this seasonally occupied site. A copper awl recovered from the Late Archaic period occupations of the site probably indicates a long distance trade system, perhaps reaching to the western Great Lakes region. “The use of the site may have varied over time among a series of functions such as a seasonal residential

american archaeology

This excavation at the Arrowhead Casino site took place in the 1970s. This area was intermittently inhabited as long as 9,000 years ago.

site, temporary habitation, or camp,” according to Curtin. “The high density of artifacts indicates that at least occasionally, longer occupation by a relatively large group occurred.” In addition to Arrowhead, the roughly 26-acre preserve includes several other Archaic campsites and activity areas, the remains of a mid-19th-century estate, and the Arrowhead Inn complex. The latter opened in the 1890s and was a nightclub and illegal gambling establishment run by organized crime until the early 1950s. It burned down around 1969. The Conservancy is working with Saratoga Springs, New York’s State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the Waters Edge/Woodlands at Saratoga Springs Homeowners’ Association, and local archaeologists to create educational materials and a long-term management plan for the preserve. —Tamara Stewart

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Conservancy Receives Donation of Arkansas Mound Site Having never been excavated, the site has great research potential.

ALAN GRUBER

n northeastern Arkansas, the flat alluvial plain of the Mississippi River stretches out in all directions as far as the eye can see. Millennia of repeated flooding by the Mississippi and its tributaries deposited layer upon layer of rich silt making the soils of the region some of the most fertile ground in North America. For over a thousand years, people have settled here to cultivate it. Agriculture is the driving force today as it likely was around A.D. 1200, when Mississippian Indians first settled at the Huddleston site. Situated on a low bluff along a bank of the Little River, the Huddleston site covers over 40 acres. The thick surface scatters of artifacts indicate that the town that stood here from around A.D. 1200 to 1400 was densely occupied. These bits and pieces of those ancient people’s lives tell a tale to archaeologists on how these ancient people lived. The Mississippians were farmers who excelled at growing crops, particularly maize, which provided them with a sedentary lifestyle and, generally, a surplus of food. As a result of their agricultural success, their societies were able to support large popu-

The Ritter site contains a village area and at least one mound (center). Years of plowing have diminished the size of the mound. The Conservancy will assure that the Ritter site is no longer cultivated.

lations. To manage these populations and resources, they developed complex political systems. Surpluses in crop production allowed for the rise of an idle class of noble elites who ruled over towns and/or provinces. These towns and provinces traded with one another across vast distances via roads and rivers. Trade also likely helped to spread the Mississippian way of life across the Southeast. The Huddleston site exemplifies a typical Middle-Mississippian village. The dense occupation indicates a sizeable population. A number of potsherds recovered at the site are of styles common to distant locales indicating trade. The site’s location on the Little River, a tributary of the Mississippi, would have facilitated that trade. Remains of possibly three mounds indicate that the site held special political or ritual importance. And, it is no surprise that the soils on which the site is located are good agricultural soils perfect for an agrarian society. So far, no professional excava-

tions have been undertaken at Huddleston; there has only been surface reconnaissance. Thus, the subsurface features such as house remains, middens, and storage pits remain intact for archaeologists to investigate. The research potential is excellent. The directors and management of E. Ritter and Company of Marked Tree, Arkansas, generously donated the site, allowing the Conservancy to consolidate the Huddleston site with the adjacent McClellan preserve. “This is an important acquisition,” stated Julie Morrow, an archaeologist for the Arkansas Archeological Survey’s Jonesboro station. “So many great sites around here have been destroyed recently. It’s good to know that Huddleston and McClellan are protected so that something will be left for the future.” In honor of E. Ritter and Company’s donation, the Huddleston site shall henceforth be known as the Ritter Archaeological Preserve at the Huddleston site. —Alan Gruber

summer • 2004

N E W P O I N T- 2

STONE ARTIFACTS OF TEXAS INDIANS

Taking On the Role of Protector The preservation of a prehistoric village is guaranteed as the Conservancy purchases it from its longtime guardian.

a cq u i s i t i o n

JOE B. WILSON

COLLEEN BARNITZ

A 457 is a Jornada Mogollon village dating from A.D. 1100 to 1400 located near Alamagordo in southern New Mexico. Human Systems Research (HSR) acquired this site in 1988 to prevent a communications company from building a radio tower on top of it. HSR, a nonprofit archaeological firm based in Las Cruces, New Mexico, protected this ancient village for the last 16 years. But firms like HSR are not in the business of preserving sites, and therefore it agreed to sell the property to the Conservancy so that LA 457 can be managed as a permanent preserve.

This illustration of a Lincoln black-on-red bowl is representative of some of the sherds found at the site.

The site covers roughly 60 acres. About two-thirds of the site is covered by a state highway, a major road, and commercial buildings. Both commercial and residential development have seriously affected the site. The area is well known to surface collectors, but there is no evidence of subsurface disturbances.

american archaeology

Humanistic sculpted sherds such as these support the theory that a trade route connected LA 457 and Casas Grandes in northwestern Mexico.

The cultural deposits buried beneath the surface will help answer questions such as when the Jornada Mogollon region was occupied. In 1985 amateur archaeologist Rosemary Hunter, with guidance from HSR archaeologists, completed an excavation that indicated three different periods of occupation based on the varying styles of recovered ceramics. Further research is required to conclusively date these occupations. The excavation, which revealed archaeological deposits as deep as three feet below the surface, indicates that El Paso Phase village sites in this area are deeply buried. A wide range of ceramic and lithic materials were found. Mimbres classic black-on-white, Lincoln black-on-red, and St. John’s polychrome were among the various types of pottery. Points recovered from above and below the surface were manufactured from chert, obsidian, and quartz. Small, thin, finely-chipped triangular points with base, side, and corner notches were

some of the most commonly found lithics. These points are generally associated with El Paso Phase sites. Large Late Archaic-style points were also found, as were drills, awls, axes, and scrapers and grinding tools such as manos and metates. Storage and roasting pits, pit structures, surface rooms, and several human burials were also in evidence. Artifacts from this site like ceramics embellished with human faces, and macaw-, parrot-, and fish-shaped shell pendants seem to indicate it was situated along a trade route that linked it with the Casas Grandes area in northwestern Mexico. These artifacts are known to be associated with Casas Grandes. The Conservancy is grateful to HSR, Hunter, who owns property near the site, and other neighboring landowners who have protected an important piece of the Tularosa Basin prehistory. There is good reason to believe this site contains a wealth of evidence for future archaeologists. —Amy Espinoza-Ar

N E W P O I N T- 2

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The Conservancy Acquires Important Mesa Verde Site Complex The site requires expert management and security.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO MUSEUM

n the mid-12th century, the fertile Montezuma Valley below Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado was home to thousands of prehistoric Puebloan farmers. Recent research conducted by Crow Canyon Archaeological Center of Cortez has shown that the valley’s Yellow Jacket Pueblo community is the largest known Mesa Verde settlement. This ceremonial center, portions of which the Conservancy has been purchasing since 1982, may have had as many as 1,000 people during this time. The Conservancy recently took ownership of the Joe Ben Wheat Site Complex, the largest satellite settlement of nearby Yellow Jacket Pueblo. Three separate archaeological sites within this complex were studied by the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History’s first curator of anthropology, Joe Ben Wheat, and his colleagues between 1954 and 1991. The University of Colorado field school, under the direction of Wheat, recovered millions of artifacts from the complex—the largest archaeological collection held by the museum today. Unfortunately, Wheat died in 1997 before completing his research on this highly significant collection. His ashes were scattered in Yellow Jacket Canyon.

Excavators work at a later Pueblo component (A.D. 1100–1300) within the Joe Ben Wheat Site Complex. The site complex tells of the developments that led up to the Great Pueblo Period, and the massive exodus from the region at the end of the 12th century.

In 2002 the property’s owner, the University of Colorado Foundation, realizing that the 40-acre parcel had special management and security needs, approached the Conservancy to take over ownership of the complex. After nominating the complex to the National Register of Historic Places, museum researchers received a grant from the State Historical Fund through the Colorado Historical Society to upgrade the curation of the

collection to museum standards so that it can be studied by researchers and used for public interpretation. In order to receive this grant, the museum had to obtain matching funds from another source. The Conservancy purchased the complex from the foundation at less than market value, and as part of the agreement it assumed management responsibilities and provided the museum with the matching funds for the grant. summer • 2004

N E W P O I N T- 2

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO MUSEUM

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Joe Ben Wheat played a seminal role in defining the Great Pueblo Period.

“We are very pleased with the outcome of this important undertaking,” said Jim Walker, the Conservancy’s Southwest regional director. “Processing the artifacts from the 37-year field school will allow Dr. Wheat’s tremen-

dous contribution to Mesa Verde archaeology to be appreciated and studied by researchers. Everyone involved benefits from this project.” The complex, located across a narrow canyon just a few hundred yards from Yellow Jacket Pueblo, contains more than 90 masonry rooms, 14 kivas, and a public dance plaza. It includes items dating from the Basketmaker III to the Great Pueblo periods, which date from about A.D. 500 to 1300, making it a predecessor of Yellow Jacket Pueblo. “Collections from the Joe Ben Wheat Site Complex are one of the largest from controlled excavations at Mesa Verde area sites,” explained Stephen Lekson, curator of anthropology at the University of Colorado Museum. “The sites were carefully and extensively excavated, and offer unmatched data on household archaeology at the largest Great Pueblo Period site in the Mesa Verde region. We anticipate that the rehabilitated collections, the new databases, and site reports will provide research opportunities for decades to come.” —Tamara Stewart

POINT Acquisitions

Joe Ben Wheat

★ ★ LA 457 The Protect Our Irreplaceable National Treasures (POINT) Program was designed to save significant sites that are in immediate danger of destruction. american archaeology

C O N S E R V A N C Y

Field Notes SOUTHWEST—The Conservancy is working with the Museum of New Mexico’s Office of Archaeological Studies to conduct a mapping project at the Galisteo Pueblo Archaeological Preserve. Galisteo Pueblo, which is located in north-central New Mexico, was occupied between the late A.D. 1200s and about 1782. It’s one of the few prehistoric villages of the Galisteo Basin that was occupied when the Spanish arrived in the Southwest. The Conservancy received a preservation easement on the 62-acre site in 2003. This project represents the first time that a detailed map documenting the 25 known roomblocks, the estimated 1,580 ground-floor rooms, the associated kivas and plaza areas, and the depth of subsurface cultural materials will be prepared. An additional, more challenging goal will be to identify and map the remains of the Spanish mission and convento built at the village site during the Spanish Colonial period. This project is making use of sophisticated technology to produce a highly accurate and detailed general map of the pueblo. Another objective of the project is to prepare specific maps of areas where erosion has occurred. Check dams and other erosion control measures are being constructed to improve the soil conditions and slow the effects of erosion by Galisteo Creek, which runs

STEVE KOCZAN

Mapping Project Started at Galisteo Pueblo

Archaeologist H. Wolcott Toll, of the Museum of New Mexico, adjusts the laser transit that will be used to prepare a detailed map of Galisteo Pueblo while Richard Huelster, a volunteer with the Galisteo Basin Initiative, holds the target. The map will document features and architectural units preserved at the pueblo and will be used to monitor erosion near Galisteo Creek.

directly adjacent to the site. Researchers will evaluate the effectiveness of these measures by mapping the same erosion areas in the future and comparing the two maps. Volunteers with the Galisteo Basin Initiative, a museum-sponsored effort to preserve, study, and interpret sites in the basin, are also assisting

with the project. The mapping will be completed by July 2005. Portions of the Galisteo Pueblo Archaeological Preserve mapping project are funded by a grant from the Historic Preservation Fund, which is administered by the National Park Service and the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division. summer • 2004

BOOKS Coyote Press P.O. Box 3377 Salinas, CA 93912 Specializing in Archaeology, Rock Art, Prehistory, Ethnography, Linguistics, Native American Studies and anything closely related. We stock thousands of new books and reprints, used and rare books, and the back issues of many journals. Browse or shop online at our newly redesigned e-commerce website: WWW.COYOTEPRESS.COM E-mail: coyote@coyotepress.com Proud sponsors of: www.californiaprehistory.com

american archaeology

Reviews The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America By George R. Milner (Thames & Hudson, 2004; 224 pgs., illus., $40 cloth; www.thamesandhudson.com)

The Mound-Builders By Henry Clyde Shetrone with a new introduction by Bradley T. Lepper (University of Alabama Press, 2004; 240 pgs., illus., $30 paper; www.uapress.ua.edu)

By a happy coincidence two volumes on the ancient moundbuilders of eastern North America have appeared at the same time. George Milner’s is new, lavishly illustrated, and contains all the latest scientific information. Henry Clyde Shetrone’s is an old classic first published in 1930 that is rich in the firsthand knowledge of a pioneer archaeologist. Taken together, these volumes tell a fascinating tale of the prehistoric people who have puzzled European-Americans since they found the first mound. Huge manmade mounds of earth can be found from Virginia to Texas, and from the Gulf Coast into Canada. Some are full of burials, others strangely empty. Some are in the shapes of animals, while others are huge geometric designs. Thomas Jefferson was the first to scientifically explore a mound and write about his findings. But it was the mounds of the Ohio Valley that attracted national interest when the first settlers discovered them. Unable to link them to contemporary tribes, a great mythology soon grew up around the moundbuilders. Were they a lost tribe of Israel? Or perhaps Welsh Indians, East Indians, or some other Old World people? Clearly, the mounds were too big and too compli52

cated to have been built by American Indians. The debate raged for a hundred years involving Americans from the White House to the Chautauqua circuit. Milner, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University, has produced a very readable and superbly illustrated survey including all the latest information about the moundbuilders. A new generation of archaeologists has been taking a hard look at the mounds, and thanks to modern techniques and technology, they have obtained plenty of new information. There was no one “race of moundbuilders,” as was assumed in the 19th century. Rather, different people have been building different types of mounds for the last 5,000 years. Large mound sites in the Lower Mississippi Valley, like Watson Brake in Louisiana, date to about 3500 B.C. Milner shows that successive mound building traditions continued uninterrupted right up to the time of European contact, about A.D. 1500. The latest dating techniques prove that mound building started before pottery and before agriculture in the Archaic period when humans first began to abandon the nomadic lifestyle. When agriculture allowed for large settlements, mound building grew. The largest of all American mounds, Monk’s Mound at Cahokia near St. Louis, was the center of a large agricultural community. Like many of the mounds of that era, it mainly supported a large temple some 100 feet above the Mississippi flood plain. Shetrone was a self-educated archaeologist who learned his trade by working with the archaeologists of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society (OAHS) in Columbus. He became the organization’s director in 1928. Shetrone’s The Mound-Builders pulled together all the known information about Ohio Valley mounds and presented it for the general reader. Of particular interest are accounts of excavations at some of the most famous mounds. Under his leadership, several of the largest mound groups in Ohio were preserved by OAHS. Shetrone moved beyond current stereotypes to present Native Americans as innovators capable of great things. He both demystified them and enhanced their importance in American history. Bradley Lepper of the Ohio Historical Society (“archaeological” was dropped in 1954, summer • 2004

the year of Shetrone’s death) puts Shetrone in context in an excellent introduction. Sadly, most of the mounds are gone, destroyed by sprawling cities, modern agriculture, and looters. Only a small fraction of this wondrous legacy remains in public parks and Archaeological Conservancy preserves. Shetrone and Milner, in these superlative volumes, give us an introduction to a great American tradition that still excites experts and casual visitors.

Reviews

Storied Stone: Indian Rock Art of the Black Hills Country By Linea Sundstrom (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004; 299 pgs., illus., $45 cloth, $25 paper; www.oupress.com)

Rock art expert Linea Sundstrom has contributed an important addition to the growing collection of serious works on American Indian rock art. A native of the Black Hills, Sundstrom drew on 20 years of fieldwork to produce this volume of insights into the character and meaning of the centuries-old traditions. Modern scholars are using ethnography and other disciplines to decipher the meaning of rock art panels. In Storied Stone, Sundstrom is particularly skillful at employing these scientific methods to draw conclusions about the meaning of ancient works as well as those of a more contemporary era. Richly illustrated with both line drawings and photographs of the spectacular Black Hills country, Storied Stone presents many new interpretations of petroglyphs. Scenes of human to animal transformations are thought to date back thousands of years, while views of eagle trapping are more recent. Hunting scenes may depict actual events. Rock art enthusiasts will find this to be a stimulating work. —Mark Michel american archaeology

The Archaeologist’s Toolkit Seven volumes edited by Larry J. Zimmerman and William Green (AltaMira Press, 2003; 1200 pgs., illus, $125 paper; www.altamirapress.com)

Archaeologists Larry Zimmerman of the Minnesota Historical Society and William Green of Beloit College have assembled a valuable teaching toolkit. The seven volumes are designed to teach novice archaeologists the basics of modern methods. Volume one explains how to plan a research project, and volume seven tells how to present the results, including the latest on electronic publication. In between are five volumes on archaeological survey, excavation, ar tifacts, archaeobiology, and curation. Though each could stand alone as an important contribution, they also work exceedingly well together. This is hands-on archaeology that also promotes conser vation and ethics. Legal issues and cultural resource management are emphasized as well. All the volumes are written by experienced professionals who stress the basics and give plenty of practical tips, case studies, and illustrations. The Archaeologist’s Toolkit is a power ful teaching tool that will prepare its readers for life in the field. 53

T H E

A R C H A E O L O G I C A L

C O N S E R V A N C Y

Exploring the Land of the Anasazi BEST OF THE SOUTHWEST When: September 18–28, 2004 Where: New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado How much: $2,195 per person

($390 single supplement) The American Southwest is home to some of the best-preserved evidence of prehistoric civilizations in the New World. The magnificent ruins of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde are but two vivid reminders of the complex cultures that dominated the region between the 10th and 14th centuries. The Archaeological Conservancy’s Best of the Southwest tour includes these two settlements as well as other prehistoric sites and modern pueblos where ancient traditions persist. In New Mexico, you’ll visit remarkable sites such as the cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument; the “Sky City” of Acoma, a pueblo flourishing atop a high mesa just as it did 600 years ago; and San Ildefonso Pueblo, which is famous for its pottery. Several nights will be spent in Santa Fe, providing an opportunity to enjoy the city’s museums and shops.

The Conservancy’s Best of the Southwest tour features spectacular archaeology such as these cliff dwellings found at Mesa Verde National Park.

You’ll take a jeep tour through Canyon de Chelly National Monument and visit Montezuma Valley’s seldomseen prehistoric pueblos. In Colorado, the world-famous cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, featuring Cliff Palace, Spruce Tree House, and Sun Temple, await. Back in New Mexico, you’ll stop at outliers of the Chacoan culture and tour Chaco Canyon, which was the center of a great civilization around A.D. 900 to 1150. Expert archaeologists will accompany you on this memorable 10-day excursion.

Enduring Earthworks CAHOKIA AND THE MIDDLE MISSISSIPPIAN CULTURE

Cahokia was occupied by the Mississippians from approximately A.D. 700 to 1400. Thousands of people lived there.

Join us on our exploration of the phenomenal earthworks of Cahokia and the central Mississippi and Illinois River Valleys. Inhabited around A.D. 700 to 1400, Cahokia was the premier Mississippian town and the center of the most sophisticated prehistoric Indian civilization north of Mexico. This ancient city, located across the Mississippi River from what is now St. Louis, covered nearly six square miles and summer • 2004

MARK MICHEL

When: September 16–19, 2004 Where: Missouri and Illinois How much: $715 per person ($130 single supplement)

was home to thousands of people. Monks Mound, the great platform mound in Cahokia’s central ceremonial area, is the largest prehistoric earthen construction in the New World. In addition to Cahokia, you’ll visit Mastodon State Historic site, which has provided evidence of humans

hunting Ice Age elephants, and Dickson Mounds, a Mississippian mound and village center that flourished 800 years ago and today boasts a state-of-the-art interactive museum. Midwest archaeological experts will join you on this fascinating trip.

—UPCOMING TOURS— Veracruz BETSY GREENLEE

JANUARY 2005 Join us in Mexico’s oldest port city, Veracruz, for an exciting look at Olmec, Totonac, Huastec, Maya, Aztec, and Spanish cultures that have dominated the region for thousands of years.

The Pyramid of the Niches at El Tajin.

Aztec, Toltecs, and Teotihuacános MARCH 2005 MARK MICHEL

Explore the magnificent temples and pyramids left behind by civilizations long since vanished in modern-day central Mexico. A day will be spent touring the extensive ruins at Teotihuacán.

Oaxaca

JIM WALKER

OCTOBER 2005 In addition to being in Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead festivities, our tour explores Mixtecan and Zapotecan archaeological sites in the region including Mitla, Monte Albán, and Dainzú. We’ll also travel to several crafts villages where you’ll find weaving, pottery, carved animals, and other local art. Visitors explore the magnificent ruins at Monte Albán, a city built by the Zapotec and Mixtec.

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Patrons of Preservation The Archaeological Conservancy would like to thank the following individuals, foundations, and corporations for their generous support during the period of February 2004 through April 2004. Their generosity, along with the generosity of the Conservancy’s other members, makes our work possible. Life Member Gifts of $1,000 or more

Anasazi Circle Gifts of $2,000 or more

Anonymous (2) Betty Banks, Washington Jim and Audrey Benedict, Colorado Lorraine Besch, New Jersey Mr. and Mrs. Duncan Boeckman, Texas Donna Cosulich, Arizona Hester A. Davis, Arkansas Roger and Frances Kennedy, Massachusetts Dr. and Mrs. John L. Parks, Iowa Leon and Mary Podles, Florida Sarah and Hervey Stockman, New Mexico Ceres M. York, North Carolina

Susan Blumenthal, New Mexico Helen Chatfield, Ohio Joy Robinson, California Ann and Harlan Scott, Delaware Joe Shepps, New Mexico Gordon and Judy Wilson, New Mexico Dr. Richard Woodbury, Massachusetts

Foundation/Corporate Gifts of $5,000–$24,999 Philip R. Jonsson Foundation, Texas Roy A. Hunt Foundation, Pennsylvania Sidney Stern Memorial Trust, Connecticut

Foundation/Corporate Gifts of $25,000 and more

Show Pride in America’s Archaeological Resources! Archaeological Conservancy T-shirt: 100% cotton $12, plus $2.44 S&H circle size: S M L XL XXL To order, send your check to:

The Archaeological Conservancy 5301 Central Ave. NE, Suite 902 Albuquerque, NM 87108 NAME

CITY

Bequests Blythe Baebler, New Mexico Earl Gadbery, Pennsylvania Charlotte N. Gray, New Mexico Robert Samels, Michigan David J. Williams Jr., Kentucky TO MAKE A DONATION OR BECOME A MEMBER CONTACT:

The Archaeological Conservancy 5301 Central Avenue NE • Suite 902 Albuquerque, NM 87108 (505) 266-1540 www.americanarchaeology.org

ADDRESS

STATE

The Meadows Foundation, Texas Woodlands of Saratoga Springs, Inc., New York E. Ritter and Company, Arkansas

ZIP

summer • 2004

Make your mark in time. Some Conservancy members think the only way to help save archaeological sites is through membership dues. While dues are a constant lifeline, there are many ways you can support the Conservancy’s work, both today and well into the future. And by supporting the Conservancy, you not only safeguard our past for your children and grandchildren, you also may save some money.

Parkin Archeological State Park parkin, arkansas

Began as a Conservancy Preserve in 1985

Place stock in the Conservancy. Evaluate your investments. Some members choose to make a difference by donating stock. Such gifts offer a charitable deduction for the full value instead of paying capital gains tax.

Give a charitable gift annuity. Depending on your circumstances, you may be able to make a gift of cash and securities today that lets you receive extensive tax benefits as well as an income for as long as you live.

leave a lasting legacy.

SPENCER TIERNY

Many people consider protecting our cultural heritage by remembering the Conservancy in their will. While providing us with a dependable source of income, bequests may qualify you for an estate tax deduction.

Yes, I’m interested in making a planned-giving donation to The Archaeological Conservancy and saving money on my taxes. Please send more information on: ❏ Gifts of stock

❏ Bequests

❏ Charitable gift annuities

Name: Street Address: City: Phone: (

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Whatever kind of gift you give, you can be sure we’ll use it to preserve places like Parkin Archeological State Park and our other 225 sites across the United States. Mail information requests to: The Archaeological Conservancy Attn: Planned Giving 5301 Central Avenue NE Suite 402 Albuquerque, NM 87108-1517 Or call: (505) 266-1540