American Archaeology Magazine | Winter 2019-20 | Vol. 23. No. 4

THE THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE EARLY AGRICULTURE NATIVE AMERICAN PERSISTENCE •

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american archaeology WINTER 2019-20

a quarterly publication of The Archaeological Conservancy

Vol. 23 No. 4

The Puzzle Of Paquimé

$3.95 US/$5.95 CAN

american archaeology winter 2019-20

a quarterly publication of The Archaeological Conservancy

Vol. 23 No. 4

COVER FEATURE

26 THE PAQUIMÉ ENIGMA

BY ELIZABETH LUNDAY Paquimé has been studied for decades, but archaeologists are still trying to understand what took place there.

12 A GLIMPSE OF EARLY AGRICULTURE

BY JULIAN SMITH

MATT PEEPLES

The sophistication of ancient farmers has been revealed by excavations in southern Arizona.

19 THE THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE

BY TAMARA STEWART Extreme weather is extremely threatening to archaeological sites.

26 12

33 INVESTIGATING THE VACANT QUARTER

BY DAVID MALAKOFF Archaeologists are investigating the abandonment of a large section of what is now the central U.S. in the mid 1400s.

40 AND YET, THEY PERSISTED

BY GAYLE KECK

ROBERT CIACCIO

Recent research is revealing that, contrary to common assumptions, Native Americans maintained their traditions during the colonization of northern California.

48 new acquisition A WINNING BID FOR PRESERVATION

The Conservancy and its partners protect a Hopewell earthwork.

2 LAY OF THE LAND 3 LETTERS 5 EVENTS 7 IN THE NEWS • Pre-Clovis Site In Idaho • Protection Against Witches • Ancient Lead Pollution

50 FIELD NOTES 52 REVIEWS 54 EXPEDITIONS

COVER: Paquimé is a UNESCO World Heritage site that contains some 2,000 rooms. Archaeologists have been studying it for decades, CREDIT: Danny Lehman / Corbis Documentary via Getty Images

View more images from our feature articles online at www.archaeologicalconservancy.org american archaeology

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Lay of the Land

W

arming of the earth is accelerating despite much anguish but little action to limit or reverse it. Sea levels are rising and higher temperatures and droughts result in more and more severe wildfires. In this issue of American Archaeology (see “The Threat Of Climate Change,” page 19) we examine how global warming is affecting archaeological resources, and what can be done about it.

In coastal areas, archaeologists are aggressively surveying important sites that are being threatened by coastal erosion. Protecting these sites with sea walls and other structures is incredibly expensive and often impractical. An alternative is to salvage information from them before they are washed away, but this flies in the face of conservation

archaeology that demands preserving information in situ. Nonetheless, salvage of coastal sites may well be the only practical policy available.

Some of the Conservancy’s preserves are already being threatened, and we are seeking ways to preserve the information in them. For example, a small Conservancy preserve in Maine has been eroding into the ocean for a number of years. Local archaeologists have been working with us to sample the Archaic-period deposits as they are being exposed by the sea. Thus, much of the information is saved. It’s not a totally satisfactory solution, but it’s the best we have for now.

In some places it may be possible to cover the coastal deposits with large rocks (rip-rap) to protect sites from

LIZ LOPEZ PHOTOGRAPHY

Dealing With Global Warming

Mark Michel, President

the rising waters.This is expensive and probably won’t last too long without constant improvements. Government agencies, as well as the Conservancy, are looking for solutions, but as long as sea levels continue to rise, they are going to be imperfect and expensive.

It’s a serious problem that promises to be with us for years to come.

Join our Monthly Giving Program Make your gift to the Conservancy go even further by joining our monthly giving program, the Friends of the Conservancy. Donors provide continuous support of our preservation efforts, and also reduce fundraising expenses by eliminating the need to send paper renewals and appeals. Make a real difference in the race to protect cultural heritage sites across the country.

When you participate in our monthly giving program: • Your membership will automatically renew each year, ensuring that you won’t miss an issue of American Archaeology.

• You will also receive a special end of year thank you gift annually.

• You are in charge – set your donation amount and change it at any time.

Become a Friend of the Conservancy Today!

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winter • 2019-20

Letters A Moving Story I was very moved by Gayle Keck’s article “Recovering Ashes From Ashes” (Fall 2019) that told of how a few dedicated archaeologists, working with trained dogs and their handlers, have been able to recover the previously cremated remains of loved ones that were thought to be lost when people’s homes were destroyed by wildfires.

As a military veteran myself–like some of those whose cremains have been recovered–and the son of a veteran who was killed in action in World War II, I can understand the heartbreak of those who thought the precious cremains of their loved ones might have been lost in the fires that also destroyed their homes. The news that such recovery is actually possible, and the astounding fact that the recovery teams are all volunteers who pay their own expenses, is something that needs a much wider dissemination. Perhaps more support can be raised for these dedicated volunteers and their cause, if only to help pay their expenses.

Editor’s Corner Who knows how it started? Maybe the hunter-gatherers just got tired of hunting and gathering. Whatever the cause, someone got the bright idea to grow food rather than go rummaging around for it. The advent of agriculture, which occurred in the Americas roughly 10,000 years ago, brought about fundamental changes.

Ancient people were able to settle down and build their homes, their villages, and eventually their cites. Possessing a generally reliable supply of food, they endeavored to do more than merely survive.

As noted in our feature “A Glimpse Of Early Agriculture” (see page 12), thousands of years passed before farming began in what is now the United States. But once the practice of planting maize took hold in southern Arizona, change was slow but inevitable.

It’s thought that maize made up a small portion of the diets of the residents of Las Capas, one of the Southwest’s largest Early Agricultural-period sites, so deer, rabbits, and other game could not breathe easily.

But as time passed, people ate more maize.As their settlements grew, they became more socially complex. Gardening evolved into farming, and the demands of planting and harvesting were such that organized labor was necessary to meet them. Building and maintaining sophisticated irrigation systems required cooperation.

Some of the artifacts found at Early Agricultural-period sites also suggest that people’s rituals became more complex.

Agriculture fed our distant ancestors in many ways.

Richard S. Relac Hanover, Pennsylvania Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1. Publication Title: American Archaeology. 2. Publication No.: 1093-8400. 3. Filing Date: October 1, 2019. 4. Issue Frequency: Quarterly. 5. No. of Issues Published Annually: 4. 6. Annual Subscription Price: $30.00. 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: The Archaeological Conservancy, 1717 Girard Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106. 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: same as No. 7. 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher—Mark Michel, address same as No. 7. Editor—Michael Bawaya, address same as No. 7. Managing Editor—N/A. 10. Owner: The Archaeological Conservancy, address same as No. 7. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None. 12.

Tax Status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publication Title: American Archaeology. 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: Spring 2019. 15.

Extent and Nature of Circulation: Average Number of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: (A) Total No. Copies (net press run): 25,500. (B) Paid Circulation (By mail and outside the mail): (1) Mailed Outside County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies.): 16,374; (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies.): 0; (3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 1,685; (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail): 870. (C) Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)): 18,929. (D) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail): (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 0; (2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail): 33; (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 1,430. (E) Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15D (1), (2), (3) and (4)): 1,463. (F) Total Distribution (Sum of 15C and E): 20,392. (G) Copies not Distributed: 5,108. (H) Total (Sum of 15F and G): 25,500. (I) Percent Paid (15C divided by 15F times 100): 92.83%. 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation: Number Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: (A) Total No. Copies (net press run): 25,500. (B) Paid Circulation (By mail and outside the mail): (1) Mailed Outside County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies.): 16,380; (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies, and exchange copies.): 0; (3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS: 1,658; (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g. FirstClass Mail): 1,185. (C) Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)): 19,223. (D) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail): (1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 0; (2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail): 28; (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 1,475.

(E) Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15D (1), (2), (3) and (4)): 1,503. (F) Total Distribution (Sum of 15C and E): 20,726. (G) Copies not Distributed: 4,774.

(H) Total (Sum of 15F and G): 25,500. (I) Percent Paid (15C divided by 15F times 100): 92.75%. 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: N/A. 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: If the publication is a general publication, publication of this statement is required. Will be printed in the winter 2019 issue of this publication. 18. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. Michael Bawaya, Editor.

american archaeology

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WELCOME TO THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONSERVANCY!

he Archaeological Conservancy is the only national nonprofit 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 540 sites across the nation, ranging in age from the earliest habitation sites in North America to a 19th-century 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, 1717 Girard Boulevard NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106; by phone: (505) 266-1540; by e-mail: mbawaya@ americanarchaeology.com; or visit our Web site: www.americanarchaeology.org You can also follow us on Facebook.

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1717 Girard Boulevard NE Albuquerque, NM 87106 • (505) 266-1540 www.americanarchaeology.org Board of Directors Gordon Wilson, New Mexico CHAIRMAN Betsy Alexander, Virginia • Cecil F. Antone, Arizona Carol Condie, New Mexico • Janet Creighton, Washington • Shane Doyle, Montana W. James Judge, Colorado • Jay T. Last, California • Bill Lipe, Idaho Leslie Masson, Massachusetts • Jeffrey Mitchem, Arkansas • Dorinda Oliver, New York Rosamond Stanton, Montana • Bill Thompson, Texas • Jim Walker, New Mexico Conservancy Staff Mark Michel, President • Tione Joseph, Business Manager Lorna Wolf, Membership Director • Sarah Tiberi, Special Projects Director April Brown, Web Developer • Kevin Wojoarowski, Administrative Assistant Kyle Crandall, Administrative Assistant • Shelley Smith, Administrative Assistant Regional Offices and Directors Jim Walker, Senior Vice President, Southwestern Region (505) 266-1540 1717 Girard Boulevard NE • Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106 Tamara Jager Stewart, Projects Director Paul Gardner, Vice President, Midwestern Region (614) 725-1500 3620 N. High St. #307 • Columbus, Ohio 43214 Jessica Crawford, Regional Director, Southeastern Region (662) 326-6465 315 Locust St. • P.O. Box 270 • Marks, Mississippi 38646 Nikki Mattson, Field Representative Cory Wilkins, Regional Director, Western Region (530) 592-9797 4445 San Gabriel Drive • Reno, Nevada 89502 Kelley Berliner, Regional Director, Eastern Region (301) 682-6359 22 S. Market St. #2A • Frederick, Maryland 21701

american archaeology® PUBLISHER: Mark Michel EDITOR: Michael Bawaya (505) 266-9668, mbawaya@americanarchaeology.com ASSISTANT EDITOR: Tamara Jager Stewart ART DIRECTOR: Vicki Marie Singer, vicki.marie@comcast.net Editorial Advisory Board Larry Baker, Salmon Ruins Museum • Jeffrey Blomster, George Washington University Tony Boudreaux, University of Mississippi • Dianna L. Doucette, Public Archaeology Laboratory Lara Homsey-Messer, Indiana University of Pennsylvania • Chris Judge, University of South Carolina-Lancaster Meg Kassabaum, University of Pennsylvania • Scot Keith, New South Associates Aaron Levinthal, Maryland Department of Transportation • Kerry Lyste, Stillaguamish Tribe Logan Miller, Illinois State University • Susan Ryan, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center Dave Salge, Arizona Site Stewards • Ron Schirmer, Minnesota State University-Mankato Karen Smith, South Carolina Department of Natural Resources • Geoff Smith, University of Nevada-Reno Cindy Stankowski, San Diego Archaeological Center • Michael Strezewski, University of Southern Indiana Stan Wilmoth, Montana State Archaeologist • Greg Woodall, Utah National Advertising Office Marcia Ulibarri, Advertising Representative 1717 Girard Boulevard NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106; (505) 504-4264, mulibarri@earthlink.net American Archaeology (issn 1093-8400) is published quarterly by The Archaeological Conservancy, 1717 Girard Boulevard NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106. Title registered U.S. Pat. and TM Office, © 2019 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 $30 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, 1717 Girard Boulevard NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106, or call (505) 2661540. 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, 1717 Girard Boulevard NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106; (505) 266-1540. All rights reserved.

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

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winter • 2019-20

Events MUSEUM EXHIBITS • TOURS • FESTIVALS • MEETINGS • EDUCATION • CONFERENCES

JILL DISANTO, PENN MUSEUM

SOUTHWEST MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN COLLECTION, AUTRY MUSEUM

v NEW EXHIBITS

Historic Southwest Museum

NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM, PA 050297

The Autry’s Mt. Washington Campus, Los Angeles, Calif. The traveling exhibit “Four Centuries of Pueblo Pottery” features more than a hundred rare pieces of ceramics from the Autry’s Southwest Museum of the American Indian Collection. The exhibit traces the dramatic changes that transformed the Pueblo pottery tradition in the era following sixteenth-century Spanish colonization to the present and it includes such well-known potters as María and Julian Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo), Nampeyo and her descendants (Hopi), Gladys Paquin (Laguna Pueblo). (323) 221-2164, www.theautry.org/exhibitions (Through Spring 2020)

Penn Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.—The new 2,000-square-foot Mexico and Central America Gallery highlights more than 3,000 years of history through some 260 stunning artifacts, part of the museum’s multi-phase building transformation project. The gallery includes four breathtaking Maya stone objects from sites in Guatemala and Honduras, one of which allowed researchers to crack the code in deciphering Maya hieroglyphs.

Glimmering gold pendants from Costa Rica and other spectacular artifacts from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama are showcased in the new gallery, as well as rotating displays of the museum’s colorful Guatemala textiles. (215) 8984000, www.penn.museum/transformation/spaces/mexico-centralamerica (New permanent gallery)

Museum of Indian Arts & Culture

Santa Fe, N.M.—The new exhibit “Women in Archaeology” celebrates the important role women played in unveiling the history of the Southwest. The curators scoured books, journals, and even obituaries to reveal details about the pioneering archaeological work of women such as Bertha Dutton, Florence Hawley Ellis, Marjorie Lambert, Anna O. Shephard, Cynthia IrwinWilliams, and others. This exhibit also notes the contributions of women who worked in other regions. (505) 476-1269, indianartsandculture.org/current (Through October 9, 2020)

american archaeology

Phoenix, Ariz.—“Celebrate!

90 Years at the Heard Museum” includes signature works from the museum’s permanent collection, including Hopi katsina dolls, classic Pueblo pottery, Navajo textiles, and jewelry commemorating the milestones, people, and events that have made the Heard Museum what it is today.

(602) 252-8840, www.heard.org/ currentexhibits (Long-term exhibit)

CRAIG SMITH, HEARD MUSEUM

Heard Museum

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MUSEUM OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

Museum of Natural and Cultural History

University of Oregon, Eugene Ore.—Delve into Oregon’s ancient story, from the archaeology of the first Americans to the dynamic cultures of today’s living tribes. Combining interactive displays with world-class anthropological collections, the exhibit “Oregon—Where Past is Present” brings to life 14,000 years of Oregon stories. Explore the galleries, try your hand at ancient weaving styles, test your skills as an archaeologist, and more.

(541) 346-3024, https://mnch.uoregon. edu/exhibits (Permanent exhibit)

v CONFERENCES, LECTURES & FESTIVALS Pueblo Grande Indian Market

December 14-15, Pueblo Grande Museum Auxiliary, Phoenix, Ariz. Celebrate Native American arts with the traditional annual Indian Market. Shop at over one hundred artists’ booths, and enjoy native performances and traditional foods.

(602) 534-2430, www.pueblogrande.org/events

Conference on Historical & Underwater Archaeology

January 8-11, Sheraton Boston, Boston, Mass. Revolution is the theme for the upcoming annual SHA conference, highlighting the city’s role in the American Revolution and exploring the concept in archaeological research, theory, and technology today.

Reports, workshops, symposia, forums, roundtable luncheons, and tours to local historic sites round out the conference, with a Thursday evening reception at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum featuring ‘behind the scenes’ tours of the collections.

Friday evening Banquet and Awards Ceremony and Dance.

(301) 972-9684, https://sha.org/conferences

the theme for this year’s symposium is “Thinking Big: New Approaches to Synthesis and Partnership in the Southwest/ Northwest.” Paper and poster presentations and forums will showcase research and perspectives focused broadly on debates that go beyond individual regions, study areas, and typical research partnerships. Participants are asked to think big in terms of the spatial extent of research and also the range of topics and stakeholders that archaeology in the region can serve. https://southwestsymposium.org

Brooksville Native American Festival

February 1-2, Florida Classic Park, Brooksville, Fla. Join this annual family-friendly educational festival and art show and enjoy technology demonstrations, native drumming, intertribal dancing including the Salina family Aztec dancers, arts and crafts, traditional foods, and a historic village. (727) 389-1395, www.brooksvillenativeamericanfest.com

January 14-18, The Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas, Austin. This year’s theme “Center and the Four Corners: City, Symbol, and Space” will explore the structures and symmetries of the ancient Mesoamerican cosmos and how archaeologists have tried to interpret them. Presentations will address these overlapping features of cosmology, sacred geometry, and structural symmetry in order to better define spatial relations and their representations. https://utmesoamerica.org/2020-mesoamerica-meetings

Southwest Symposium Archaeological Conference

January 30-February 1, Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz.

Founded in 1988 to promote new ideas and directions in the archaeology of the U.S. Southwest and the Mexican Northwest,

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HEARD MUSEUM

Mesoamerica Meetings

Heard Museum World Championship Hoop Dance Contest

February 8-9, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Ariz. Top native hoop dancers compete for the prestigious world champion title and cash prizes. Today, hoop dance is shared as an artistic expression to celebrate and honor indigenous traditions throughout the U.S. and Canada. (602) 252-8840, www.heard.org/events

winter • 2019-20

News IN THE

Pre-Columbian Lead Pollution

Mississippians’ use of galena caused elevated levels of lead.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE WALKER, KINCAID MOUNDS SUPPORT ORGANIZATION

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recent analysis of sediment cores indicates that the Mississippian people who occupied Kincaid Mounds were exposed to lead pollution due to the use of galena. The sediment cores were taken from Avery Lake, which is adjacent to Kincaid Mounds in southern Illinois. The research, which was conducted by Broxton Bird and Jeremy Wilson of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, shows a major spike in lead deposits during the Mississippian period.

Galena is a sparkly metallic mineral that is abundant in the Midwest and is known to have been ground up and used by native peoples for decorating objects and buildings and for personal adornment. Researchers think the wind and rain must have blown and washed the lead dust into the lake during its processing and use.

“As an archaeologist working in this region, we often encounter galena during excavations and recognize that it can be sourced to different areas of the mid-continent based on its isotope ratios,” said Wilson, the second author of the study that was recently published in the journal Geology. “However, the truly surprising element of our recent work was that this galena usage resulted in lead contamination of the lake sediments.”

During the Mississippian period, a vast trade network developed that radiated out from Cahokia. Galena was part of this network, and sourcing

american archaeology

An aerial view of Kincaid Mounds. The people who lived here centuries ago were exposed to lead pollution.

analysis performed on the Avery Lake sediment cores indicate the lead deposited there primarily came from southeastern and central Missouri, as well as the upper Mississippi Valley. Bird identified the geological source of the lake’s galena and noted that 1.5 metric tons may have been brought into Kincaid Mounds annually. That amount is “almost twenty-five percent of what was deposited over the last two hundred years from coal and leaded gas combustion and ore smelting,” he said.

“It’s really very significant.”

The lake’s sediment cores show three pollution spikes in the past. The first occurred from about 300 B.C.- A.D.

300 and was likely due to fires that were set for clearing the landscape, cooking, and heat. The second spike took place during the Mississippian period from galena processing and use.

The third spike, which began in A.D. 1800, is a result of industrialization.

“In coring these floodplain lakes, like Avery Lake adjacent to Kincaid Mounds, our research goals included assessing long-term landscape changes and human impacts and inputs,” said Wilson. “Our goal is to understand the spatial and temporal extent of galena utilization and lead pollution during pre-Columbian times in eastern North America.” —Tamara Jager Stewart

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Protection Against Witches Artifact discovered at Spanish fort in North Carolina apparently warded off witches.

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WARREN WILSON COLLEGE ARCHAEOLOGY

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rchaeologists recently reported the discovery of a curious metal artifact that may have been used by Spanish soldiers to ward off witches at Fort San Juan, a sixteenth-century Spanish fort found at the Berry site in western North Carolina. The small, square piece of iron with broken edges was discovered pressed against the remains of a doorway post of a kitchen just outside the fort, said project codirector David Moore of Warren Wilson College.“It seemed unlikely that it was there by accident. It seemed purposeful,” Moore said.

The object, which was probably from a medieval version of a flak jacket made up of small plates sewn between layers of fabric, was discovered about ten years ago at the site. But it wasn’t until recently that the archaeologists learned that it may have been jammed next to the post by Spanish soldiers to prevent people who practiced witchcraft from entering the kitchen.“These were so-called civilized Europeans practicing magic to protect themselves against the natives,” Moore said.

“Objects like this let us look into the humanity of people.”

Archaeologist Robin Beck of the University of Michigan, who codirects the project, said that placing iron objects in doorways was a method used throughout Europe as early as the first century B.C. to ward off witches and evil spirits. The artifact “speaks to the motivations, fears, and uncertainties of an individual Spaniard at this particular moment in time,” he said.

Beck explained that Native

The Spanish may have used this iron object to combat witchcraft.

American women who had been captured by the Spanish prepared food for the soldiers in the kitchen and the men would have feared that the women would ensorcell their food. According to folklore, a person practicing witchery would not have been able to enter the kitchen if iron was in the doorway.

Beck noted that during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, people in Mexico believed in the practice of using special herbs in or casting magical spells over food so as to harm a man or change his behavior.

In Spain such magic was often related

to love and sexuality. He said the soldiers may have feared that food magic would take away their manhood.

Established in 1567, Fort San Juan was the oldest Spanish inland settlement in the United States. It was one of six settlements that the Spanish established to create an inland route to transport silver and gold from Mexico to the coast of South Carolina to avoid pirates in the Caribbean. About eighteen months after the fort was built, Native Americans burned it to the ground and killed the soldiers. —Paula Neely

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Finland To Return Native American Remains And Artifacts

NPS

The remains and grave goods were taken from Mesa Verde in 1891.

This will be the first international repatriation of human remains to Mesa Verde, which is known for cliff dwellings such as this one.

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inland has agreed to return the remains of twenty American Indians and twenty-eight funerary objects removed from Mesa Verde over 100 years ago, according to the Department of the Interior. “The agreement recognizes the importance of treating these individuals and their descendants, who will be welcoming them home, with dignity,” said Assistant Secretary – Indian Affairs Tara Katuk Sweeney.

The grave goods are among over 600 artifacts that were excavated and

american archaeology

removed from Mesa Verde in 1891

by Swedish researcher Gustaf Nordenskiöld. In addition to mummified remains and grave goods, the collection includes pottery, sandals, woven mats, and various tools that date from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries.

The collection was shipped to Sweden and later sold to a collector in Finland, who eventually bequeathed the items to the National Museum of Finland.The collection has been extensively studied and documented, according to a press

release issued by the museum.

The incident helped lead to the passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906 and the establishment of Mesa Verde as a national park, according to Cristy Brown, public information officer for Mesa Verde National Park. Located in southwest Colorado, Mesa Verde is a complex of ancient stone dwellings built in the side of cliffs that was home to the Ancestral Pueblo people from A.D. 600 to 1300.

There are twenty-six federally recognized American Indian tribes associated with Mesa Verde, and in 2016 they worked with the museum to identify the remains and funerary items they hoped to have repatriated. Those tribes include the Hopi, the Navajo, the Mescalero and Jicarilla Apache, and the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico. Hopi Chief of Staff Troy Honahnie said the tribes do not wish to comment until after the remains have been reinterred due to privacy concerns.

Cliff Spencer, the superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park, said about 400 Native American remains have been returned from sites throughout the U.S. to Mesa Verde since 2010, but this will be the first international repatriation.

No date has been set for the return of the items, but the Hopi anticipate that the repatriated items will be returned by spring 2020. The museum plans to retain other items in the collection since they were legally acquired.

—Paula Neely

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Pre-Clovis Occupation Found At Cooper’s Ferry

COURTESY OF LOREN DAVIS

The western Idaho site is one of the oldest in the Americas.

The recent discoveries at the Cooper’s Ferry site add to the evidence that the Clovis people were not the first Americans.

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oren Davis was “stunned,” he recalled. The Oregon State University archaeologist had just gotten his first look at radiocarbon dates on some animal bones and charcoal his team had recovered from the Cooper’s Ferry site along the Salmon River in western Idaho. The testing showed that the bones and charcoal, which were found together with numerous stone tools and projectile points, were 15,000 to 16,000 years old—indicating his team had found one of the oldest sites in North America.

“The earliest evidence of people in the Americas had been dated to the millennia before 14,000 years old in a handful of other sites,” Davis said. So, when he saw those much older dates from his site,“I was stunned but skeptical, and needed to see those numbers repeated over and over just to be sure they’re right. So we ran more radiocarbon dates.” Sure enough, the dating indicated people began occupying Cooper’s Ferry between 15,280 and 16,560 years ago, Davis’s team reported in the August 30 issue of Science.

Many researchers say the find is another nail in the coffin in the “Clovis First” theory, which holds that roughly 13,000 years ago the first Americans migrated southeast from present-day Alaska through an ice-free corridor in the massive ice sheets that covered the land. But the new data

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indicate people were south of the ice well before this corridor opened. And it supports the idea that the first migrants instead traveled south along the Pacific Coast and moved inland along river valleys, perhaps by boat.

“The timing and position of the Cooper’s Ferry site is consistent with and most easily explained as the result of an early Pacific coastal migration,” said Davis. In this case, migrants likely followed the Columbia River to the Snake River, one its major tributaries. The Columbia was “the first place below the glaciers where they could easily walk and paddle in to North America,” said Davis.

It appears that the earliest inhabitants of Cooper’s Ferry butchered animals and made stone tools at the site. Intriguingly, the oldest projectile points found at the site are similar in design to even older points found in Russia and Japan.

Davis is now working with researchers in those countries to see if there might be a connection and continuing to analyze the hundreds of other artifacts found at Cooper’s Ferry over the past decade.

Cooper’s Ferry “has been meticulously excavated,” said Mike Waters, the director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A & M University, who has visited the site.“I’m confident it’s a legitimate pre-Clovis site.”

—David Malakoff

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LiDAR Reveals Network Of Maya Canals And Croplands Researchers believe the Maya were responding to environmental changes.

S. LUZZADDER-BEACH

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oday, a lush tropical forest carpets the upper Rio Bravo watershed in western Belize. But roughly 1,000 years ago, it looked very different: new research reveals that the wet, marshy landscape was covered by a vast network of canals and croplands created by Maya farmers. The findings add to growing evidence that “Maya wetland agriculture was much more extensive in the region than was once recognized,” said geoarcheologist and study leader Timothy Beach of the University of Texas.

Researchers have long known that the Maya used a range of sophisticated farming techniques, including rotating crops and building terraces. But they have debated just how extensively Maya farmers exploited wetlands. One problem was that it was difficult to identify ancient wetland farming areas now overgrown by trees. But over the past decade LiDAR, a technology consisting of airborne lasers, has allowed archaeologists to see through thick foliage.

The Belize discovery resulted from LiDAR surveys done in 2016. Past studies had identified some evidence of wetland farming along the Rio Bravo, including now-buried canals. But the LiDAR surveys revealed that canals once crisscrossed a much larger area than previously known. One complex, called the Birds of Paradise wetland, was five times bigger than previously thought and laced with forty-five miles of canals, the researchers reported in the October 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Not far away, the LiDAR surveys and subsequent field work revealed an even bigger and previously unrecognized wetland farming complex. All told, the Rio Bravo croplands covered some five square miles. They were likely used to grow maize, avocados, and other crops.

Radiocarbon dating of plant material collected at these sites suggests Maya farmers began using the fields as early as 1,800 years ago and expanded their presence between 1,400 and 1,000 years ago, Beach said. That pattern might relate to two big environmental changes. One was a rising sea level that would have caused local water tables to rise

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Geoarchaeologist Timothy Beach directed the research.

and inundate lowlands, prompting Maya farmers to adapt.

The other was several prolonged droughts, which could have pushed farmers to expand low-lying fields with better water supplies.

The study is “very compelling” and “demonstrates the importance of wetland agriculture” to Maya communities in some regions, said Anabel Ford, a Maya specialist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But she noted that the kind of river-fed wetlands found along the Rio Bravo don’t exist near major Maya cities, such as Tikal in Guatemala, suggesting Maya farmers relied on other strategies to feed those communities. —David Malakoff

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A GLIMPSE OF

Early Agriculture

BY JULIAN SMITH

An artist’s rendition of ancient farmers tending their crops at the Las Capas site. Those farmers built an extensive network of irrigation canals.

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ROBERT CIACCIO

Several archaeological projects in southern Arizona have revealed that this area has been farmed for thousands of years by people who devised sophisticated irrigation systems.

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ast summer and fall, drivers on Interstate 10 in Tucson, Arizona, could see an archaeological dig in progress near the Ruthraff Road exit. Desert Archaeology, a local cultural resource management firm, was excavating part of a prehistoric site called Los Pozos in advance of a highway improvement project. The project is the latest investigation at the site, which stretches for over a mile between the highway and the Santa Cruz River. Los Pozos dates to the Early Agricultural Period, roughly between 2000 B.C. and A.D. 1, a period during which irrigated maize agriculture was introduced to northwest Mexico and the U.S. Southwest from Mesoamerica. Over the past few decades, researchers in the Tucson area have found that farming occurred much earlier than was once thought and that it affected the lives of residents in profound ways.

During the two millennia of the Early Agricultural period, local cultures gradually shifted from mobile hunting and foraging to a more sedentary lifestyle centered around growing maize, a transition that had profound effects. The Santa Cruz River floodplains and terraces offered the perfect setting for irrigation agriculture: a dependable and plentiful water source and regular floods of rich sediment, said Ian Milliken, Pima County Cultural Resources Project Manager, who is involved in the Los Pozos investigation. (Tucson is located in Pima County, and the county government is a consulting party in this project.) Residents learned how to build dams, terraces, and canal systems that watered individual garden plots. “Their primary crop was maize, which was originally thought to have arrived by 1000 or 500 B.C.,” according to Jim Watson of the Arizona State Museum, who has worked at numerous Early Agricultural period sites.

Since the 1990s, however, a series of projects in the Santa Cruz River basin near Tucson have pushed these dates back significantly. “They really redefined our understanding of the origins and adoption of agriculture in the Sonoran Desert,”Watson said. Most, if not all, of this research has been done by cultural resource management firms hired by Pima County, the City of Tucson, and the State of Arizona.

The Las Capas site, near where the Rillito and Cañada del Oro rivers feed into the Santa Cruz, is one of the largest and best preserved Early Agricultural period sites in the Southwest. Las Capas was probably home to no more than 100 people at a time, said Jim Vint of Desert Archaeology, who led an excavation of the site in 2008 and 2009 in advance of the expansion of a water reclamation plant. Over the centuries, however, these people left behind dozens of round and oval pithouses, thousands of storage and roasting pits, and acres of irrigated fields. Radiocarbon dating showed maize was being grown here by 2100 B.C., and possibly as early as 3700 B.C. Small clusters of dirt-capped houses stood on low rises just outside the floodplain. Fields in the floodplain were crisscrossed by dozens of irrigation canals of varying width that brought water to hundreds of individual agricultural plots, each one roughly 250-square feet and bordered by

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Archaeologists use backhoes at Las Capas to expose broad areas by removing several centimeters of earth at a time.

As features such as pithouses and storage or roasting pits are exposed, their edges are marked with paint.

soil berms. The extent of the fields and the sophistication of the canal system impressed Vint, and he thinks they showed how invested in agriculture the people were.

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n 2015, a backhoe operator who was working at a construction site in Tucson near Interstate 10 uncovered something that thrilled archaeologists: a set of perfectly

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J. HOMER THIEL

preserved footprints about three feet below the surface.

Forensic experts analyzed the prints and concluded they had been made by seven to nine individuals, including a toddler and a dog. Radiocarbon dating of samples and flood deposits showed they were made around 1000 B.C. and were one of the oldest sets of footprints discovered in the Southwest.

Further excavations showed the footprints encircled

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agricultural plots that were about thirty-by-forty-five feet in size. Bordered by raised berms, these plots were planted with maize and irrigated by three canals that connected to the Santa Cruz River. Over 4,000 people came to see the prints when the site, named Rillito Fan, was briefly opened to the public that winter. “Footprints are something everyone can recognize, no matter what age,” Milliken said.

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An aerial view of Las Capas’ network of canals and agricultural plots, which are outlined with white paint. The area that was farmed is darker due to clay deposited by repeated irrigation and the accumulation of decayed plant material.

The footprints around the two excavated fields showed in detail how the ancient farmers operated their irrigation system. First, they dug out part of one corner of the berm and plugged the lateral canal with mud to divert water into the various plots. To drain excess water, they walked to the far corner and dug another opening in the berm.“Traditional ecological knowledge is very evident in Rillito Fan,” Milliken said. The fields were created with just the right amount of slope to let water distribute evenly through each plot, but not flood the fields too deeply. Canals were made just wide and deep enough to carry water to the furthest point in the system. “Archaeologists usually try to infer behavior from the material assemblage,” he said. But by being able to see exactly where the ancient farmers walked, “we have confirmation that this is exactly the technology they were using to flood their field system.”

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These methods showed how the inhabitants were further refining the irrigation techniques seen at Las Capas. “It confirmed they weren’t just experimenting, but mastering this art of agriculture earlier than we expected,” said Milliken.

“They were brilliant strategists in understanding hydrology and the landscape.” Trench profiles revealed other fields and canals above and below the ones with the footprints—signs of generations of people returning again and again for the abundant water and fertile soils, building and repairing irrigation systems in the process.

The transition from nomadic hunting and foraging to subsistence farming spurred significant social changes, Watson said. As settled communities and populations grew, people had to organize themselves to face new challenges such as how to allocate farmland and water. (The latter is still a divisive issue in the Southwest today.) As successful

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HENRY D. WALLACE

harvests became essential to survival, people had to learn to work together on a larger scale to build and maintain large canal systems. “All those things require leadership and collaboration and cooperation to make the whole thing work,” said Bruce Huckell of the University of New Mexico, who has worked at Early Agricultural-period sites.

The social and cultural shift didn’t happen overnight, Vint said, but instead was a slow and stable process. “There was a certain amount of agriculture, but still a lot of foraging and gathering of wild plants.” (Some researchers call this phase “farmaging.”) At Las Capas, for instance, maize made up only a portion of the local diet for the first centuries of the Early Agricultural period, possibly less than a third of residents’ average annual calories. The rest came from hunting animals like rabbits and deer, and collecting plants like mesquite and sedges. Maize farming was adopted quickly, but its

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effects spread over a thousand or more years before significant changes in social organization appeared, according to Sarah Herr of Desert Archaeology.“It’s not a game-changer in the way you might think,” she said.

One question that scientists have debated is whether irrigation developed independently in Mesoamerica and the Sonoran region of northwest Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, or if the technology came north through migration or word of mouth. Bill Doelle of Archaeology Southwest said he wouldn’t be surprised if canal irrigation was a local development that was adapted to maize. “It’s a simple concept that could be done with reasonable levels of human labor,” he said.“They’re not moving massive amounts of earth.”

As an experiment, Vint had his crew members build a plot of their own using the same kind of mesquite sticks ancient farmers would have used. They found that two

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people could dig a plot complete with berms in just thirty-five minutes. “It’s not as long as you might think; twenty to twenty-five people could construct a pretty big system in a couple of weeks,” Doelle said.“Then all you have to do is maintain it.”

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n any case, Watson said, “the big lesson is how [the Tucson projects] show a long trajectory of social and technological buildup. At Las Capas you get to see it progress over 2,000 years,” he said. Over time, families lived near fields for longer periods and returned more often. Settlements grew and residents relied more on maize. “All that led to more social complexity,” he said.

A number of sites in the Santa Cruz basin dating to the Late Cienega phase (400 B.C.-A.D. 50) show this increasing complexity. In the mid 1990s, excavations at a different section of Los Pozos uncovered an agricultural settlement. This part of the site included hundreds of round pit structures built for storage and shelter, with artifacts ranging from projectile points and shell beads to the remains of a dog and a turtle.

One pit structure yielded an unusual set of artifacts including a fossilized horse tooth and the vertebra of a mastodon or mammoth. A gastropod fossil, an oblong piece of siltstone, and a fragment of quartz found nearby may have been part of the collection. Any one of these items would have been noteworthy; finding them all together suggests the house’s occupant played a special role in society. (Native American shamans made medicine bundles that held similar items during the Historic period.) “The curation of unique artifacts could point to increasing ritual complexity in these Early Agricultural communities,”Watson said.“As groups grew larger and more socially complex, the ritual sphere would have

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also needed to grow more complex.”

Larger structures dated to the Cienega phase (800 B.C.-A.D. 50) are thought to have been built for communal use, he said. The Tumamoc Hill site, which sits on the peak of the like- named hill, 700 feet above the Santa Cruz River in downtown Tucson, has a round structure over twelve feet in diameter dated to the Late Cienega phase. (The terraced site is also encircled by over a mile of low stone walls, one of the earliest examples of communal labor in the Southwest.) The Santa Cruz Bend and Clearwater sites both span the entire Cienega phase and have structures larger than typical family pithouses.

An important area of future research is the degree and scale of contact between southern Arizona and northern Mexico, according to Vint. “We don’t have a good understanding of early agricultural development in northern Sonora,” he said.

“That would help connect the dots in terms of the route and timing of maize coming up from the south. But the international border creates a lot of problems for archaeologists, especially lately.”

The cooperation and support of local government and governmental organizations has been crucial to archaeology in the Santa Cruz basin, according to Milliken. Public works projects cover wide areas that, when excavated, can give a fuller picture of a site than a typical narrow excavation trench. “In profile, what appear to be canals could be natural or man-made,” he said. “But if you strip a large area, take sediment off by increments, you can see features in plan [top-down] view.”

Some backhoe operators are skilled enough to scrape soil away centimeters at a time.

Development projects often require digging deep as well as wide, which uncovers large amounts of data. “Economic progress and development in the area have led to these discoveries. Watson said. “Who knows how long they would have stayed buried otherwise?”

JULIAN SMITH is the author of Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World’s Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West. winter • 2019-20

ROBERT CIACCIO

A number of figurines, such as this one which dates from 710 – 530 B.C., have been recovered from early agriculture sites. These figurines could have symbolized fertility, rain, and ancestor worship.

NPS

The Threat Of Climate Change When a wildfire threatened the visitors center at Tonto National Monument in central Arizona last June, artifacts were removed from its museum and temporarily stored at another facility. Archaeologists and firefighters also covered a cliff dwelling with fire-resistant wrapping to protect the 700-year-old wood within the structure.

Myriad archaeological sites are endangered by extreme weather.

By Tamara Jager Stewart With sea levels and temperatures rising, permafrost thawing, hurricanes and wildfires raging, archaeological resources are facing grave threats. “There is global scientific agreement that this is a real crisis,” emphasized David Anderson, an archaeologist with the University of Tennessee.

“And cultural heritage needs to be part of the climate change discussion. Do we abandon these structures and sites, move them, build sea walls? What gets protected? When tens of millions of people have to move off coast, what happens with their past places?”

A paper that was published in American Antiquity in 2019 titled “Preparing for the Future Impacts of Megastorms on Archaeological Sites: An Evaluation of Flooding from Hurricane Harvey, Houston, Texas” warned that “Powerful hurricanes in 2017—Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria—were stark examples of how these previously rare catastrophes are becoming increasingly normal due to climate change,

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with dire consequences for cultural resources.”According to the paper, 920 archaeological sites in southeast Texas were flooded by Harvey’s storm surge and rainfall.

In 2017 environmental archaeologist Isabel RiveraCollazo of the University of California, San Diego, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography led a cultural heritage assessment for the Climate Change Council, a panel that advises the Puerto Rican government. That assessment concluded that many sites face inundation by rising sea levels and violent tropical storms. That year Hurricane Maria hit the region with a thirty-foot storm surge, causing flooding, massive erosion, and mudslides. It’s estimated that thousands of historic buildings were destroyed or damaged. The impacts to archaeological resources have yet to be assessed, but reports indicate countless eroded sites and looting of exposed sites.“There is an urgent need to identify innovative ways to mitigate loss,” said Rivera-Collazo.

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The following year she and her colleague Falko Kuester created a database of archaeological sites along the coastline of Puerto Rico that allows them to monitor those sites.“Aside from this, there is no other effort to address climate change threats in Puerto Rico,” said Rivera-Collazo, who has been working there since the late 1990s focusing on the effects of climate change.“It is certainly not possible to save all the sites, but by recruiting the communities, we can build more effective prioritization and intervention plans,” she said.

In Arctic regions melting permafrost, rising sea levels, and increasingly intense and frequent storms are affecting cultural resources. Here the temperature has increased more than twice the global average since the 1980s, resulting in a rapid loss of sea ice that used to help temper storms and protect coastlines from erosion. “The previous mentality held that, if a site was in permafrost, it would just preserve in place, and very little excavation was allowed by regulatory agencies,” said Anne Jensen, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.“But now that’s all changing; now not excavating means, essentially, rot in place.” Jensen is chair of the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) Climate Change Strategies and Archaeological Resources Committee, a group of archaeologists working to combat the impacts of climate change on cultural resources and to increase public awareness of those impacts.

“Between the permafrost thaw and massive coastal erosion, the archaeological heritage of this region is getting hammered,” said Michael Newland, director of the Northern California Cultural Resources Group and a member of the SAA’s climate change committee.“Much of the state of Alaska is remote and the coastline is huge. Of all of us, Anne Jensen is most on the front lines of those impacts. What she is trying to address now is what the rest of us on the coasts will be facing over the next few decades. Her work is a glimpse of the future.” Jensen estimates that many of Alaska’s coastal sites could be destroyed in twenty years, and she’s hopeful that, before that happens, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations will fund more excavations as well as the development of a pan-regional system for prioritizing sites.

In the lower forty-eight, global warming is also melting alpine ice patches and exposing artifacts that had been preserved in those ice patches for thousands of years. Craig Lee of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado works in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which extends for about 24,000 square miles around Yellowstone National Park, located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. He and his colleagues have found a large number of lithic items, but they’ve also found fragile artifacts such as woven willow baskets, horse-hair cordage, and wood dart and arrow shafts. “We have several (wood shafts) that are in the 7,000 to 8,000 year-old range,” Lee said, and one that’s more than 10,000 years old. One ice patch yielded twenty bighorn sheep skulls. These skulls serve in current

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Floodwaters approached Jamestown’s Natalie P. and Alan M. Vorhees Archaearium last October. Jamestown is located on an island in the James River approximately thirty-five miles from the Chesapeake Bay. The flood was caused by a high tide and the wind from a severe storm in the North Atlantic.

and past Native American ceremonies associated with hunting and the landscape.

Their work is “one hundred percent based on climate change and the risk of loss,” Lee noted, adding that they’ve found a number of exposed objects that have decayed to the extent “that you really can’t discern a thing” about them.

“Once (an artifact) melts out and rots away, it’s gone.” Lee and colleagues are employing a novel ice coring technique,

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COURTESY CHUCK DURFOR, JAMESTOWN REDISCOVERY FOUNDATION

with support from the NSF, to estimate how much time is left before these ice patches melt away.

Newland was president of the Society for California Archaeology (SCA) when, in 2012, he convinced the society’s board that the public portion of the California coastline needed to be surveyed. “Based on current projections,” he said, “any site within a quarter mile of the current shoreline will be completely destroyed by 2100.” Newland had

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already started a pilot study at Point Reyes National Seashore in northern California on the potential impacts of climate change on archaeological resources, so he and his SCA colleagues began the survey there.Volunteering their time, they covered about seventy miles of public lands.“The volunteer effort has drawn in over a hundred students from a dozen universities and colleges,” he said.

“In California, fire is now a major threat to cultural

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quickly wash across the surface, creating dangerous and massive flooding in the area’s canyons.”Valles Caldera’s postfire erosion washed away acres of buried archaeological deposits that had survived millennia of fires.

“When I watch archaeological sites that remained intact for 4,000 years now washing away, I cannot help but recognize that I am seeing changing climate conditions happening in real time today,” said Steffen. “One thing we can do is develop effective strategies for protecting specific archaeological sites through removal of dense fuels before fires, and stabilization after fires. Another is to develop tools archaeologists can use to evaluate the conditions that result in the greatest damage so that they can work with fire managers to plan prescribed fires that will have the least potential for site destruction.”

These are some of the goals of an interagency project that she and others in the Jemez Mountains area are involved with called ArcBurn. “Predicting and managing the effects of climate change on wildfire requires understanding natural and cultural interactions of the past and present,” explained Rachel Loehman, a research landscape ecologist with the United States Geological Survey and head of the ArcBurn project. Formerly an archaeologist, Loehman now investigates the impacts of wildfires and other disturbances on ecosystems and cultural resources in the Southwest and coastal Alaska.“There is an emerging group of fire archaeologists who specialize in caring for cultural resources in the

WASP

resources, probably more immediate than sea level rise,” said Newland. “Sixteen of the state’s largest fires in history have occurred in the last twenty years.” Fire destroys artifacts made of wood and other flammables, and it affects items fashioned from obsidian, bone, and antler so that they can’t be dated. Fire suppression and clean-up efforts pose their own threats to fragile sites.

Wildfires are a natural part of the landscape, but, in the past two decades, fires in the Southwest and Western U.S. have burned hotter and covered larger areas due to extreme drought and years of fire suppression. A recent UNESCO report identified Mesa Verde National Park as one of the most at-risk World Heritage sites, and Tim Hovezak, Mesa Verde’s cultural resource manager, reported that nearly seventy percent of the park has been altered in the last few decades by fires. Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico has burned repeatedly in the last two decades, damaging more than 1,000 archaeological sites.

After the devastating 156,000-acre Las Conchas fire of 2011 in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, many sites were left without protective vegetation and with cracked building stones that undermined walls that had withstood centuries of normal forest fires. “In fire-scarred landscapes, the rainy season brings flash floods and the second phase of damage,” said Anastasia Steffen, interdisciplinary scientist at the nearby Valles Caldera National Preserve.

“Instead of soaking into the burned soils, these heavy rains

Researchers excavate the remains of a house at the Walakpa site in northern Alaska in 2017. The site is threatened by rising sea levels.

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RACHEL LOEHMAN

Archaeologists assess the condition of a site after a managed fire in the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico.

context of fire management activities and operations,” she said.“The ArcBurn project exists to provide data to help this effort—data particularly focused on the links among fuel loads, fire behavior, and fire effects on artifacts and sites.”

In 2009, Congress created the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program to enable federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to collaborate on ecosystem restoration, with an emphasis on addressing forest fire challenges. In consultation with local tribal governments, land managers are using restoration practices like forest thinning and prescribed fires to decrease the potential for extreme fires. Tree-ring evidence shows that historically wildfires burned more frequently but much less intensely, with less impact on forests. This information, when combined with archaeological evidence such as past population levels, settlement patterns, and wood harvest and subsistence behavior, suggests that humans were managing Southwest landscapes in a way that changed the vegetation, fuel, and fire patterns, but still maintained ecological resilience. In contrast, contemporary land management activities, coupled with climate changes, have resulted in more intense fires that dramatically change how forests look and function.

“Archaeology has huge relevance in discussions of

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ongoing climate impacts and management strategies, because we can provide context for human adaptations to changing environments and critical information on long-term ecosystem responses to human activities” said Loehman. Efforts such as the Jemez Fire and Humans in Resilient Ecosystems (FHiRE) are underway to look at relationships between human communities and landscape fires and consult with local tribes to better understand their traditional fire and forest management practices.

Archaeologist Marcy Rockman is working to ensure cultural heritage is an integral part of the political discussion surrounding the climate crisis. “Currently I’m working with the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to set up and run a project to better link and represent cultural heritage in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” said Rockman. ICOMOS is a non-governmental organization dedicated to the conservation of the world’s monuments and sites. The IPCC is an intergovernmental body established by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization. “What I want is for heritage to be clearly named and described as being of value in global-scale reports,” she said, “because that’s when and how we have a chance to build

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the kind of support we need to both address impacts and on federal, state, county, private, and tribal lands, there’s no use heritage effectively in climate response.” single entity that’s responsible for them. As a result, volunRockman served in the National Park Service’s (NPS) teer groups and individuals are often having to take the Climate Change Response Program from 2011 to 2018, initiative, he said. For example, in 2012, Anderson and other where she was charged with determining the effects of cli- researchers, with NSF support, began developing the Digital mate change on all of the cultural resources within NPS’ 419 Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), an informatunits and how to respond to them.“Our summary finding is ics platform about cultural resources spanning much of the that every park, and likely almost every cultural resource, is U.S. “Right now we are linking data from about a million being, or will be, affected by climate change in some way. sites, and can see this type of platform as indispensable to Key remaining questions are when, how, and how severely?” effective mitigation planning,” he said. DINAA links to site Rockman led the development of the NPS’ “Cultural information in an array of public and private repositories, so Resources Climate Change Strategy.” She and her colleagues produced vulnerability assessments and prioritization tools to help park superintendents and resource managers consider all aspects of sites and historic structures, such as their significance, uniqueness, and the nature and extent of their endangerment.

With this information, officials can make decisions about investing money, time, and effort into saving what can reasonably be saved. But “we will have to say goodbye to some of our cultural resources,” she said. “We’ve never been able to save everything, and climate change is making this doubly true.

The key challenge facing us now is how to choose well what to save.”

The program Rockman and her colleagues set up at the NPS had two key objectives: to address the impacts of climate change on cultural resources, and to learn from archaeology how to respond to climate change. “While there is still a lot of work to be done on the impacts side, my sense is we are starting to get our heads around the scope and speed of climate impacts, or at least how to gather some of the data we need A member of the National Park Service’s staff places fire-resistant caps on wood components to track it,” she said. “We have not of a prehistoric cliff dwelling in 2011 when the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument yet as clearly defined how to learn in southwest New Mexico was threatened by the Miller Fire. from the past in ways that are useful to our modern climate challenges.” that they can be monitored and their vulnerability to various “To date, very little is being done” to remedy the effects threats prioritized should remedial action be necessary. of climate change, Newland said.“There is no comprehensive “Lots of folks are talking about creating these databases, state or federal effort to inventory what is going to be lost. but we need to coordinate our efforts. Some of our biggest A lot of agencies won’t acknowledge that climate change challenges are not technical, they involve getting people is happening.” And given that endangered sites are found to cooperate and participate rather than perpetuating turf

JOSE OLIVER

Archaeologist Isabel Rivera-Collazo inspects exposed rocks at the Los Tubos petroglyph complex in Puerto Rico after unusually large and frequent waves eroded the beach sand. A petroglyph can be seen highlighted with yellow sand on a rock in the foreground.

wars,” Anderson said, referring to the difficulty in getting some governmental agencies to participate in DINAA. “We could have a national digital site database in place in a year if we had the necessary cooperation.”

Rivera-Collazo founded Descendants United for Nature, Adaptation, and Sustainability (DUNAS) in collaboration with the Climate Science Alliance, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at Scripps, and several other organizations.This summer her research team worked with the community to restore coastal sand dunes in northern Puerto Rico and excavate an adjacent archaeological site that had been impacted by recent storms. “Our DUNAS proposal builds expertise and technical resources on the island so that the program can run on its own, and enrolls citizen scientists and communities in the monitoring and assessment,” she said. DUNAS trains community members and develops networks consisting of stakeholders such as scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and climate activists.These efforts have led to the identification of climate risks and solutions to these risks, which the members of the network can undertake.

Combating the effects of climate change can be very expensive, and “there’s no real top-down funding to actually do anything about it,” said Newland. He’s served as an advisor to the California State Parks system,and he said the agency had done little to mitigate the impacts on archaeology. California

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State Parks “has limited funding,” Newland acknowledged, “and there are a lot of competing needs.” At NPS, “far more funding is dedicated to the natural resources than the cultural resources,” Rockman observed, even though NPS is the “lead federal agency for cultural resources.” Most archaeological funding is dedicated to research, not assessing and mitigating extreme weather’s effects on sites, she added.

(Rockman left NPS in November of 2018—“I was a program of one”—and she said her position has not been filled. Thus far she’s received no pay for her work with ICOMOS.) The SAA’s climate change committee hasn’t come up with any solutions to these various problems yet. “Primarily, we’re focused on raising awareness of this issue,” Jensen said. There are archaeologists who aren’t being “slapped in the face” by melting permafrost and eroding coastlines, like she said she is. Jensen surmised that some archaeologists “flat out don’t believe” climate change is occurring.“It’s just weather” to them.

As daunting as these challenges are, Anderson appears to be optimistic. “We have the knowledge to solve these problems,” he said.“The future doesn’t need to be bleak. We have to engage and work together toward the best possible solution.”

TAMARA JAGER STEWART is the assistant editor of American Archaeology and the Conservancy’s Southwest region projects director.

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By Elizabeth Lunday

The Paquimé Enigma Paquimé has puzzled archaeologists for decades. New research could provide some answers.

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By Elizabeth Lunday PAQUIMÉ HAS BEEN A MYSTERY since Spanish explorers first saw the abandoned city. In an account of a 1565 expedition, chronicler Baltasar Obregón described the site as encompassing “many houses of great size, strength, and height...with towers and walls like fortresses.... The houses contain large and magnificent patios paved with enormous and beautiful stones resembling jasper.There are knife-shaped stones which support the wonderful and big pillars of heavy timbers brought from far away. The walls of the houses were whitewashed and painted in many colors and shades.”

And yet this city was empty of inhabitants. The Spanish asked indigenous people living in the surrounding area about the community, and they said that the city had been defeated in battle a few generations before and its residents had fled.

Today, archaeologists know much more about

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A view of the southeastern portion of Paquimé.

The labyrinth of massive adobe walls made up a portion of the living quarters at the city’s center.

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a substantial city sometime around A. D. 1300. This begged the question—a question that has been debated by archaeologists for decades—of who built this grand city? Was it the work of local residents, or migrants from the south or the north? In 2013, archaeologists Mike Searcy of Brigham Young University and Todd Pitezel of the University of Arizona began their Roots of Casas Grandes project in hopes of settling this debate.

DI PESO’S TEAM DISCOVERED Paquimé had some 2,000 rooms in buildings that reached at least three stories.Archaeologists believe many architectural features of Paquimé were used in large, public rituals. Fifteen geometric or animalshaped platform mounds, likely used for ritual ceremonies, are scattered around the city. Five enormous earth ovens were probably used to prepare feasts held in conjunction with rituals. One was so large it could have been used to cook up to 6,600 pounds of agave.

Mesoamerican-style ballcourts also likely played an important role in religious activities. The courts are shaped

SCOTT URE

Paquimé, which is located in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua in a wide, fertile river valley in the foothills of the Sierra Madres. The surrounding region, and the culture that thrived there, is known as Casas Grandes. Paquimé was a wealthy city whose residents imported rare and valuable objects from hundreds of miles away—from the western coast of Mexico, from Mesoamerica to the south, and from the Ancestral Pueblo region to the north. The city’s architecture also incorporates elements from distant cultures.

The Casas Grandes region received little attention from archaeologists until 1958, when Charles Di Peso of the Amerind Foundation began a three-year excavation of the city. Di Peso developed a basic chronology for the site; although it was revised by later archaeologists, researchers continue to divide the timeline of the Casas Grandes culture into two periods, the Viejo (Old) period between A.D. 700 and 1200, and the Medio (Middle) period between 1200 and 1450.

Di Peso’s research indicated that Paquimé rose in size and complexity relatively quickly; what began as a small collection of simple buildings appears to have grown into

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A crew under the direction of Michael Searcy and Todd Pitezel exposes the plastered floor of a large communal structure at the San Diego site, a Viejo-period settlement located nine miles south of Paquimé.

like a capital letter “I” with a long, narrow alley that widens at both ends. Brilliantly colored macaws also seem to have had ritual significance.The birds are native to central Mexico, where they appear frequently in pottery and sculpture and were used in religious rituals. The people of Paquimé both imported and bred the birds, and several plazas include pens where macaws were held.

After finishing his Paquimé excavation, Di Peso investigated one nearby Viejo-period site, and it yielded none of the Mesoamerican elements that he found at Paquimé. Consequently he theorized that southern merchants arrived in the region at the start of the Medio period, took control of the surrounding indigenous population, and supervised the building of the city, motivated by the opportunity to dominate trade to the region.

Other archaeologists have proposed alternative explanations. Noting Paquimé’s architectural similarities to Ancestral Puebloan sites such as Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins, which is located north of Chaco in northwest New Mexico, Steve Lekson of the University of Colorado proposed that a small group of elites from Aztec Ruins, who were joined by thousands of people along the way, moved to the Casas Grandes region and took control over what he believed was a relatively small local population.

Lekson thinks these migrants, who had left Aztec Ruins, were intent on creating a new community at the southern end of what he refers to as the Chaco Meridian, a north-south line that runs from Aztec through Chaco to Paquimé. Lekson hypothesized this line established a sacred connection between the cities. The migrants also wanted to be nearer Mesoamerica in order to acquire ritualistic goods such as macaws. In addition to incorporating Ancestral Puebloan characteristics into Paquimé’s architecture, the migrants, emulating Mesoamerican cultures, also incorporated characteristics from that region.

“In our thinking, Casas Grandes is primarily a local phenomenon,” said University of Tulsa archaeologist Mike Whalen.“It has local antecedents and a local origin.” Whalen and his research partner, Paul Minnis of the University of Oklahoma, have worked in the region over the last twenty

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years. Whalen and Minnis argue Viejo-period architecture and artifacts demonstrate cultural antecedents for later Medio period features. “There’s a lot of continuity in the ceramics from the Viejo period to the Medio period. We also see continuity in the architecture,” said Minnis, regardless of the Mesoamerican and Ancestral Puebloan influences.

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COURTESY OF ROOTS OF CASAS GRANDES PROJECT

Whalen compares pottery discovered at Viejo and early Medio sites with a style of mid- to late-Medio-period pottery known as Ramos Polychrome. This is highly decorative pottery that features red and black geometric designs and stylized figures on a tan background. It was produced starting around 1300. When excavating at an early Medio site dating

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to about 1200, Whalen said,“We didn’t find any Ramos Polychrome, but we did find painted wares that are similar, but much simpler. They have some of the same designs, but not all of them, and they are in simpler form.” Whalen believes this pottery is a precursor of Ramos Polychrome.

Searcy and Pitezel theorize that Paquimé was partly

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lived in clusters of shallow, semi-circular pithouses that were common in the Southwest in this period. They usually consisted of partially below-ground structures with walls constructed of poles, brush, and adobe. Subsequently pithouses were replaced by above-ground adobe rooms; the exact reason for this transition is unclear, but archaeologists suggest it coincided with an increase in communal stability.

Searcy and Pitezel excavated a circular structure thirty feet in diameter that they think served as a communal building. It’s possible that rituals of the sort performed at Paquimé in the Medio period took place here. In her excavations, Kelley found copper artifacts and marine shells that had been acquired from as far away as the west coast of Mexico and black-on-white pottery imported from the Mimbres region in southwest New Mexico and adjacent areas of Arizona and northern Mexico. These discoveries indicated trade with distant cultures during the Viejo period.“So we’re starting to

MERADETH SNOW

the result of a local evolution, and, believing more data is necessary to answer the migrants or locals question, they embarked on their project. “One of our primary goals is the development of the Viejo-period chronology so that archaeologists not only can better understand the internal Viejoperiod trajectory, but also better understand the transformation into the Medio period,” said Pitezel.“We hope that work will help us discover what we refer to as the ‘roots of Casas Grandes.’ That is to say, what similarities and differences between the periods can inform on how the Casas Grandes Medio period came to be.”

Little work has been done on Viejo-period sites. Whalen and Minnis excavated four Viejo pithouses at three sites, the late Jane H. Kelley of the University of Calgary conducted limited excavations at six sites, and Searcy and Pitezel have excavated two others. The data from these excavations suggests that from about A.D. 700 to 950 Casas Grandes people

A researcher pipets a small amount of liquid in preparation for quantifying the amount of DNA in a sample taken from human remains found in the Casas Grandes region.

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MIKE SEARCY

Todd Pitezel analyzes a reconstructed Viejo-period vessel. The vessel is an Anchando Red-on-brown jar, a type thought to be one of the precursors to the Medio-period polychrome vessels.

find more lines of continuity,” said Searcy,“cultural practices that didn’t change from the Viejo to the Medio periods.”

As for Paquimé’s foreign characteristics, he surmises they came via trade or migration. “Are people going out of Casas Grandes to Central Mexico and seeing ballcourts and macaws and bringing them back to the community?” Searcy asked. “Or are people migrating from these foreign places and bringing their culture with them?”

Meradeth Snow and her team at the University of Montana had some of the same questions, so they began a research project, which Searcy joined, sequencing samples of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, taken from the remains of 400 individuals found at Viejo and Medio-period sites in the Casas Grandes region, including Paquimé. Individuals inherit their mtDNA from their mother, allowing researchers to trace maternal lineages back in time. Geneticists divide DNA lineages into haplogroups, which are large groups of people all descended from the same maternal line. While thirty-six mtDNA haplogroups are found around the world, only five have been discovered among Native American populations.

Determining only the haplogroups of Casas Grandes individuals would likely not provide Snow with enough

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information to draw conclusions about population movements, so she is sequencing the whole mitochondrial genome to reveal subtypes of the haplogroups. Snow and Searcy reason that if migrants arrived in the Medio period, they would have had a different genetic profile of their maternal lineages than the people of the Viejo period. If most of the individuals from the Viejo and Medio periods belong to the same subtype, that could indicate few migrants arrived in the community. In contrast, the appearance of different mtDNA lineages could reflect migration.

The researchers took samples from individuals in a range of social classes, as determined by the value of the grave goods that adorned their burials. “We’ll be looking to see if we find certain subtypes within certain types of burials,” Snow said. The point of this is that, if they do find evidence of migrants, the types of grave goods they were buried with would suggest their status. Such information could confirm or contradict Di Peso’s hypothesis that affluent southern merchants came to Paquimé and engineered its development. They expect to have the results of this study by the end of 2020. Archaeologists on all sides of the Paquimé debate believe these results will provide answers

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MATT PEEPLES

Paquimé has Mesoamerican and Ancestral Puebloan elements. This t-shaped door is an example of the latter.

to some of the most pressing questions about Casas Grandes.

Despite disagreeing on where Paquimé’s residents hailed from, Di Peso and Lekson agreed that, once the city reached its grand scale, it exerted control over the surrounding region. Di Peso, in fact, wrote that “hundreds of mountain and valley satellite villages bowed to the needs of the capital city.” But Whalen and Minnis’ investigation of Medio sites in the surrounding countryside have led them to conclude that Paquimé’s control was limited. Communities within eighteen miles of the city center had architectural features that imitated Paquimé’s, including macaw pens, ballcourts, large community ovens, and platform mounds. But the communities farther away bore fewer similarities to Paquimé, and features such as macaw pens and platform mounds are absent.

The sort of power Di Peso and Lekson believe Paquimé wielded, Whalen said, would have required physical force, and there is no evidence of that. “The influence of Paquimé was not by force,” he said.“It was a simpler influence that had to do with ritual.” The leaders of Paquimé, Whalen argued, used large public rituals to bind together the people of the city and its nearest surrounding neighbors into a shared culture. But as distance from the city increased, Paquimé’s influence faded.

Paquimé thrived until about 1400. Then the population began to decline, and by 1450 the city was abandoned.

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Many questions remain about Casas Grandes. Pitezel and Searcy want to better understand the dynamics of the Viejo-period population; it’s unclear how many people lived in the region before the rise of Paquimé or how they were organized socially and politically. They are also working on the chronology and typology—the characteristic features associated with particular dates—of Casas Grandes ceramics.

“Chronology and ceramic typology may seem ‘old school’ to most archaeologists, but so little work has focused on the Viejo period that we are obligated and compelled to start with the basics,” said Pitezel. In fact, these fundamentals will be essential to solving the big mysteries at Paquimé. “Chronology and ceramic typology are basic units for archaeologists, so without a clearer understanding of these as related to the Viejo period, we can only continue to speculate on larger anthropological questions related to social, economic, political, and religious systems of the Casas Grandes people.”

Working in such uncharted territory is one of the most exciting parts of working at Paquimé, according to Searcy.

“There’s so much there we don’t know,” he said.“Everything we do advances our knowledge.”

ELIZABETH LUNDAY is the host and producer of the history podcast “The Year That Was” as well as author of multiple books about art and culture. winter • 2019-20

INVESTIGATING

The Vacant Quarter

JAN UNDERWORD

The highlighted section of this map shows the area that archaeologist Stephen Williams called the Vacant Quarter. The red dots denote sites that were recently investigated by Charles Cobb and his team, or previously investigated by other archaeologists. The data from the previously investigated sites informed Cobb’s work. There are other sites that aren’t shown on the map that define the Vacant Quarter’s boundaries.

In the mid 1400s, Native Americans largely abandoned a large section of the central United States. Archaeologists, with a little help from an eighteenth-century cleric, have launched a new effort to understand why.

By David Malakoff

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n 1978, archaeologist Stephen Williams was touring ancient settlement sites around the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers when an intriguing “notion came to me,” he later recalled. Williams, a Harvard University professor who had worked in the Central and Southeastern United States for decades, knew that the archaeological evidence

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showed that many of the sites had hosted thriving communities, some with thousands of people, during the Mississippian Period, which lasted from roughly A. D. 800 to 1550.

Some featured the huge earthen ceremonial mounds that were a hallmark of Mississippian peoples. But Williams was also aware of a growing number of studies suggesting that

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In 1939, a huge Works Progress Administration crew began their excavation of Angel Mounds, one of the better known sites in the Vacant Quarter. The crew uncovered more than two million artifacts.

people had abandoned many of the sites at roughly the same time, beginning in the mid-1400s. And when he sketched a map of the abandoned settlements, he realized they formed a vast area he called the Vacant Quarter, which covered some 50,000 square miles across eight states. It included some of the region’s largest and most studied Mississippian sites, including Cahokia in western Illinois and the Angel Mounds in Indiana, and also lesser-known sites far to the south in Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.

When Williams, who died in 2017, first published his Vacant Quarter hypothesis in 1983, he was careful to note that he wasn’t proposing that the region became totally devoid of people. Some Native Americans likely still hunted and gathered food there. But the Vacant Quarter no longer had any “year-round settled villages,” he wrote, even as communities flourished around its perimeter. Indeed, the void appeared to represent the “burned out center” of the Late Mississippian period. And the abandonment could help explain why the first Europeans to visit the area, who arrived in the 1500s, reported finding derelict villages marked by an “echoing stillness.”

At first, many archaeologists were skeptical of the Vacant Quarter hypothesis. Over time, however, it steadily gained acceptance as researchers documented additional Late Mississippian sites in the region that appeared to have abruptly shifted from vibrant to vacant. But thirty-five years after Williams first presented his provocative ideas, archaeologists are still trying to answer some fundamental questions about the Vacant Quarter: What caused so many people to flee such a vast, bountiful area in just a generation or two? When did they leave? And where did they go?

Intent on answering some of those questions, researchers from three universities and the Chickasaw Nation have embarked on a new study of sites in central Tennessee and northern Mississippi that are on ancestral Chickasaw lands.

By conducting new digs at one Mississippian mound, radiocarbon dating nearly 200 carbonized botanical remains in museum collections, and analyzing ceramics and ancient climate records, the researchers hope to get “a very fine resolution look at what was happening—socially, ecologically, and climatically—in these two very different parts of the Vacant Quarter in the century or so before abandonment,” said archaeologist Charles Cobb of the University of Florida, who is leading the study. “We want to know: Did [abandonment] happen the same way across the Vacant Quarter? Was it a slow, protracted process? Or was there some pivotal event that was the straw that broke the camel’s back?” The researchers will “zoom in very close on a handful of sites, but also zoom out to see how they fit into a much larger pattern,” added archaeologist Tony Boudreaux of the University

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Mississippi, who is also involved in the project.

The archaeologists are also getting some help from an unusual source: a Presbyterian minister named Thomas Bayes.

Though Bayes has been dead for 250 years, he invented an innovative statistical approach that is still very much alive, and the researchers said it should enable them to develop

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COURTESY GLENN A. BLACK LABORATORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON

a clearer picture of when Mississippian peoples occupied some Vacant Quarter settlements, and when they left. “This will be one of the biggest deployments yet of Bayesian chronological techniques in American archaeology,” said Tony Krus of the University of South Dakota, who is leading that part of the project.“And it could be a game changer.”

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ncient abandonments have long held “a particular fascination” for archaeologists, Cobb, Krus and their colleagues noted in a description of their Vacant Quarter project written for the National Science Foundation, a major funder of this multi-year endeavor. In the Southwestern United States, for instance, researchers have spent a century

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TONY BOUDREAUX

Researchers from the Chickasaw Nation and the University of Mississippi water-screen ecavated dirt in search of tiny artifacts.

seeking to understand why, in the late thirteenth century, the Ancestral Puebloans vacated the spectacular cliff dwellings and stone cities they had built in the Mesa Verde region. It’s a mystery that has captivated the public, too, spawning countless books, magazine articles, and television shows.

But the idea that similarly dramatic mass departures once occurred in the Southeastern U.S. has traditionally gotten less attention from scholars and the media. In part, that may be because an abandoned, brush-covered dirt mound makes for less dramatic and colorful storytelling than a crumbling cliff dwelling. But Williams’ hypothesis “really helped focus attention on the idea that … there was something big going on in this region that we should be looking at,” recalled archaeologist David Anderson of University of Tennessee, who has studied the Vacant Quarter, but is not involved in this project.

In several papers Williams even suggested how researchers could go about testing whether the Vacant Quarter was, in fact, a real thing. One issue he flagged was that much of the evidence supporting the idea came from prehistoric sites located in river valleys. Perhaps, he wrote, whatever forces had prompted people to abandon these low-lying settlements, such as floods, warfare, or disease, hadn’t affected Mississippian communities located on higher ground or further away from river valleys.Williams challenged researchers to see if this notion was correct.

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In the early 1990s, Cobb was one archaeologist who accepted that challenge. Over a decade, he and his colleagues documented three Late Mississippian villages—known as Dillow’s Ridge, Millstone Bluff, and Hayes Creek—that were located on uplands in the Ohio River Valley in southern Illinois, roughly in the center of the Vacant Quarter. Analyses of artifacts and radiocarbon dating of burned wood taken from structures indicated that all three villages had been abandoned at about the same time, around 1450. That showed depopulation of the Vacant Quarter was not limited only to river valleys, Cobb and co-author Brian Butler wrote in a 2002 paper published in American Antiquity, but was “likely a widespread phenomenon that crosscut environmental zones.” Other studies have since supported that notion.

Researchers have also been tackling another challenge posed by Williams: figuring out exactly when the Vacant Quarter abandonment occurred, and whether it was “synchronic,” meaning it occurred roughly simultaneously everywhere. Williams initially proposed that abandonment had been synchronic and took place sometime between 1450 and 1550. But archaeologists have found that some sites, including Cahokia, were abandoned much earlier, perhaps by the mid-1300s. That suggested abandonment played out differently in different parts of the Vacant Quarter, with some settlements flickering out while others lingered on.

In a bid to construct a better chronology, about a decade

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could have kept in reserve to get them through hard times.

The researchers found that the farmers likely had adequate water to produce plentiful harvests in about three-quarters of the years between 1200 and 1500, and the Vacant Quarter populations appear to have expanded, or at least remained stable, during the wet years. But the region also experienced four extended droughts, with the shortest lasting eight years and the longest twenty-nine. The latter drought, which lasted from 1385 to 1413, appears to have been particularly devastating, with communities likely experiencing total crop failure during nearly half of that period.

Vacant Quarter populations appear to have dropped severely due to the drought, and never really recovered. But it wasn’t clear that drought alone caused abandonment, Meeks and Anderson emphasized.The reality, they suggested, was likely far more complicated, involving an interplay of environmental stress and social factors.

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desire to understand that complexity is driving the new study.“Climate change is sure looking like an important underlying driver of abandonment, but it also looks like not every community is responding in the same way at the same time,” said Cobb. And that makes sense, he added, because although the Vacant Quarter communities shared a “veneer of similarity,” they were different in a number of ways. Consequently, some communities might have responded to stress

CHARLES COBB

ago Anderson and Scott Meeks, who is now with the consulting firm Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research, undertook a Herculean task.They compiled 557 radiocarbon dates that archaeologists had obtained from charred wood and other artifacts found at 113 sites in the Vacant Quarter’s five main geographical regions. Taken together, the dates offered a rough guide to how much of the quarter had been occupied at any given time, and how populations had changed between 1200 and 1500.The analysis strongly suggested that abandonment had been synchronic, with “the most significant period of population decline” occurring between 1380 and 1420, they reported in a chapter of the 2013 book Soils, Climate and Society.

Meeks and Anderson also went a step further by examining one possible cause of abandonment: precipitation shifts that created food shortages. First they reconstructed how much water was likely available to farmers in the Southeastern U.S. between 1200 and 1500. The estimates were based on growth rings found in trees that grew in the region at the time: the width and density of the rings can indicate whether a year was wet or dry. Then, they calculated how much of one key staple—maize—the available water would have allowed farmers to grow, recognizing that both too much water (floods) and too little (droughts) can cause crop failure. Finally, the researchers calculated how shifting crop yields would have affected how much food communities

This bowl was recovered from a site in Tennessee. Its style is typical of bowls produced in the Late Mississippian period.

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Members of the Chickasaw Nation dig a trench at the Stark Farm site.

by changing their agricultural practices, for example, while others tried praying to their gods for rain, or simply declaring war on nearby communities and taking their land and food reserves.

To explore such differences, the research team is focusing on what happened prior to abandonment in two very distinct parts of the Vacant Quarter that are about 190 miles apart: the Middle Cumberland River Valley in Tennessee, on the quarter’s eastern edge, and the Upper Tombigbee River Valley in Mississippi, at its southern frontier. Archaeological evidence suggests the Middle Cumberland was a booming center of Mississippian culture, with a population that was relatively large for the Vacant Quarter. Residents built at least twenty-five multi-mound complexes as well as many smaller settlements. In contrast, populations in the Upper Tombigbee appear to have been sparser, and they built no known large multi-mound centers.

One major component of the project involves new field work at the Butler Mound near Columbus, in eastern Mississippi. It is just the third Late Mississippian site in the area to get intensive study. In 2016, researchers used remote sensing to identify a number of potential structures and other cultural features. They also collected and radiocarbon dated charred wood from near the top of the mound, and from one dwelling. “We can’t yet tell when mound construction began, but the preliminary radiocarbon dates suggest that construction was continuing into the late 1400s,” said Boudreaux, who is partnering with researchers and university students from the Chickasaw Nation to examine the site. If those dates hold up, he said,“we could be looking at one of the Vacant Quarter’s last occupied mounds.”The researchers will be comparing what they learn at the Butler Mound to data gathered at the two other, already documented, Mississippian sites in the region.

In Tennessee’s Middle Cumberland Valley, the researchers won’t be doing much digging. Instead, they will focus on analyzing the existing museum collections of ceramics and other artifacts that archaeologists have collected at seven Mississippian sites. One goal is to assemble a large new set of radiocarbon dates that will allow them to better understand when the Vacant Quarter sites were abandoned. And here, said Krus, is where the deceased cleric Thomas Bayes is lending a hand. His key concept, which has been realized thanks to the advent of modern computers, is that scientists can use their expert knowledge to improve calculations of probability. Bayes-inspired tools are now used routinely by political analysts, gamblers, and financiers to construct sophisticated virtual worlds, in which they run millions of simulations of elections, sporting events, and investment decisions. These

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simulations, which are informed by assumptions that the experts feed into the models, have proven adept at identifying the most probable outcomes.

In the Vacant Quarter study, the archaeologists are using Bayesian simulations for purposes such as determining how many samples of wood and other materials they will need to radiocarbon date in order to calculate highly-accurate occupation spans for the ten sites they’re investigating. Such finegrained information is key to understanding the chronology of abandonment, they noted. Krus concluded they will need to date 180 new samples (in addition to ninety-four already in hand), most of which will come from museum collections.

The Bayesian tools “are a big help in helping decide how to maximize our sampling time and effort… to get the most robust conclusions,” Krus said.The simulations also help save money, since dating samples is expensive.

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TONY BOUDREAUX

The team has also started reviewing published data on plant and animal remains found at their sites, in order to learn more about past local climates and what people were eating.

And they are looking for evidence of social strife, such as the construction of palisades or other defenses against attacks, that might have set the stage for migrations. The researchers also plan to analyze the design and make-up of pottery found at sites, to see if ceramics were flowing between these settlements—a possible sign of population movements. Such studies could also shed light on where people went after they abandoned the Vacant Quarter. The ceramic studies, for example, could help confirm a suspicion that the Vacant Quarter residents living in the Upper Tombigbee River area migrated a few dozen miles west, where they occupied Stark Farm and other sites.

Anderson, for one, sees the new study—with its use of

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Bayesian modeling, paleoclimate and agricultural data, and fine-grained approach to resolving a large-scale puzzle—as a model for future investigations of other ancient abandoned homelands. Archaeologists have already identified several other regions in Eastern North America that appear to have experienced mass out-migrations, he noted. “We’re coming to understand that the prehistoric political landscape… was shifting [and] chaotic, with people abandoning some regions even as dense populations grew or stayed on in others,” he said.“So, I have no doubt we are going to recognize many, many more Vacant Quarters in the years to come.”And archaeologists, he suggested, need to be ready to explore the void.

DAVID MALAKOFF is a deputy news editor at Science and a frequent contributor to American Archaeology.

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SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY HERITAGE LAB ARTIST ERIC S. CARLSON / COLORIZED BY CAROLYN ARCABASCIO

An artist’s depiction of Mission Santa Clara de Asís, circa 1800. A portion of the Native American neighborhood is in the foreground, showing both native-style dwellings (right) and adobe dormitories (left). The dormitory cut-away shows its interior and construction techniques. The mission had a Native population of 1,318 individuals at that time.

It’s often thought that Native Americans either died off or were stripped of their culture during the colonization of northern California. But recent investigations are revealing that the Natives maintained their traditions.

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And Yet, They Persisted

BY GAYLE KECK american archaeology

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this dialog, we realize we need to reframe this and start to recognize the missions as Native space.”

Schneider agreed.“What gets lost in the story of missionera California,” he explained,“is that missions are established in complicated, dynamic, and long-standing indigenous landscapes that have their own political, economic, and social histories—and the padres really didn’t have a concept of what they were engaging with.”

In fact, all the missions but one were built on Native village sites. Allen said the padres “recognized that Native Americans built their villages in the best places: near rivers, at higher elevations, with access to food.” Of course, that also put the missionaries close to prospective converts, known as “neophytes.”

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he Natives were already suffering from contact diseases.

As the Spanish missionaries moved up into Alta (upper) California, they brought new animals, new invasive plant species, new power dynamics, and new goods.

Allen said the Native peoples saw their world shifting. From that perspective, contact with the missions itself could be viewed as a strategy of persistence.“If you see someone coming in who seems to have a lot of access to goods, wouldn’t you at least send some family members there?” she asked.

“It becomes a matter of ‘What are our options here?’” Some Natives chose to join the missions, while others did not.

Once Natives moved to the missions, they maintained their traditional ways.The historical record shows that many continued to occupy traditional Native housing, rather than the structures built under direction of the padres.“If you had

LEE PANICH

t Mak-‘amham restaurant in Berkeley, California, you can sample “old school acorn bread” or more contemporary “acorn-flour brownies with walnuts + bay salt,” on a menu created from traditional Native Ohlone ingredients. In San Bernadino, elementary school students read a series of historical novels approved by Chumash tribal elders, tracing California history from a Native viewpoint, rather than constructing models of colonial Spanish missions like past generations. And Julia Parker, a Native Coast MiwokKashaya Pomo basket-weaver—whose works are owned by the Smithsonian Institution and Queen Elizabeth II—passes on her skills to four generations of her family.

All of these activities may come as a surprise to many who assume Native Californians and their traditional lifeways didn’t survive the Spanish Mission era (1769 – 1834).

When California’s twenty-one missions were secularized in 1833, the popular belief was that Native Californians had all died, assimilated into other cultures, or intermarried, losing any traces of their traditions and practices. But in fact “Native people found ways to weather that period and survive,” according to Tsim Schneider, an enrolled citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo) and an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“For so long, all of the scholarship focused on the missions as a colonial space,” said Rebecca Allen, a mission researcher and president of the Society for California Archaeology.“Even when Native American peoples are talked about, it’s their role in that colonial space. The more archaeology and research, and the more Native Americans get involved in

These burned shell beads were recovered from a pit feature at Mission Santa Clara. Archaeologist Lee Panich posits that materials like these are evidence that Native people continued aspects of their traditional mourning ceremonies, including the destruction of the deceased’s personal possessions, while in residence in the mission.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROL M. HIGHSMITH [REPRODUCTION NUMBER, E.G., LC-USZ62-123456]

Like other California missions where Natives faced severe hardships, Mission San Carlos Borromeo (also known as Carmel Mission), is now a popular tourist attraction.

2,000 Native Americans at a mission, only about ten percent would have been living in mission housing,” said Allen.

For several reasons, though, evidence of traditional housing was never found in archaeological digs. The ephemeral nature of structural plant materials like tule and saplings, the lack of examining the missions’ outer perimeters, and a focus on exploring the colonial footprint all hindered obtaining the full archaeological picture of the true mission landscape for many decades.

Recently, Allen made several important discoveries.“We work with large mechanical equipment, like a backhoe fitted with a flat blade, and we slowly peel back layers of soil over large areas,” she said. “In Native American living areas, you don’t find stone floors.” Instead, archaeologists search for stained, or darker, “soil affected by people living there.”

Allen used this technique at Missions San Luis Obispo, San Jose, and Santa Clara.

The Santa Clara site revealed the first archaeological evidence of a traditional Native house on mission property.“First we could see part of a round stain,” she said.“Pretty soon we have a half-circle, then we pull back more and we have a full circle. And pretty soon we have the whole outline. Then we can go in for detailed excavation.”The house’s footprint was a shallow basin with sloping walls and a flat floor, measuring nearly ten feet in diameter. In the center was an intact hearth

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filled with ash. Analysis of samples from the floor revealed native foods including black walnuts and elderberries, as well as wheat, corn, and evidence of tobacco use.

What’s more, the entire house had been burned. “If someone died, or if someone moved, they would burn the house. What better way to keep pests and disease down?” she asked. Allen contrasted this with the padres’ practice of “stuffing” all unmarried women into a single adobe dormitory. Disease took a heavy toll in these tight quarters; by the end of the Mission period, the ratio of men to women at many missions was two to one. “Living in what was considered ‘civilized’ housing was killing them,” she noted.

Allen’s team also discovered pits near the house that were filled with animal bones, ceramics, chipped-stone artifacts, and a large quantity of shell beads. She initially interpreted the pits as caches to store, or hide, trade items, but some of the pits showed evidence of burning. Archaeologist Lee Panich of Santa Clara University had a suggestion. In addition to burning a deceased person’s lodging, the deceased’s possessions were typically burned, too, as part of mourning ceremonies. Panich posited that some of these pits of burned objects were the continuation of a Native mourning practice, right in the midst of the Catholic mission.“That was a fun moment,” Allen said, “of someone else coming in with a new perspective.”

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Colonialism And Its Aftermath Franciscan missionaries founded twenty-one missions in Alta California to convert Natives to Catholicism and to help solidify Imperial Spain’s claim to the region. The mission padres claimed vast tracts of land, using Native labor to raise cattle, sheep, and domesticated crops, including wheat and corn, fruit and olive trees, and grapes for producing wine and brandy. They were also required to provide food and supplies for Spanish army outposts.

It was a horrific time for Indigenous peoples, who nonetheless persisted.

The following timeline notes some of the significant events that occurred from the colonial period to the present.

1769 - The first Alta California Spanish mission is founded at San Diego.

Estimates place the Native Californian population from 133,000 to more than 705,000.

1806 - A measles epidemic kills an estimated twenty-five percent of the mission population in the San Francisco Bay area within just three months.

1810 - The Mexican War of Independence begins.

1821 - Mexico (including Alta California) gains independence from Spain.

1824 - The largest number of Natives in the history of the mission system—21,066—are attached to missions this year.

1832 - By the end of this year, mission padres performed a total of 87,787 baptisms and 24,529 marriages, and they recorded 63,789 deaths over the course of the missions’ existence in Alta California. The missions collectively own 151,180 head of cattle, 137,969 sheep, and 14,522 horses.

1833 - Mexico passes a law secularizing the missions. The law stipulates that Native mission neophytes are to receive up to half of the mission land; this was never put into effect.

1834-1836 - The missions are secularized; their lands are divided and given out in grants by the Mexican government.

1837-1838 - A smallpox epidemic devastates the Native population north of San Francisco, killing an estimated 70,000.

1846-1873 - More than 370 massacres of Natives by non-Natives take place in California. Coupled with individual killings of Natives, it’s believed that more than 100,000 were killed during this time period.

1850 - California becomes part of the United States. The California legislature passes a law removing Native Americans from their lands and allowing them to be sold into indentured servitude for minor offences, such as loitering.

1851 - California Governor Peter Burnett said he expects “a war of extermination” to be waged “until the Indian race becomes extinct.” The state authorizes $1.29 million to subsidize militia campaigns against Natives.

1910 - Estimates place the Native Californian population at 25,000, its lowest figure since European contact.

2010 - In the U.S. census, 723,225 Californians self-identify as American Indian or Alaska Native.

2019 - California Governor Gavin Newsom issues an executive order apologizing on behalf of the state’s citizens for a history of “violence, maltreatment and neglect” against Native Americans. There are currently 109 federally recognized Native American tribes in California.

—GAYLE KECK

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Panich, author of the upcoming book Narratives of Persistence, is well aware of the difficult situation Native peoples had to navigate. “It would have been apparent early-on that the missions were dangerous,” he said,“but also apparent that the Spanish were here to stay. So I think a reasonable interpretation was that certain groups thought it was in their best interests to align themselves with the missions—but the archaeology shows that they didn’t buy into it fully.”

The padres kept meticulous records, including noting whether individuals received last rites before their deaths. Studies of mission records show that “Natives, by and large, weren’t accepting last rites, or even annual communion,” Panich said.

(However, other researchers believe the missionaries may have thought neophytes weren’t pious enough for those rites.) In reports back to Spain, the padres mentioned “how difficult it was to root out Native belief systems,” Panich added.

Given the modern-day belief that Natives weren’t allowed to leave the missions, Panich said experts were surprised by the padres’ accounts of neophytes who died outside of the missions. “If you got some sort of sickness,” he explained, “you probably knew which ones were fatal—so people likely just took off and went back home to die.” This theory is supported by archaeological evidence. “There are instances of burials that have been found on the outskirts of the mission area, in precontact-looking sites, of individuals who are buried with thousands of glass beads,” he said.“That could be some of those people coming out of the missions to die in their home villages.” Even at some burials in mission cemeteries, padres noted that Natives followed their tradition of throwing beads into the graves.

During a 2007 construction mitigation project at Mission San Jose, excavators uncovered a structure approximately thirty-three-feet wide, which was too large for a domestic building. They recovered various objects such as shell beads, abalone pendants, local earthenware, groundstone, chert, and obsidian; there was also a metal cross. Panich believes the structure was a sweat lodge (temescal), used by Natives for gatherings and religious practices.

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LEE PANICH

Students from Santa Clara University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, excavate at Toms Point. This area was home to a long-standing Coast Miwok community where Native people returned after the missions were secularized.

There’s even support in the mission’s papers for this theory. Its death record states, “On the 15th of the current month [December, 1818]...the neophytes Azarias and Francisco died under very dangerous circumstances...They were in the temescal (I wish we had never permitted its construction) watching the dance, which is always dangerous.” The cause of death is also described: “They ate a root that everyone knows to be very poisonous.” Panich believes the root was likely jimsonweed, a hallucinogenic. Considering how outnumbered the padres were—a handful of Spaniards to more than a thousand neophytes—“they probably needed to let people do their thing just to keep everybody happy,” he concluded.

Other Native religious objects found in adobe dormitories at both San Jose and Santa Clara missions include charmstones, which were sometimes used by traditional healers to “trap” sickness. The stones are so sacred that some tribes won’t allow publication of their photos.

There’s also evidence that, contrary to the common belief, native people who lived at the missions were not shut off from the outside world and their homelands. Native people frequently ran away from missions, and there were also times when the padres allowed them to leave for a few

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days or weeks to hunt, gather, and conduct other rites of passage. “They were traveling purposefully, staying in touch with their homelands,” Schneider said.

Items, such as obsidian tools and shell beads have been found in Native dormitories.“Obsidian is an obvious connection we can link to specific places. In the last ten years, we’ve analyzed roughly two thousand obsidian artifacts from Missions San Jose and Santa Clara,” Panich noted.“Ninety percent of that came from St. Helena and Santa Rosa [about 100 miles to the north]; ten percent came from the Sierras [as much as 200 miles to the east]. They must have been coming in as trade from people running away from missions, or on passes.

That contradicts the previous belief that, when the last neophyte was baptized, the villages had all been abandoned.”

There are also darker tales of Native persistence in the historical record. Lorenzo Asisara, who was born at Mission Santa Cruz in 1819, talked about mission life from a Native perspective. “The Spanish priests were very cruel with the Indians,” he told a researcher in 1877.“They mistreated them a lot, they kept them poorly fed and ill-clothed, and they made them work like slaves. The priests did not practice what they preached at the pulpit.”

According to Asisara, his father was one of twenty

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even more difficult, particularly as the Gold Rush changed California’s dynamic once again and it became a U.S. state.

“That’s when you had out and out genocide, especially north of San Francisco Bay,” said Panich. State-funded militias carried out hundreds of massacres. “Groups that had been in the missions escaped some of this,” he continued, “because, often, they made the choice to turn their identities inward.

Going underground was a survival strategy, but it also cost them their authenticity in the eyes of later observers.”

Still other Native families returned to their homelands, where they blended mission-learned work skills with traditional seasonal mobility patterns. “Sometimes those who were pressed into laboring at local ranches, mills, and farms were quite skilled in combining their seasonal employment with collecting trips for food and other resources, and as one way to keep track of dispersed family members,” Schneider said. At Toms Point, a cape about sixty miles northwest of San Francisco, Schneider and Panich conducted research on private property that was once home to a trading post that was founded sometime during the 1840s by George Wood.

He married a Native woman and his workforce was Native American.

SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY

Natives who conspired to murder Padre Andres Quintana, an infamous priest who flogged men, women, and even children at the Santa Cruz mission, using a whip tipped with a cruel wire point. The murder took place in 1812, a time of turmoil in Alta California. The Mexican independence movement began in 1810, ending Spanish supply ships and crown support for the missions. “The padres needed to rely even more on Native labor,” Panich explained. “That’s when you really see things decay in terms of the relationships.” When neophytes fled the missions in these later years, the padres would send out punitive expeditions. “Sometimes they’d bring back the fugitives,” he said, “and also capture women and children.” These captives were used as leverage “to get holdouts to come into the mission,” Panich added.

When the missions were secularized by the Mexican government in 1833, Natives faced a new reality—and they adapted once again. “Some Native people remained living in the communities they had created at the missions,” Schneider stated.“In other cases, they were forced into work at a nearby rancho, where they often applied some of the skills they learned at the missions, such as blacksmithing or carpentry.”

For Natives who hadn’t been in the missions, life became

The remnants of a Native-style dwelling were revealed during an investigation at Mission Santa Clara in the mid-2000s.

At the time, this was the first such dwelling to be documented archaeologically at a California mission site.

Another was recently uncovered at Mission San Gabriel in Los Angeles.

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TSIM D. SCHNEIDER

A flaked bottle glass artifact from the Toms Point trading post site. Investigations at one nearby site recovered a complete arrow point manufactured from similar bottle glass.

Consulting historical maps that pinpointed the trading post--and even noted Native housing--the archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to search the area. “Even though the footprint of the trading post wasn’t there, we were left with all the remnants of the people who worked, ate, danced, and held feasts at this place,” Schneider said.

“By working at Toms Point, we were able to recontextualize this colonial place that is symbolic of an era of violence and widespread Native American cultural loss into a much longer history and record of indigenous presence reaching back at least 13,000 years.”

Soil samples turned up charred seeds that may be evidence of typical Native American land-management via burning. “The faunal assemblage showed persistence in terms of foodways,” Schneider noted, with a variety of waterfowl, fish, and shellfish remains. In addition to obsidian and chert flakes, the team discovered scraping tools shaped from bottle glass, using traditional techniques. “The bottle glass tools and debitage are especially poignant examples of indigenous persistence, or Native people creatively applying their knowledge and skills of flintknapping to imported materials,” Schneider said.

Why is the archaeological story of persistence so

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important? “It was a question that was bugging me, the history of my peoples’ encounters with colonial institutions,” Schneider explained. “We know we’re still here and we have a long and resilient history, but the archaeology was lacking and I wanted to do the work that might help fill in the gaps of the story between the mission period and the modern era that my tribe is a part of.”

“Change and continuity are part of the narrative all along,” he continued.“Native people created ways to remain connected to their loved ones, to their cherished resources for baskets, food, and tools, and to the landscapes that are meaningful to them. They persisted to remain relevant and to maintain a sense of belonging in a landscape that was rapidly being taken away from them. I think that’s a story I can speak to as a tribal member. Forward-thinking is at the heart of persistence,” Schneider concluded.“There is always a vision of the future that Native Americans want for their families.”

GAYLE KECK is a frequent contributor to American Archaeology. Her article “Discovering The Archaeology Of Tattooing,” which appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of American Archaeology, won the Society for American Archaeology’s 2019 Gene Stuart Award.

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new acquisitions

A Winning Bid For Preservation

JARROD BURKS

The Conservancy and its partners protect a Hopewell earthwork.

An aerial view of the center of the earthwork. Its embankments are located in the woods surrounding this opening.

T

he Fortified Hill Earthwork, one of the last remaining relatively intact Hopewell earthworks on private land in Ohio, was recently purchased at auction by conservationists. Fortified Hill is a so-called hill fort enclosing about seventeen acres of a ridge overlooking the Great Miami River.

It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974.

Hilltop enclosures were once fairly common in southwestern Ohio, but almost all of them have been destroyed by

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residential sprawl, mining, and mechanized agriculture. The Fortified Hill earthwork has been known to archaeologists since 1836, when it was mapped by local antiquarian James McBride, an esteemed Ohio pioneer politician who mapped many of the earthworks along the Great Miami River. His map was reproduced in Squier’s and Davis’Ancient Monuments of the Mississippian Valley in 1848, although apparently they didn’t visit the earthwork.

In addition to his Fortified Hill map, McBride produced,

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and Squier and Davis reproduced, a map of a six-mile section of the Great Miami River south of Dayton that denoted Fortified Hill as one of seven monumental earthworks located along the river. Today, Fortified Hill is the only one that remains relatively intact. It was preserved in large part because of its acquisition by Louis Barich, a physician in nearby Hamilton, Ohio. Barich retained the land in its natural condition of second-growth forest and meadows. He told friends that he did this in order to preserve the archaeological site and he hoped that the site would be permanently preserved. Unfortunately, when Barich died in January 2019, his will made no provision for the disposition of the archaeologically significant property. When this oversight became known to Jeff Leipzig, Barich’s friend and medical partner, he reached out to the archaeological community. As a result, the Conservancy became involved.

The Conservancy contacted the bank handling Barich’s estate and proposed buying the property for its appraised market value. In August, we were informed that such a purchase would not be possible and that an auction would be held on September 28. In the meantime, Leipzig gave numerous interviews to the news media and appealed to local charitable foundations for grants to help the Conservancy

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fund the acquisition. Jarrod Burks, Director of Heartland Earthwork Conservancy, an Ohio nonprofit dedicated to the preservation, study, and interpretation of earthworks in the Midwest, made HEC’s Facebook page the nexus of an online fundraising drive, directing supporters to the Conservancy’s fundraising page.

Although the Conservancy routinely solicits donations to fund acquisitions, the Fortified Hill project created a quandary, since it was far from a done deal. We would need funds only if we prevailed at auction, but we could not bid without them. Consequently, the Conservancy asked donors to pledge their support without sending money. This made it possible to bid up to the limits of whatever war chest we amassed, but we would not have to return the funds if we failed to buy the property. By the time the auction was held, over one thousand people had pledged about $240,000. Though this was a remarkable sum, it hardly guaranteed success. Barich’s estate included twenty parcels, and the seventeen-acre Fortified Hill Earthwork sprawled across three parcels with a combined acreage of 161 acres and an appraised price of nearly $1.2 million.

Leipzig reached out to Nanci Wilks Lanni, the daughter of the founder of the non-profit Pyramid Hill Sculpture Garden and Museum, located near Fortified Hill. Lanni took an interest in the project, since her father had been a friend of Barich and had tried repeatedly to acquire the Fortified Hill property for his sculpture garden. Armed with funds from the Harry T. Wilks Family Foundation, Pyramid Hill won the bid for the three Fortified Hill parcels, as well as a contiguous parcel that contains the remnants of Werner Mound. By the end of the day, all the archaeologically significant properties were purchased for more than $1.5 million, insuring their preservation.

The three partners—Pyramid Hill Sculpture Garden and Museum, Three Valleys Conservation Trust, a local organization that raised $50,000 for the property, and the Conservancy—are currently formulating plans for the management of the property. Pyramid Hill wants to incorporate the property into the sculpture park. Three Valleys hopes to do invasive plant control and monitor some sensitive habitats away from the earthwork. The Conservancy wants to make the archaeological resources available to researchers and the public. Since all of the goals are mutually compatible, a multipurpose plan seems likely. —Paul Gardner

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C O N S E R VA N C Y

field notes WEST—In 2018 the University of Nevada’s Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit returned to the Conservancy’s Leonard Rockshelter preserve in western Nevada to evaluate a claim made in 1951 by Robert Heizer of the University of California, Berkeley that the shelter was occupied 13,000 years ago. Heizer based this claim on obsidian flakes found in a layer of radiocarbon-dated bat guano in one of his excavation trenches. He noted that the flakes were discovered just above gravel deposited when Lake Lahontan flooded the shelter roughly 15,000 years ago. The shelter stands about 4,500 feet above the valley floor now. The research team relocated and reopened the trench in which the flakes were found, and they also excavated a test pit adjacent to it, and collected samples for dating.

The researchers’ analysis of data collected in 2018 led to a critical discovery. Based on their remapping of the site with a high-precision GPS, it is now clear that the rockshelter sits roughly 100 feet lower than Heizer believed. This is important because at the revised elevation, Leonard Rockshelter would have last flooded during the Younger Dryas, a wet period from about 12,900-11,600 years ago during which Lake Lahontan rebounded, rather than remained high and dry as Heizer argued based on the erroneous elevation. A sample of organic matter found directly above the gravel was radiocarbon dated to 11,250 years ago. This date, which is corroborated by other studies, indicates Heizer’s 13,000-year-old date is wrong. Heizer’s date was probably an inaccuracy of the sort that was commonplace during the early days of radiocarbon dating, because it is unlikely that any organic material of that age was preserved during the subsequent flooding event.

This past July, the researchers returned to Leonard Rockshelter with the hope of finding artifacts associated with the gravel in a new test pit. Archaeologists often remark that the

GEOFFREY SMITH

Researchers Return to Leonard Rockshelter

Researchers work at Leonard Rockshelter.

most significant finds of a project come in the final days of fieldwork, and so it was that Ph.D. student Nicole George uncovered an obsidian biface directly above the gravel on the final day of the project. The position of the biface atop the Younger Dryas gravel confirms that, as Heizer argued long ago, people first occupied the shelter shortly after Lake Lahontan receded, albeit somewhat later than he initially believed.

Conservancy Preserve Listed On The National Register Of Historic Places SOUTHWEST—The greater Galisteo Basin of north-central New Mexico contains a high density of well-preserved Ancestral Puebloan and Spanish Colonial sites dating from the late-pre-Columbian through the early- historic periods.

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Three of these sites were recently nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, including El Camino Real – Rancho del Río Santa Fe, a one-acre Conservancy preserve.

A grant from the New Mexico State Historic Preservation

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TAMARA JAGER STEWART

Division helped fund the nomination.

El Camino Real – Rancho del Río Santa Fe is one of only four remaining pre-Pueblo Revolt (1680) Spanish Colonial sites documented along the lower Santa Fe River of the northern Rio Grande Valley. The site is located along El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (the Royal Road of the Interior Land) corridor as it heads from the village of La Cienega to Santa Fe.The site saw much travel and trade as Spanish conquistadors, colonists, and missionaries made their way north to Santa Fe with wagon loads of supplies.

Consisting of stone foundations, adobe mounds, and associated artifacts located just above the Santa Fe River floodplain, the site includes the remains of a two-room rancho (a small, residential building), a possible attached torreón (a round lookout tower), and a corral for livestock. The structures have cobble and volcanic rock foundations, and they once had walls of adobe bricks. In 1970, E. Boyd of the Museum of New Mexico noted the site contained historic

A view of El Camino Real corridor.

native pottery, and eighteenth-century majolica, a European ceramic type.

Some historians doubt that the circular foundation was a lookout tower, given that it’s situated at a lower elevation that would not have provided a very good view.

In the late 1980s a private landowner who had proposed developing the surrounding lands gave the site to the Conservancy. We crafted a long-term management plan for the site, which the public can visit by request.

SAMUEL BOURCY

A Geophysical Survey At Lamoka Lake NORTHEAST—In the summer of 2019 a team of researchers and volunteers led

by Samuel Bourcy and Matthew Sanger of Binghamton University conducted a geophysical survey of the Lamoka Lake Preserve in New York. This large, Late Archaic village was identified in 1907 by a farmer, and it was first investigated

by William Ritchie of the Rochester Municipal Museum (now the Rochester Museum and Science Center) in 1925.

Ritchie subsequently excavated the site in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Researchers with the Buffalo State Museum also excavated the site in the late ’70s, and a crew from Utica College conducted another brief excavation in the 1990s.

Lamoka Lake was acquired by the Conservancy in 2006. Archaeologists think it was initially occupied around 3500 B.C. based on the types of projectile points found there. Researchers have uncovered thousands of artifacts

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Volunteers conduct a geophysical survey at the site.

from stone projectile points to worked bone tools. They have also found postholes evidencing some of the earliest examples of structures in the region.

The purpose of Binghamton’s geophysical survey was to pinpoint

the locations of the features, such as fire pits, house floors, and activity areas, that the previous excavations had uncovered in order make an accurate map of the site. The researchers were also looking for undiscovered features.

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Reviews Ghost Fleet Awakened: Lake George’s Sunken Bateaux of 1758 Thunder Go North: The Hunt for Sir Francis Drake’s Fair & Good Bay

By Melissa Darby (University of Utah Press, 2019; 336 pgs., illus., $25 cloth; www.uofupress.com)

In 1577, Francis Drake, already notorious for his marauding on the Spanish Main, set out on a secret mission for Queen Elizabeth I to explore and claim the western coast of North America. On his way, he raided Spanish settlements and ships, taking a large quantity of gold and silver as well as other riches. But by the summer of 1579 his sole remaining ship, the Golden Hind, was leaking badly and in desperate need of a safe harbor to make repairs. They found a “fair and good bay” somewhere north of San Francisco Bay, beached the ship, unloaded 23,000 pounds of silver, and made the repairs. They stayed from five to ten weeks interacting with local Natives before departing to circumnavigate the earth, returning to England in 1580.

Historians and archaeologists have been looking for this bay for more than a century. By the 1930s, a consensus developed that it was Drake’s Bay near San Francisco. A bronze plaque was discovered in Marin County in 1936 that matches the one Drake left, and California historians and archaeologists laid claim to the Drake landing.

Archaeologist Melissa Darby of Portland State University uses modern historical research, ethnographic descriptions, and other evidence to dispute the Drake’s Bay location.

The brass plaque turns out to be a fraud, and Drake’s descriptions of the Natives don’t fit. Instead, she makes a compelling case that the bay is in central Oregon. The story of Drake’s voyage is enmeshed in intrigue from its beginning until today. Elizabeth secreted all of his records and a modern historian apparently faked the plaque. Thanks to Darby’s thorough research, we are close to a definitive answer to a 400-year-old mystery.

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By Joseph W. Zarzynski (SUNY Press, 2019; 284 pgs., illus., $25 paper, www.sunypress.edu)

In the eighteenth century, bateaux (French for boats) were the most popular and versatile watercraft for the inland waterways of British and French colonial America. Hundreds of these small vessels plied the rivers and lakes of upstate New York and the surrounding territories, where they transported most of the commerce of the region. They were also an important part of the military arsenals of the competing European superpowers, carrying supplies as well as troops. They were double-ended, flat-bottomed, chine-built, and powered by oars and sails. When the French and Indian War between Britain, France, and their allies broke out in 1754, the waterways of New York were key areas of conflict. The French controlled Lake Champlain and the British Lake George.

Bateaux were extensively used by both armies.

In the autumn of 1758, the British commanders at Lake George deliberately sank two floating batteries, some row galleries and whale boats, a sloop, and 260 bateaux in order to protect them from the French army over the winter. In the spring of 1759, the British raised this fleet from wet storage, repaired the wooden boats, and put them back in action against the French. The British army of 11,000 men and 800 boats quickly moved north to Lake Champlain; but some of the bateaux were not recovered and lost to history.

This volume by marine archaeologist Joseph Zarzynski tells the intriguing story of the rediscovery of the lost bateaux in 1960 and the decades-long efforts to preserve, recover, and study these lost vessels. Zarzynski describes the various initiatives developed by him and his colleagues under the auspices of Bateaux Below, the non-profit organized to preserve the bateaux. Much of this work was groundbreaking for maritime archaeology, and the story provides important precedents for marine preservation everywhere. Over a period of forty years, these dedicated archaeologists have developed new technology and policies to govern preservation of marine sites, as they have recovered vast quantities of invaluable information about a little known chapter of American history. This volume tells that story and is thus a major contribution to the entire field.

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Captain Kidd’s Lost Ship: The Wreck of the Quedagh Merchant

By Frederick H. Hanselmann (University Press of Florida, 2019; 222 pgs., illus., $85 cloth; upress.ufl.edu)

In 2007, a shipwreck was discovered just off the coast of Catalina Island in the Dominican Republic. Fortunately, it was reported to the authorities who promptly asked a team of marine archaeologists to investigate. After a quick survey, the team proposed that the wreck, which had numerous cannons, was from the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries. This matched the time period and last known location of the Quedagh Merchant, a ship abandoned

by Captain William Kidd in 1699 while he returned to Boston to answer charges that he was a pirate. The ship was believed to have been burned at about that time by Kidd’s Dominican colleagues. Kidd fared no better, as he was determined to be a pirate, sent to London, tried, and hanged. Stories of buried treasure abounded, and the wreck of the Quedagh Merchant was much sought after but never found. Until 2007.

This engaging volume tells the story of professional marine archaeologists from Indiana University who mapped and studied the wreck using the latest techniques and technology. They also made extensive use of historical documents, largely from Kidd’s trial, to match the wreck to descriptions of the ship and its contents. The historical documentation and the features of the wreck were determined to closely match the Quedagh Merchant, making it a very high probability that this is the ship. Kidd left no treasure behind on the ship, taking it with him to New England, thus making the wreck an unlikely target for treasure hunters who destroy many shipwrecks. The next challenge was how best to manage and preserve the wreck.

Located in thirty feet of water near the shore, the wreck of the Quedagh Merchant was an excellent candidate for preservation in place and the subsequent development of an underwater museum accessible to the general public. The Dominican Republic is actively promoting tourism, and this wreck was an opportunity to further that development, while also preserving an important historical site. The author carefully explains the legal and practical challenges in developing this living museum. This then becomes a blueprint for turning a major historical wreck into a marine protected area for the general public and the preservation and educational programs that go with it. In 2011, the Captain Kidd Living Museum in the Sea was dedicated. Secondary exhibits also opened in London, where Kidd was hanged, and in Indianapolis.

Captain Kidd’s Lost Ship covers both the theoretical issues of marine archaeology as well as its practical application. It is also a fantastic case study of the identification, investigation, and permanent preservation of a wonderful piece of history.

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The Market for Mesoamerica: Reflections on the Sale of Pre-Columbian Antiquities Edited by Cara G. Tremain and Donna Yates (University Press of Florida, 2019; 240 pgs., illus., $90 cloth; upress.ufl.edu)

This timely volume examines the alarming rise of illicit collecting and trafficking of looted Mesoamerican antiquities, particularly those of the Maya. Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating in the 1960s, looting of Mesoamerican sites has become a huge problem that threatens knowledge and history throughout the region. The looting, of course, is driven by a growing international market of private collectors and museums. Eleven noted scholars examine the history, extent, and trends of this market and its impact on scholarly research in ten lively essays.

A number of case studies amply illustrate how this international market works. Stelae easily moved from Guatemala to New York prior to the 1970s. Ceramics, mainly from ancient tombs, really got going in the 1980s. National and international laws that attempt to curb this trade are examined, and their effectiveness evaluated. This volume is full of up-to-date information that leads to suggestions for tackling a seemingly intractable problem. —Mark Michel

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The Archaeological Conservancy

Expeditions Guatemala Highlands and Copán When: March 12-22, 2020 Where: Guatemala and Honduras How Much: $3,195 ($325 single

Rain forests, snow-capped volcanoes, and magnificent lakes make up the landscape of the ancient Maya in the highlands of Guatemala. On our tour you’ll experience a complete spectrum of history from ancient ruins to modern cities. Our travels will take us from beautiful Lake Atitlán, colonial Antigua, and colorful Chichicastenango in the highlands to the Honduran rainforest, where we will visit Copán, considered the crown jewel of the southern Maya cities. Other archaeological highlights include Kaminaljuyú, Quiriguá, and Iximché. Scott Hutson, a professor of Mesoamerican Archaeology at the University of Kentucky, will accompany us on the tour.

This stele depicts 18 Rabbit, one of Copán’s greatest rulers.

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winter • 2019-20

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONSERVANCY

supplement)

California Missions and Archaeology Tour When: March 23 - 28, 2020 Where: California How Much: $1,995 per person ($375 single

MARK MICHEL

supplement) In 1542, the first European explorer in California, Juan Cabrillo, sailed into what is known today as San Diego Bay and made first contact with the local inhabitants, the Kumeyaay people. It is widely agreed among scholars that the Kumeyaay occupied this region for at least 12,000 years. To the north lived the Luiseño people, and to the east, the Cahuilla.

In 1769 Father Junípero Serra established the first Franciscan mission in California near the ancient Kumeyaay village of Kosa’aay, known today as Old Town in San Diego. Father Serra, also known as the “Founder of California,” went on to establish nine of the twenty-one missions from San Diego to San Francisco.

During our tour of the San Diego area, we will take an in-depth look into some of these missions, as well as the archaeology of the native people, which will tell us the story of their unique existence before and after the arrival of the Spanish.

Mission San Diego de Alcalá was founded in 1769.

Yampa River When: June 5 - 12, 2020 Where: Colorado, Utah How Much: $2,195 ($150 single supplement)

DAVID NOBLE

Join us for a downriver adventure in Colorado and Utah, where we’ll float through Dinosaur National Monument and experience incredible scenery first described by explorer John Wesley Powell. On our seventy-mile journey down the Yampa and Green rivers we’ll visit remote archaeological sites, including Fremont culture rock art panels and prehistoric rock shelters.

The Yampa River offers breathtaking scenery.

american archaeology

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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 August through October 2019. Their generosity, along with the generosity of the Conservancy’s other members, makes our work possible.

Life Member Gifts of $1,000 or more Douglas Q. Adams, Idaho Elizabeth and Edward Kessel, Virginia Franklin H. Albro and Gerald Sweeney, James Kimble, Arizona California Andrew Klein, Ohio Betty J. Annis, New Mexico Walter and Allene Kleweno, New Mexico Patricia D. Ashley, North Dakota Linda Koch, Ohio Lynn E. Bevill, Arizona John B. Lane, Pennsylvania Maryann Bishop, Florida Ken and Marcia Lee, New Hampshire Glenwood L. Boatman, Ohio Steve Lyttle, Ohio Elizabeth Boeckman, Texas Marilyn and James Mallinson, New Mexico Martha Boice, Ohio Bonnie Miller, Maryland Denis Boon, Colorado Clark Mleynek, Kansas Karl and Ruth Bottigheimer, Massachusetts Gary R. Mullen, Alabama Françoise E Bourdonnec, Oregon Diana Nevins, Nebraska Scott Brandley, Utah Margaret Ann Olson, Wisconsin Lucienne and Timothy Bruce, Texas Marilyn Orr, Ohio George E. Burgoyne, Michigan Mark and Dianne Otten, Ohio William Clifton, Ohio Brad Pursell, Ohio Jennifer Creighton, Washington William G. Rhoads, Virginia Christine Crowthers, Ohio Robert V. Riordan, Ohio William and Kathleen Dancey, Ohio James F. Rogers, California Debbie Duncan and Steve Hankison, Ohio Carole L. Ross, Indiana Ruth Dyar, Texas Karen L. Royce, Ohio Mike Flanders, Ohio Clinton and Stephanie Smullen, Tennessee Alma L. Flegel, New York Todd Stephenson, Oklahoma Patricia G. Foschi, New Mexico Barbara Suggs, Ohio John and Allis Gillmor, Tennessee Nancy Sullivan, Ohio Janet Griffin, Washington K Patricia Thrane, Connecticut Melanie Hall and Erik Goldstein, Victoria Patricia Thrane, Vermont Massachusetts Joseph J. Trott, New Mexico Leanne Harper, Colorado Steve and Laura Tuhela-Reuning, Ohio Mark Huber, Virginia John and Mary Vassallo, Connecticut John Jay Jackson, Ohio DeeAnne Wymer, Pennsylvania Todd Jones, Indiana Anasazi Circle Gifts of $2,500 or more John and Anne Abendroth, California Brenda L. Johnson, Minnesota Stephen and Carol Alden, New Hampshire Jeanine J. Keating, Florida George and Nancy Bain, Ohio Roland and Martha Mace, New Mexico Elizabeth Barrett, Ohio Gretchen H. Munroe, South Carolina Margaretta Barton Colt, New York Richard and Judith Reuning, Ohio Robert D. Brown, Indiana Bruce Tarkington, Tennessee William Busta and Joan Tomkins, Ohio Susan and Glyn Thickett, Arizona Janet Creighton, Washington Alan C Tonetti, Ohio Nancy L. Evans, Colorado Bradford and Elizabeth Woodall, Ohio John Feiertag, Ohio Foundation/Corporate Gifts Heartspring Foundation, Washington Ohio Valley Archaeology, Inc., Ohio Bequest Gloria H. Oana, Arkansas

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Since the inception of the Conservancy’s Living Spirit Circle in 2002, participation has grown to over 150 members. These dedicated members have included the Conservancy in their long-term planning to ensure that America’s past will always have a future.

This elite group is open to those who wish to make a lasting contribution by including the Conservancy in their will or estate plans, or by making a life-income gift such as a charitable gift annuity.

The Conservancy would like to thank the following Living Spirit Circle members for their thoughtfulness and generosity.

Albert and Becky Abel, Illinois Charlotte Adelman, Illinois Michael F. Albertini, Washington Valerie Amerkhail, District of Columbia Nancy A. Anderson, California Dorothea E. Atwell, New York Carol M. Baker, Texas Olive L. Bavins, California Esther Beaumont, Virginia Chester L. Behnke, Wisconsin Lawrence R. Benson, New Mexico Judith A. Bley, California Denis Boon, Colorado Robert E. Bouley, Tennessee Karen Olsen Bruhns, California Robert L. Buell, Indiana William V. Burlingame, North Carolina Harryette Campbell, Missouri Jean Carley, Oregon Suzanne and Donald Carmichael, Maine Margaret M. Carroll, New Mexico Robert and Maureen Cates, California Debra C. Comeau, Arizona Catherine I. Crawford, Illinois Al Crossman, Arizona Richard W. Dexter, Wisconsin Bill DiPaolo and Laura Hall, Colorado Scott Donaldson, Ohio William G. Doty and Joan T. Mallonee, Alabama Willa H. Drummond, Florida Mary D. Dunnell, Mississippi Ray L. Elliott, California William Engelbrecht, New York Hazel L. Epstein, California Phoebe B. Eskenazi, Oregon Janet EtsHokin, Arizona William S. Falkenberg, Colorado Mary Faul, Arizona Mary Gwyn Fitzgerald, Colorado Mr. & Mrs. Preston Forsythe, Kentucky Patricia G. Foschi, New Mexico Robert A. Freed, Washington Veronica H. Frost, Ohio Richard F Geist, California Derald and Bridget Glidden, California Maiya and Ross Gralia, Colorado Gilda Greenberg, North Carolina Jerry H. Hassemer, Arizona Lucinda Beyer Headrick, Georgia Dale and Barbara Henning, Iowa George M. Hidy, New Mexico Susan F. Hodgson, California Judith Hollander, California Kathleen Hull, California Rodney and Virginia Huppi, California Judith Husted, California Barbara J. Jacobs, District of Columbia Mr. and Mrs. Felipe C. Jacome, Arizona Diane Jones, Maryland Joyce S. Kaser, New Mexico Lawrence J. Kazura, New Mexico Jeanne L. Kennedy, California Dona P. Key, Oregon Walter and Allene Kleweno, New Mexico Derwood K. Koenig, Indiana Luella and George Landis, Connecticut Elva J. Lane, Arizona William J. Lannin, Illinois Richard and Gail Larson, Iowa Jay Last, California Debby Leitner Jones, Maryland Joyce E. Lively and Ronald J. Karden, California Alston C. Lundgren, New Mexico Margaret A. Lussky, Minnesota Mary S. Lyon, Michigan Nancy L. Malis, Indiana

William L. Mangold, Indiana Laura Marianek, Ohio Robin Marion, New Jersey Robert Mark and Evelyn Billo, Arizona Richard A. McBride, Michigan Kathleen M. McCormick, New Jersey Barbara Mead, Michigan Mark Michel, New Mexico Dr. and Mrs. Gerald A. Mitchell, Jr., Tennessee Jeffrey M. Mitchem, Arkansas Lois Monteferante, New York Jack A. Moore, Florida Sandra Moriarty, Colorado Lynn A. Neal, Arizona James A. Neely, New Mexico Lee Newman, Virginia David G. Noble and Ruth Meria, New Mexico Jan and Judith Novak, New Mexico Lee O’Brien, Indiana Dorinda J. Oliver, New York Margaret Ann Olson, Wisconsin Priscilla A. Ord, Virginia Jonathan F. Orser, Ohio Margaret P. Partee, Tennessee Tim Perttula, Texas Donald E. Pierce, Texas Gavine Pitner, North Carolina Kim Poggenpohl, Georgia Mary Lynn Price, California David A. Pritzke, Tennessee Erik and Elizabeth Rasmussen, Virginia Helen Marie Redbird-Smith, Oregon Barbara A. Reichardt, California Deborah J. Remer, Michigan Caryl Richardson, New Mexico Jean L. Ring, California Joy Robinson, California Don and Amy Rosebrock, Idaho Kathryn Sky Roshay, Arizona James W. Royle, California Susan J. Rudich, New York Janette L. Rudkin, California Jon and Lydia Sally, Ohio Richard A. Sanders and Janice Hand, Montana Kenneth Sassen, Utah Ken Saunders and Sandra Lawhun, North Carolina Beverly A. Schneider, Tennessee Anita G. Schroeder, Virginia Charles Sheffer, Arizona Sarah C. Sherwood, Tennessee Cheryl B. Smith, Florida Harriet N. Smith, New York Rosamond L. Stanton, Montana Connie L. Stone, Arizona George Strauss, California Jerry M. Sullivan, Texas Barbara H. Tandy, California Michael and Kellee Taylor, Washington Ronald and Pat Taylor, Virginia Jeanne Tucker, Oregon Elizabeth W. Varsa, New Mexico Steven Vastola, Connecticut Jack W. Vetter, Kansas James B. Walker and Michael R. Palmer, New Mexico Stephen Walkinshaw, Texas Mark Walters, Texas Jill M. Ward, Oregon Karl and Nancy Watler, Colorado Richard and Jean Weick, Oregon Tim Wernette, Arizona Ron and Carol Whiddon, New Mexico Gordon and Judy Wilson, New Mexico David L. Wilt, Maryland Barbara E. Nichols Wolf, Colorado Kathrin W. Young, Washington Robert D. Zimmerman, Nevada

winter • 2019-20

Protect archaeological sites while increasing your income The Archaeological Conservancy charitable gift annuity can: • Increase your financial security by receiving guaranteed fixed payments for your lifetime.

• Reduce your tax burden with savings on capital gains and income taxes.

• Help protect America’s cultural heritage. $10,000 minimum donation To receive more information and our brochure, mail information requests to: The Archaeological Conservancy Attn: Planned Giving 1717 Girard Blvd. NE Albuquerque, NM 87106 For more information call 505-266-1540 or email saraht.tac@gmail.com

Current Annuity Payout Rates

Age Rates

65 5.1% 75 6.2% 80 7.3% 85 8.3%

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: o Gifts of Stock

o Bequests

o Charitable Gift Annuities

Name:_____________________________________________________________________ Street Address:______________________________________________________________ City/State/Zip_______________________________ Phone: (_____) _________________

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.

Old Fort Earthworks, MIDWEST REGION

Began as a Conservancy Preserve in 2003

Whatever kind of gift you give, you can be sure we’ll use it to preserve places like Old Fort Earthworks and our other 540 sites across the United States.

Place stock in the Conservancy.

Give a charitable gift annuity.

Leave a lasting legacy.

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.

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.

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

Charitable gift annuities

Bequests

Name: _______________________________________________________________________

The Archaeological Conservancy Attn: Planned Giving 1717 Girard Boulevard NE Albuquerque, NM 87106

Street Address: ________________________________________________________________ City:________________________________________ State: ______ Zip:_______________ Phone: (

) ___________________________

Or call: (505) 266-1540