American Archaeology | Winter 2017-18 | Vol. 21 No. 4 by American Archaeology Magazine

PREHISTORIC CLIMATE CHANGE

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JEFFERSON’S MONTICELLO

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WHAT HAPPENED IN PHILADELPHIA

american archaeology

WINTER 2017-18

a quarterly publication of The Archaeological Conservancy

Vol. 21 No. 4

Saving Ancient Books

$3.95 US/$5.95 CAN

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american archaeology winter 2017-18

a quarterly publication of The Archaeological Conservancy

Vol. 21 No. 4

COVER FEATURE

12 SAVING AN ANCIENT LIBRARY BY RICHARD A. MARINI

courtesy shumla archaeological research & education center

Researchers are digitally preserving ancient pictographs and the knowledge they contain.

20 READING JEFFERSON’S LANDSCAPE BY DAVID MALAKOFF Evidence of major changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are seen on the grounds of Monticello.

28 THE LOST HISTORY OF TLAXCALLAN BY LIZZIE WADE The remains of an unusual and forgotten republic are being uncovered in central Mexico.

35 A TALE OF PREHISTORIC CLIMATE CHANGE BY JULIAN SMITH Long ago people on Florida’s northern Gulf coast had to contend with rising sea levels. Archaeologists are learning how they did it.

42 42 WHISTLING PAST THE HISTORIC GRAVEYARD BY TAMARA JAGER STEWART The accidental uncovering of a historic cemetery in Philadelphia has revealed its lax and confusing preservation laws.

claire gold

48 POINT ACQUISITION

A GLIMPSE OF THE ZUNI

The Conservancy obtains the Tinaja Pueblo.

2 3 5 7

LAY OF THE LAND LETTERS EVENTS IN THE NEWS

• Maya Royal Tomb Discovered • First Americans Came By Sea • Bears Ears National Monument Dramatically Reduced?

50 FIELD NOTES

52 REVIEWS

54 EXPEDITIONS

COVER: Shumla researchers Jerod Roberts (on ladder) and Karen Steelman use a portable x-ray fluorescence instrument to identify the elemental composition of rock art paintings at the White Shaman site in southwest Texas. CREDIT: Photo by Vicky Roberts / Courtesy Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center

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

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liz lopez photography

Lay of the Land Historical Archaeology At Monticello rchaeologists study material culture to learn about the past. Historians use written documents to tell the story of the past. More and more, these two disciplines are coming together to give us a greatly enhanced picture of earlier times. In this issue of American Archaeology, we take a look at Thomas Jefferson, founding father and third president, and life on his sprawling plantation home, Monticello. (See “Reading Jefferson’s Landscape,” page 20.) Historical archaeologists, using painstaking fieldwork and historical documents, are discovering important new details about life at Monticello, especially among the 120 or so slaves plus indentured servants and hired

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hands that made the plantation function. Until recently most of these people were invisible, but new research is bringing new insights as to how they lived and worked. Beginning in 1790, Jefferson shifted the plantation from growing tobacco to growing wheat for export to Europe. Housing for the slaves changed, with homes becoming more dispersed on hillsides, suggesting that the slaves became more autonomous. More skilled labor to maintain draft animals and tools was required, and all this left behind traces in the archaeological record. The shift from tobacco to wheat also coincided with an increase in the material wealth of slaves. Excavations revealed

Mark Michel, President

more and better domestic goods. Historical archaeology is a relatively new sub-field, but it is already showing at Monticello and elsewhere that it can tell us much more than the disciplines of archaeology and history alone can. The Conservancy is working to preserve important historic sites, and we can look forward to many new developments in this emerging discipline that will enrich our understanding of the past.

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Letters The Repatriation Of Kennewick Man As the Washington State Historic Preservation Officer, I read with great interest the article “The Fates of Very Ancient Remains” (Summer 2017). First, the article is factually incorrect with respect to the discussion of the repatriation of Kennewick Man. The Corps of Engineers did not repatriate the Kennewick Man to the five claimant tribes. The Corps of Engineers repatriated the skeleton to the State of Washington, who in turn, repatriated the remains to the claimant tribes. The State of Washington, in cooperation with the five claimant tribes, requested that their Congressional delegation pass legislation specifically designating the State of Washington as the recipient of Kennewick Man and, in turn, use state law as the vehicle for repatriation. The reasoning behind this methodology was that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act did not offer the Corps of Engineers full protection from future litigation. In discussions with our governor, Jay Inslee, and our Congressional representatives, we agreed that the situation had become a human rights issue for our tribes and needed to be resolved. This is an important fact that should have been identified by the author and editors, and should have been part of the article. Allyson Brooks, Ph. D. State Historic Preservation Officer/ Executive Director Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation

Editor’s Corner

In the fall of 2016, a construction crew was excavating an empty lot in Philadelphia on which an apartment complex was to be built. All was going as expected until they uncovered a number of bones. Human bones. Unbeknownst to the workers, part of an historic cemetery lay beneath them. Our article “Whistling Past The Historic Graveyard” (see page 42) describes what happened next. City officials determined foul play was not involved, and the construction project was allowed to continue. When more human remains, including whole coffins, were uncovered and the local media began to take note, a team of volunteers was hastily assembled to first monitor the site, and then to excavate the burials. As the count of excavated burials reached the hundreds, the questions of what laws governed this disastrous situation and who should take custody of the skeletons went unanswered. State and city government agencies and various preservation organizations shrugged their shoulders, saying they had no authority, no responsibility. Others argued that was not at all the case, that there were in fact laws that spoke to this problem, but they were being ignored. Disagree as they do, it seems one thing both sides do agree on is that a city so rich in history needs to be a better custodian of its past.

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1.Publication Title: American Archaeology. 2. Publication No.: 1093-8400. 3. Filing Date: September 29, 2017. 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 2017. 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation: Average Number of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: (A) Total No. Copies (net press run): 27,625. (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.): 17,363; (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: 2,168; (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail): 517. (C) Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)): 20,048. (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): 40; (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 1,612. (E) Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15D (1), (2), (3) and (4)): 1,652. (F) Total Distribution (Sum of 15C and E): 21,700. (G) Copies not Distributed: 5,925. (H) Total (Sum of 15F and G): 27,625. (I) Percent Paid (15C divided by 15F times 100): 92.39%. 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation: Number Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: (A) Total No. Copies (net press run): 27,500. (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.): 16,931; (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: 1,777; (4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail): 750. (C) Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)): 19,458. (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): 38; (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 2,476. (E) Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15D (1), (2), (3) and (4)): 2,514. (F) Total Distribution (Sum of 15C and E): 21,972. (G) Copies not Distributed: 5,528. (H) Total (Sum of 15F and G): 27,500. (I) Percent Paid (15C divided by 15F times 100): 88.56%. 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 2017 issue of this publication. 18. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. Michael Bawaya, Editor.

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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 515 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 Cecil F. Antone, Arizona • Carol Condie, New Mexico Janet Creighton, Washington • W. James Judge, Colorado Jay T. Last, California • Bill Lipe, Idaho Leslie Masson, Massachusetts • 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 Shuler, Special Projects Director Dawn Kaufmann, Web Developer • Kyrstin Beck, 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 Coordinator Paul Gardner, Vice President, Midwestern Region (614) 267-1100 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 Cory Wilkins, Regional Director, Western Region (530) 592-9797 4445 San Gabriel Drive • Reno, Nevada 89502 Andy Stout, Regional Director, Eastern Region (301) 682-6359 22 S. Market St. #2A • Frederick, Maryland 21701 Kelley Berliner, Field Representative

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 • Nicholas Bellantoni, Connecticut Jennifer Bengtson, Southeast Missouri University • Mark Boatwright, Bureau of Land Management Jonathan Burns, AXIS Research, Inc. • Michael Clem, Virginia DHR Glen Doran, Florida State University • Linn Gassaway, California Matt Hill, Iowa State University • Chris Judge, University of South Carolina-Lancaster Sue Miller, Idaho State University • Laura Murphy, Muckleshoot Tribal Archaeologist Carole Nash, James Madison University • Teresa Paglione, Natural Resources Conservation Service Paul Patton, Ohio University • Bonnie Pitblado, University of Oklahoma Christopher Rodning, Tulane University • Steve Simms, Utah State University Michael Strezewski, University of Southern Indiana • Stan Wilmoth, Montana State Archaeologist 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, © 2017 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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Events MuseuM exhibits • tours • Festivals • Meetings • education • conFerences

museum associates/lacma

v NEW EXHIBITS Los Angeles County Museum of Art

History Colorado

Royal Ontario Museum

Denver, Colo.—The exhibit “Zoom In: The Centennial State in 100 Objects” offers visitors a chance to step into the story and explore 100 unique objects that have shaped the state of Colorado. The items provide an overview of Colorado’s history, from early Paleo-Indians living along the Front Range 13,000 years ago to modern times. This exhibit explores how objects define who Coloradans are. (303) 447-8679, www. historycolorado.org (Long-term exhibit)

Los Angeles, Calif.—The intriguing exhibit “Ancient Bodies: Archaeological Perspectives on Mesoamerican Figurines” explores the central role of archaeological excavation in situating ancient art and artifacts in a cultural framework, and invites new ways of perceiving and experiencing the meaning embodied by the figurines. An A.D. 600-650 masonry tomb chamber discovered in 2006 in a grand pyramid under excavation in the ancient Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ in Petén, Guatemala, contained the remains of a ruler of the city and a rich array of funerary objects selected to accompany the ruler into the afterlife. Among these was an elaborate scene composed of twenty-three individual ceramic figurines depicting an ancient funerary ritual, a compelling example of the critical importance of provenience—the location of an object and its position relative to other objects. Ancient Bodies presents figurines from Burial 39, one of the royal tombs excavated at El Perú-Waka’. and nearly fifty additional figurines from LACMA’s collection that represent ancient cultures from across Mesoamerica. (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org (Through February 4, 2018)

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Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Calif.—”Teotihuacan: City of Water, City of Fire” explores how artworks from the ancient city shape our understanding of Teotihuacan as an urban environment. One of the earliest, largest, and most important cities in the ancient Americas, Teotihuacan is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most visited archaeological site in Mexico. The exhibit, organized in collaboration with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, features recent, never-beforeseen archaeological discoveries and other major loans from Mexican and U.S. cultural institutions. Monumental and ritual objects from Teotihuacan’s pyramids will be shown alongside mural paintings, ceramics, and stone sculptures from the city’s apartment compounds. https://deyoung.famsf.org (Through February 11, 2018)

royal ontario museum

the Fine arts museums oF san Francisco

De Young Museum

Toronto, Ontario, Canada—Showing at the ROM on its last stop in the North American tour, “Vikings: The Exhibition” draws on current archaeological scholarship and research, offering a fresh perspective on the Viking age that challenges commonly held myths and perceptions about the lives of the Norse people and this period of European history. The exhibit is an extraordinary window into the lifestyle, religion, and daily lives of these legendary explorers, artisans, and craftspeople. There are hundreds of interactive and immersive experiences, as well as objects rarely displayed outside of Scandinavia. (416) 586-8000, www.rom.on.ca/en/exhibitions (Through April 2, 2018)

Pawnee Indian Museum State Historic Site

Republic, Kans.—As early as 1770, the Kitkahahki band of Pawnee settled in what is now Republic County and remained until 1802, living in traditional dome-shaped earth lodges as large as twenty-five to sixty feet in diameter. Past excavations uncovered about half of the village, including the remains of twenty-two lodges, more than forty storage pits, and a fortification wall. The Pawnee Indian Museum was built over

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Helena, Mont.—The “Montana Homeland” exhibit examines what life was like in Montana’s past. The exhibit focuses on how people lived, worked, played, raised families, and built communities, and how they adapted to each other and to the world around them. The exhibit explores the ways people interacted with their environment, including how they obtained food, clothing, and shelter; the tools and mechanical systems they developed to make life easier; and the ways they traveled and transported goods across the land from ancient to modern times. (406) 444-2694, http://mhs.mt.gov (Long-term exhibit)

McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn.—The new exhibit “Northwest Coast Art: A Community Tradition” explores Northwest Coast art through more than sixty objects. Using indigenous and trade materials obtained along the coast of Oregon and north to Alaska, for hundreds of years Northwest Coast peoples, including the Coast Salish, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Makah, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Tlingit

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represented in this exhibit, have marked elaborate ceremonial life, social rank, and prestige through their objects and art. (865) 974-1000, http://mcclungmuseum.utk. edu/exhibition-type/special-exhibitions (Through March 4, 2018)

v CONFERENCES, LECTURES & FESTIVALS

chronometry, Plains-Pueblo interactions, and new developments in museum archaeology and collections-based research. The symposium will include a short keynote address by archaeologist Steve Lekson of the University of Colorado, and opportunities for informal socializing and networking in a variety of settings, including free breakfasts, lunches, and receptions. southwestsymposium2018.dmns.org

Society for Historical Archaeology Conference

The Mesoamerica Meetings

Biennial Southwest Symposium

Heard Museum World Championship Hoop Dance Contest

January 3-6, New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans, La. New Orleans’ historical role and culture inspired this year’s theme “Landscapes, Entrepôts, and Global Currents,” encompassing such topics as how archaeologists and historians perceive and interpret historical and modern landscapes, and current and global trends that affect our examination of the past. In addition to hundreds of presentations by scholars from around the world, this year’s conference will host a book room with exhibits of products, services, and publications from the archaeological community. (301) 972-9684, https://sha.org/conferences/

January 4-7, University of Colorado, Denver, Colo. The theme of the sixteenth Biennial Southwest Symposium is “Pushing Boundaries.” Boundaries are lines that make and mark spatial distinctions. Archaeologically, they are used to separate time periods as well. The goal of the symposium is to push geographic, theoretical, temporal, practical, and conceptual boundaries. In four sessions, the Symposium will explore the formation and meaning of Bears Ears National Monument, new research in chronology and

January 9-13, University of Texas, Austin, Tex. Scholars and students will explore the theme “Mesoamerican Philosophies: Animate Matter, Metaphysics, and the Natural Environment” by bringing ancient Mesoamerican philosophy and religion into sharper focus, looking at how the ancient Maya, Aztecs, and other Mesoamerican cultures communicated these important ideas and developed many of their own. The conference will be looking at some of the most fundamental but least articulated concepts of a cohesive ancient Mesoamerican worldview. www.utmesoamerica.org

February 10-11, Heard Museum, Phoenix, Ariz. The art of hoop dance honors the cultural traditions from multiple indigenous communities that first employed hoop dance as a healing ceremony. Today, hoop dance is shared as an artistic expression to celebrate, share, and honor indigenous traditions throughout the U.S. and Canada. Watch top American Indian and Canadian First Nations hoop dancers compete for the prestigious world champion title and cash prizes. (602) 252-8840, www.heard.org/event/hoop

mcclung museum oF natural history & culture

the remains of a large lodge depression with its floor remaining exposed and all objects, including structural remains, left where the archaeologists uncovered them. Visitors can see such rare artifacts as Pawnee sacred bundles, a star chart painted on buckskin, European metal trade items, a bull bison robe, and items made from bison bones. (785) 361-2255, www.kshs.org/pawnee_indian

montana historical society cat #2003.40.01

Montana Historical Society

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News IN THE

Maya Royal Tomb Discovered Early Classic-period tomb found in northern Guatemala.

ministry oF culture and sports oF guatemala and the Waka archaeological project

rchaeologists discovered a royal tomb at the Maya city of Waka’, which is also known as El Peru, in northern Guatemala. Analysis of associated ceramics indicate the tomb dates to A.D. 300 - 350. In addition to the ceramics, the tomb contained a variety of other artifacts that include a red painted jadeite mask, a white stone cup, Spondylus shells, and a shell effigy of a crocodile. The mask is a realistic representation of a human face, quite possibly a portrait of a ruler, with the protruding upper teeth typical of Early Classic Maya depictions of the Maize God. Researchers also found the remains of a young adult male buried nearby. He is believed to be King Te’Chan Ahk, a ruler of the Wak dynasty from the fourth century A.D. “The ruler is anonymous but definitely royal, with a jade mask depicting a ruler as the Maize God, perhaps worn on the front of a belt,” said project co-director David Freidel of Washington University. “I was surprised at this discovery, made by project co-director Juan Carlos Perez and conservation archaeologist Griselda Perez, because we were thinking we would possibly discover a Late Classic royal tomb, not an Early Classic one.” The researchers believe the tomb was likely that of a king because the red-painted jade mask depicts the ruler as the Maize God, with his forehead inscribed with a symbol meaning “yellow” and “precious” in the ancient Maya language. “El Peru, ancient Waka’, was established as a strategic stronghold on major trade routes, probably in the first century A.D. or earlier,” said Freidel.“By the second century A.D. it was a capitol of a royal dynasty, the Wak.The core settlement is extremely dense for the Maya lowlands, probably because it was a defended trade town and key ally or vassal to major powers in the Maya world throughout its history.” Researchers with the El Peru-Waka’ Archaeological Project have been working at the site since 2003. They previously uncovered royal tombs and sacrificial offering burials dating to the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. This most recent discovery dates from the earliest years of the Wak royal dynasty, which is thought to have been established in

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This jadeite mask was found in the tomb.

the second century A.D. The Wak is one of the earliest known Maya dynasties. “We will continue to study the Classic Maya from the vantage point of this key city,” said Freidel.“We are interested in discovering how ordinary people experienced this world as well how the people at court experienced it.” —Tamara Jager Stewart

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Archaeologists Directly Date Caribbean Cave Art This research reveals when and how indigenous people on Mona Island made their art.

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el corazón del caribe project

ell before Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, people living on a remote, now uninhabited Caribbean island were creating a vast trove of art deep within its gloomy caves, a path-breaking study has concluded. The findings mark the first time that researchers have been able to precisely date Caribbean cave art, and identify the complex recipes the artists used to mix their paints. Visitors have long known that Mona Island, a twenty-two-square-mile chunk of limestone that sits forty-one miles west of Puerto Rico, once hosted a vibrant culture. Many of the 200 caves that ring the island are packed with images painted on walls or, more commonly, gouged or scraped into the soft rock. There are pictures of people and animals and geometric designs, some just a few inches across, others covering yards. They are often found in the cave’s darkest, wettest recesses. Who created Mona Island’s art, and when, hasn’t been fully understood. To help fill the gap, in 2013 researchers from the United Kingdom and Puerto Rico launched the El Corazón del Caribe collaboration. It has since conducted five seasons of fieldwork on the island, mapping some seventy caves and discovering many new galleries of art. The researchers have also harnessed a wide array of technologies to probe the art’s age and composition. They include radiocarbon dating of charcoal found in paint, methods that rely on thorium and uranium isotopes to date the thin crust of minerals that

These figures are among the drawings found on Mona Island.

can form over wall carvings, as well as x-ray and other technologies that reveal the ingredients of paints. Together, such data confirm that Mona Island’s artists were already hard at work during the centuries before the arrival of Columbus, a team led by Alice Samson of the University of Leicester and Jago Cooper of the British Museum recently reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science. For example, mineral dating indicates that two wall carvings were created before 1088 and 1244, respectively, while charcoal in one paint sample dated to between 1302 and 1413.

The analyses also show the artists carried sticky gums derived from plants into the caves to mix their paints. That shows “they were planning ahead” and “not just taking dirt from the floor and smearing it on a wall; they were mixing sophisticated paints that had better sticking qualities,” said Samson. Such careful preparation is not surprising, she added, given that the indigenous Taino people who once inhabited the Caribbean considered caves to be key spiritual sites. Journeying into a dark cave to make art, she said, “was likely part of a very important activity.” —David Malakoff

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Trump Administration Proposes Reducing Bears Ears

josh eWing

The national monument’s myriad archaeological sites could lose protection.

A remote Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling in Bears Ears National Monument.

he Trump Administration has stated that it may soon shrink the Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah to a fraction of what it is now. Exactly what President Donald Trump plans to do is not clear, but Josh Ewing, executive director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, a Utah nonprofit preservation organization, said the new borders could exclude about ninety percent of the archaeological sites currently protected. According to a press release issued by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, Trump has indicated that he will reduce the monument area as recommended by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, who recently conducted an evaluation of national monuments. Trump is expected to announce what actions his administration will take in the near future. If Trump reduces Bears Ears, advocacy groups are poised to instantly challenge the decision in court, according to Scott Groene, the executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, another nonprofit preservation organization. “Trump does not have legal authority to unilaterally chop the monument area,” he said. “Only Congress has the authority to make that decision. Named after two tall buttes, towering over canyon lands, rivers and mesas, Bears Ears contains more than 100,000

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archaeological sites that date back at least 10,000 years. “It’s hard to overstate the archaeological importance of the Bears Ears monument area,” Ewing said.“It’s not just the number; it’s the level of preservation and the huge range of time that they cover.” At the request of local tribes, former President Barrack Obama designated 1.35 million acres at Bears Ears as a national monument under the Antiquities Act in 2016. Since then, state officials have suggested that the monument be reduced to about 120,000 acres. Meanwhile, Bears Ears, managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, continues to be at risk from damage resulting from vandalism and increasing visitation and recreational use. Groene said that the controversy has stalled development of a management plan until the issue is resolved. “Bears Ears is a wild place. There is no plan for managing visitors,” Ewing said. “People don’t know how to visit archaeological resources. They pick up artifacts, knock over walls, and scratch rock art.” Resources are also needed to deal with illegal off-road vehicles driving through the archaeological sites, he said.“It’s a really significant problem that will continue to worsen as more visitors come.” —Paula Neely

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Archaeologists Support Early Coastal Migration

jon erlandson

A team of experts argued that the First Americans likely arrived via a coastal route.

These approximately 12,000-year-old artifacts recovered from Santa Rosa Island in California indicate early coastal migration.

n an article recently published in the journal Science, a team of prominent archaeologists argued that most first American scholars have concluded that the first people to colonize the Americas travelled south along the Pacific Coast as early as 17,000 years ago, when glacial ice began receding from the coastlines. San Diego State University archaeologist Todd Braje, the lead author of the study, said the evidence supporting a coastline migration route has passed a tipping point and “caused the collapse of the Clovis-First Theory.” For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists believed that the first Americans, thought to be Clovis people, crossed a now-submerged land bridge known as Beringia that connected Siberia with North America and then travelled along an ice-free corridor that developed when the ice sheets retreated after the last Ice Age about 13,500 years ago. But Braje said a majority of researchers now believe that the earliest Americans made their way along a so-called kelp highway that rimmed the north Pacific coastline from northeast Asia to North America long before the Clovis period. When the Coastal Migration Theory was first proposed in the 1970s, it was considered highly unlikely by most archaeologists. That began to change when the theory was buttressed by University of Oregon archaeologist Jon

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Erlandson, a coauthor of the Science article, and marine ecologists who developed the Kelp Highway Hypothesis in 2007. By reconstructing the environment that coastal travelers might have experienced about 17,000 years ago, researchers found that seafaring people could have taken advantage of marine resources such as otters, seabirds, fish, shellfish, and seaweed, all of which were supported by kelp forest ecosystems along the coasts. Braje also referred to a 2016 study of pollen, DNA, and fossils from lake sediment cores in the ice-free corridor that indicated the corridor would have been impossible for humans to traverse until about 12,600 years ago. That’s long after humans arrived at sites such as Monte Verde in southern Chile, which archaeological evidence shows people occupied at least 14,500 years ago, and possibly as long as 18,000 years ago.“They had to get there another way,” he said.“Travel along the Pacific Coast is the most plausible explanation.” Braje acknowledged, however, that other than a handful of pre-Clovis sites, there is still very little archaeological evidence to support the Kelp Highway Hypothesis. He said proof of these early Americans is difficult to find because coastlines have changed significantly due to erosion and sea rise. —Paula Neely

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Researchers Source Ancient Turquoise Isotopic analysis of turquoise from an Arizona mine provides information about trade routes.

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esearchers at the University of Arizona are combining archaeological and geochemical analyses to understand ancient turquoise mining and trade in the American Southwest. Their technique uses measurements of lead and strontium isotopes to identify the distinctive chemical signatures of turquoise deposits, and then compares the signatures with those of archaeological samples to see if they match. “Archaeologists have been struggling for decades to find a reliable means of sourcing archaeological turquoise and exploring how turquoise was mined and traded throughout the greater Prehispanic Southwest,” said Saul Hedquist, who recently received his Ph.D from the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology and is the lead author of a paper that was recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. “Lead and strontium isotopes have been used singly since the 1970s, but this is one of the first studies in archaeology to use more than one heavy isotope system in provenance, something geologists have been doing for a long time.” Hedquist and his colleagues Alyson Thibodeau of Dickinson College, John Welch of Simon Frasier University, and David Killick of the University of Arizona analyzed turquoise from the Canyon Creek Mine on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona, finding that it had a distinctive isotopic signature. “The Canyon Creek source lies within a distinct geologic setting, with higher levels of lead than other ancient mines that we know about,” said Hedquist. That allowed them “to confidently connect samples

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A mosaic piece from a pre-Columbian site in east-central Arizona that has isotope ratios consistent with geologic samples from Canyon Creek.

from the mine to turquoise curated in museum collections.” The researchers have been able to link turquoise mined from Canyon Creek to artifacts recovered from preColumbian sites across much of what is now east-central Arizona, some more than sixty miles from the mine. They found that all sites containing the Canyon Creek turquoise were occupied between A.D. 1250 and 1400, which helps them determine the dates for the mine’s primary use. They further determined that the mine was more

productive than previously thought, and that it served as an important source of turquoise for Mogollon Rim inhabitants during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. “To date, this is the most accurate means of assigning provenance to turquoise artifacts,” said Hedquist. “Building on other archaeological patterns, the circulation of pottery, for example, we can piece together the social networks that facilitated the ancient circulation of turquoise in different times and places.” —Tamara Jager Stewart

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Saving An Ancient Library

aving scrambled about the shallow, open-air rock shelter known as the Wiley site in southwest Texas, six archaeologists took inventory of the many iconographic figures painted on the shelter wall. They prepared to take high-resolution photographs that will document, and

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possibly reveal new details, about these ancient, often indecipherable images. The archaeologists work for the Shumla Archaeology Research & Education Center, a nonprofit organization based in the dusty town of Comstock. Shumla has recently begun the Alexandria Project, an

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Archaeologists have undertaken an ambitious project to digitally preserve millennia-old pictographs and the knowledge they contain. By Richard A. Marini

photo by jean clotte / courtesy shumla archaeological research & education center

These anthropomorphic figures are part of a Pecos River-style mural known as Rattlesnake Canyon. This represents only about one-tenth of the enormous mural, which is more than 100-feet long and ten-feet high.

ambitious effort to catalog and digitize more than 350 rock art sites scattered throughout Val Verde County, a three-hour drive west of San Antonio, hard by the U.S.-Mexico border. The project’s name is a nod to the ancient Egyptian library that was destroyed in antiquity. The archaeologists are racing

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against time to build a library of high-resolution images of the murals, some of which are 4,000 years old and are painted in what’s known as the Pecos River style.They have a busy schedule that calls for them to visit and record an average of ten sites per month.

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The hope is that future researchers will be able to study these digitized images should the originals—facing threats both natural and man-made—ever be lost. Together, the paintings tell the story of the aboriginal peoples who inhabited this dry, windswept land thousands of years ago.“This is one of the most important regions in the world for archaeologists who study hunter-gatherer rock art,” said Karen Steelman, an archaeological chemist who directs Shumla’s research. Steelman is one of only a few people in the world with the expertise to extract organic compounds from paint samples in order to radiocarbon date the ancient paintings. Getting to some of the rock art sites is a challenge. To reach the Wiley site’s rock shelter, which is located on a remote corner of a private ranch, the researchers drove twenty miles off the main highway on a bumpy dirt-andcaliche road, then another fifteen minutes through scrubby plains in a trio of all-terrain vehicles, followed by a twenty minute hike mostly uphill. The team included Steelman, executive director Jessica L. Lee, project archaeologist Charles Koenig, assistant project manager Amanda Castañeda and staff archaeologists Vicky and Jerod Roberts. Castañeda and Koenig are married, as are the Robertses.

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Although the paintings have survived for four millennia, they are increasingly endangered. The construction of the Amistad Dam and Reservoir in 1969 has made the area more humid, which in turn promotes spalling as well as the growth of microbes that encrust the paintings. And no one knows how many were flooded as the reservoir waters rose behind the dam. Global warming is also triggering stronger storms, leading to more flooding that scours the walls and leaves behind damaging silt. And drug smugglers who use the area as a through-route may vandalize the art.“If you look at photos from the 1950s, it’s obvious many of the paintings are less vibrant today,” Steelman said. Upon arriving at the Wiley site, which is named for the ranch owner’s granddaughter, the researchers took an inventory of the painted figures, categorizing them as anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, geometric and, for those they were uncertain about, enigmatic. Castañeda visited the site back in 2011, so the team already had fairly extensive notes about it. That’s not always the case. Some caves haven’t been visited by researchers since the 1950s, and descriptions are often limited to a single word:“pictographs.” As more landowners hear about the project, the

courtesy shumla archaeological research & education center

Carolyn Boyd uses a digital microscope to determine the order in which paint was applied to the wall at the White Shaman site.

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courtesy shumla archaeological research & education center

An examination of microscopic photos of this anthropomorph wearing an antlered headdress at the White Shaman site revealed the ancient artists’ precise application of colors.

archaeologists have gotten calls asking them to examine previously unknown sites. People who lease their land to hunters “like being able to say there’s ancient artwork on the site,” said Lee.“Other times they just want to know more about what’s on their property.”

n addition to digitizing the paintings, the archaeologists also hope to answer a number of questions. For example, did the small bands of hunter-gatherers who roamed the area live in the rock shelters where the paintings were made, or did the rock shelters merely serve specific purposes such as religious ceremonies or trading with other groups? The archaeologists also are looking to see if they can discern patterns as to where the rock art is located. Were sites chosen because they were near water? Are there prominent landscape features visible from multiple sites? Do they contain common natural features, such as water seeps or niches? Were they a way for the roving bands to communicate with each other, or did the paintings somehow fit into the people’s belief system? The answers to these questions will tell them how the sites were used.“It’s like when you’re

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studying ancient cities,” Steelman said. “You look at where the churches are located, where the houses are, the government buildings.That tells you how the society was organized. We’re trying to do the same thing, but from a hunter-gatherer perspective.” Another question the project hopes to answer is whether multiple cave sites tell similar stories and express common motifs, such as a creation story, an otherworld journey story, or descriptions of the religion of peyotism. This is important because while the hunter-gatherers didn’t have a written language, they would have recognized the paintings’ iconography the same way people in the Renaissance would have understood the conventions of that era’s religious paintings. “If they saw a lamb, they knew it represented Christ,” Lee explained.“If there was a man and a woman with an apple, they knew it was the story of Adam and Eve.” So far, evidence from sites such as the White Shaman Preserve seems to suggest they were not chosen randomly. One of the best and most deeply studied examples of Lower Pecos River-style pictographs in the world, the White Shaman rockshelter, which is owned by the Witte Museum in San Antonio, is located near the confluence of the Pecos

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Jerod Roberts uses the GigaPan photographic system to create a panoramic photograph of the mural at the Tinaja site.

River and the Rio Grande, close enough to the U.S. Highway 90 bridge to hear the passing traffic. Steelman noted one of the most prominent images in the mural, a headless, white, human-like figure identified as the moon goddess. As the sun sets each winter solstice, it casts a shadow on the mural that stops precisely at the neck of the moon goddess while the rest of the mural is bathed in the red glow of sunset. On the opposite end of the mural is a red and yellow crenulated arch representing the sacred mountain from which the sun emerged at the dawn of time. Just before sunset on the fall and spring equinox, the sun slowly climbs the crenulations, step by step. The remainder of the mural stays in shadow until after the sun has fully illuminated the sacred mountain in an arch of light. “That seems too unlikely to be a coincidence,” she said. No one knows why the indigenous people who lived in the area left about 1,000 years ago. But many of their belief systems survive to some extent among modern-day American Indians. Back in the 2000s, for example, a Huichol shaman brought to the White Shaman Preserve identified many of the figures on the mural by name.“They’re my ancestors,” he said, meaning that he shared what Alfredo López Austin, an authority of Mesoamerican mythology, called “a hard nucleus” of core beliefs with those who created the mural. The White Shaman mural is believed to tell a creation story similar to that of Mesoamerican groups who live

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hundreds of miles to the south, suggesting there was a connection between the two peoples. It’s even possible that the people who left this area migrated south, eventually becoming the Aztec. The mural depicts five torch-bearing pilgrims, each associated with an ancestral deity, traveling from their homes to where the peyote grows. While the Alexandria Project is just ramping up (it began last August, and Wiley was the sixteenth site the team visited), Shumla archaeologists have been studying the Lower Pecos rock art since the organization’s inception in 1998. Shumla’s founder, Carolyn Boyd, was a young muralist with an interest in rock art when she first visited the area in 1989 to see the work of her long-ago predecessors. Back then, many archaeologists thought the paintings were a random collection of images made by a number of artists over hundreds, or even thousands of years. “But looking at them as an artist, I realized that they were compositions, that they required scaffolding and group effort and were produced in some cases over perhaps weeks,” said Boyd, now the Shumla Endowed Research Professor at Texas State University in San Marcos. She is also author of The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos, which won the 2017 Scholarly Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology. She wanted to discuss her theory with professional archaeologists, but knew she’d never be taken seriously

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courtesy shumla archaeological research & education center

because she didn’t have archaeological training. So she returned to school and earned a Ph.D. in archaeology from Texas A&M University in 1998. In the years since, she has shown that the Lower Pecos paintings constitute not merely an art gallery, but a library. “These murals contain information on philosophy, on astronomy, on botany, mythology, history, evidence of a calendar system,” she said. “When you look at these paintings, you’re looking at the oldest known books in North America.” While examining photos of the White Shaman and four other rock art sites taken through a digital microscope, she discovered that the paint colors were laid down one color at a time instead of in a random order. For example, she studied a painting of an anthropomorph with red antlers covered in black dots. But the dots, the photos showed, were painted before the antlers. “As an artist, I’d paint the antlers first, then the dots,” she said.“I think most people would.” But these ancient artists did the complete opposite. Further examination of the microscopic images revealed that the paint colors were laid down in the exact same order: first black, then red, then yellow and, finally, white.“I got goose bumps when I realized we had clear scientific evidence showing the degree of sophistication needed to plan and execute something of this size,” Boyd said. Having done this thorough analysis at only five sites, she can’t be certain that this method was used for all Lower

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Pecos paintings, but Boyd noted “what we have found so far is intriguing and suggestive of a rule that governed the order in which the paint was applied. Why would they do this? “Because everything in these paintings has meaning,” she said. “It’s not just the symbols and not just the color. Even the order of the colors carries meaning.”This can be seen at the White Shaman site, where, according to ethnographic accounts, the color black represents primordial time, water, and femininity. Adding red, which represents masculinity and fire, on top of black—the union of two opposites—led to the birth of the sun and brought forth creation. Yellow is associated with the light of the sun, and then comes white, which indicates transcendence, or the next phase of life. “So if you think of it in human terms, the black is the beginning, then you have birth, you grow and die, and start over again,” Boyd said. “We see the same core concept that color carries meaning throughout Mesoamerica and beyond. The belief that color carries meaning is pretty widespread.” The paintings were also sacred and potent, explained Boyd. “Where we see painted figures, they saw living deities and mythological characters who were active in their lives. The paintings were the deities, the mythological characters.” “The Pecos River pictographs are some of the most elaborate and beautiful in the world,” said David Whitley, a noted rock art expert with ASM Affiliates, a cultural resource

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management firm in Tehachapi, California.“Carolyn Boyd has demonstrated convincingly that the sites were painted as planned and composed murals. This reflects a kind of complexity among hunting-and-gathering peoples not known elsewhere in the world.”

ack at the Wiley site, while the rest of the team was reconnoitering, Jerod Roberts set up a photographic system called a GigaPan. It consists of a high-resolution camera mounted on a computer-controlled gimbal that is programmed to take photos of the entire cave, moving systematically from top to bottom and left to right. Roberts took 588 images of the rockshelter, each fifty to eighty megabytes in size.The process took a little more than an hour. Later, back at Shumla’s Comstock office, powerful

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computers stitched the GigaPan photos into one huge, highresolution image that the archaeologists can examine. Once Jerod was finished with the GigaPan, he surrendered the camera to his wife, Vicky, who made a similar series of photos of the entire cave. But instead of taking the photos from a fixed spot, as with the GigaPan, she moved across the length of the cave, taking one step to the right as she completed each series of top-to-bottom photos. Using a photogrammetry process known as structure from motion, the 1,043 photos she took were later processed by the computers back in Comstock to create a high-resolution, three-dimensional digital image of the cave. In much the same way that images can be manipulated in Google Street View, researchers can use a computer mouse to tilt, pan, and zoom in on the image to study it from innumerable angles.

photo by chester leeds / courtesy shumla archaeological research & education center

The complex mural at the White Shaman site is twenty-six-feet long and thirteen-feet high. Carolyn Boyd and her collaborator Kim Cox have concluded that the mural tells a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time.

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photo by chester leeds / courtesy shumla archaeological research & education center

But the GigaPan and structure-from-motion photos only tell so much. The team also uses a technology called decorrelation stretching that boosts color contrast in the photos to accentuate details and highlight faint images in the rock. It’s a process similar to what NASA does to enhance images of planets, stars, and galaxies gathered by telescopes and space probes. “Something that’s really faint, that you’d barely glance at in the field, can really pop once you run it through the program,” said Steelman.“Decorrelation stretching has really revolutionized rock art research. We can now see details and figures that we might have ignored or missed before.”The process is also much quicker than using desktop software such as Adobe Photoshop, which can take hours. Instead it takes only a click of a button to manipulate colors and enhance the reds, yellows, blacks, and whites commonly used in rock art. At some point Shumla plans to open its files to other

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researchers. But because the data files being created are so large, where they will live permanently is still undecided. For the time being, some files are being stored on a 3-D model sharing website at Sketchfab.com while others are being uploaded to the GigaPan website site. Shumla officials are also in talks with the Center for Archaeological Studies at Texas State University about housing the data, but no decision has been made yet. Meanwhile, work on the Alexandria Project continues. By bridging art and science, the researchers are not only preserving priceless artifacts for future generations, they are also revealing the sophistication of the hunter-gatherers who lived in this area.

RICHARD A. MARINI is a reporter with the San Antonio Express-News. His article “Rediscovering The Alamo” appeared in the Winter 2016-17 issue of American Archaeology. 19

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Reading Jefferson’s Landscape By David Malakoff Recent fieldwork adjacent to the mansion has revealed important changes in the ornamental landscape.

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mark east

Archaeologists are studying the landscape of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello to understand the dramatic changes that took place there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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Painstaking fieldwork—including the systematic digging of over 20,000 shovel test pits—has yielded new insights into how Jefferson ran his plantation, treated the approximately 600 enslaved people he owned during his lifetime, and reacted to the dramatic economic and political changes in Europe and North America in the late 1700s and early 1800s.This past summer, researchers helped document important spaces linked to Jefferson’s elegant brick mansion, including a room used by Sally Hemings, the enslaved African-American who historians believe gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children, as well as an elaborate brick stove used by Hemings’ brothers to prepare the French cuisine Jefferson savored. Together, the discoveries “are helping us put life at Monticello during Jefferson’s time into a broader perspective, especially for the enslaved people who lived here and made up most of the population,” said Fraser Neiman, who since 1995 has led archaeological research for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello. “We see that there was a lot of change—in how the landscape looked, in how

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first glance, it might not seem like much for archaeologists to work with. There are microscopic grains of pollen that wafted from pine and oak trees more than 200 years ago and became buried at the bottom of a muddy stream. Some bricks and patches of discolored sediment that mark the locations of earthen pits that once sat hidden beneath the floorboards of slave quarters. Handfuls of ceramic sherds and rusty nails, some broken or bent. One half of a shattered porcelain plate discovered a half-mile from its mate. These humble finds, however, are helping archaeologists reveal a tale of profound social, economic, and ecological upheaval at the home of one of America’s most famous founding fathers. Over the past few decades, researchers working at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s iconic home in central Virginia, have acquired a clearer understanding of how the sprawling plantation evolved during the life of the remarkable man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third president, and founded the University of Virginia.

Archaeologists excavate a maze of twentieth-century pipe trenches and late nineteenth-century planting beds adjacent to Monticello’s South Pavilion.

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thomas jeFFerson Foundation

The removal of a bathroom from the cellar of the South Pavilion allowed archaeologists to explore Jefferson-era deposits under a twentieth-century concrete floor.

people worked, in how they lived.And we’re getting a better feel for how those changes are related to what’s going on in the larger Atlantic world, including Europe.”

is likely that the digs occurring these days at Monticello would have fascinated Jefferson, a prodigious polymath whose scholarly interests included archaeology. (He once excavated a Native American mound on his property.) He inherited most of Monticello’s 5,000 acres of forested, hilly land along the Rivanna River from his father, who died when Jefferson was fourteen. In 1768, at the age of twenty-six, he began planning and then building his home atop one of the property’s highest summits; Monticello means “little mountain” in Italian. It would take forty years for the house we know today to emerge, and archaeology reveals that even at Jefferson’s death in 1826, the steps to the West Portico were still a work in progress. But long before that, Monticello became a bustling plantation, occupied at any one time by members of Jefferson’s family, about 120 slaves, and numerous indentured servants and hired hands. Like many other colonial planters, Jefferson focused on growing tobacco and selling it to England. But the tobacco trade withered in the late 1700s as a result of the Revolutionary War and increasing competition from

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foreign growers. Luckily, a lucrative new agricultural market emerged: exporting wheat to Europe, where demand for American grain was strong thanks to a growing population and chronic warfare that depressed local harvests. In 1790, Jefferson moved to cash in on the boom by sowing his first wheat crop. Soon, tobacco was mostly an afterthought. That shift from tobacco to wheat had far-reaching effects on Monticello’s landscape and enslaved workers, archaeologists have found. One big change was increased deforestation and erosion: while tobacco could thrive in holes dug in small clearings in forests called swiddens, wheat required bigger expanses of flatter, cleared land that could be plowed. Researchers have detected telltale signs of that dramatic shift in land use in cores of sediment extracted from the mud that long ago piled up behind several stone walls that Jefferson had built to keep eroding dirt from burying small streams that were important drinking water sources. When researchers analyze pollen grains trapped in the sediments, they find that tree pollen predominates in the older, deeper layers. That is consistent with Monticello’s tobacco-growing era, which didn’t require complete deforestation to grow the crop. But in the younger layers of sediment, tree pollen becomes rarer and pollen from asters and other open-field plants dominates, signaling the shift to

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treeless wheat fields.The sediment cores, which can be fivefeet long, also show signs of increased topsoil and eventually subsoil erosion after the tobacco-to-wheat transition.“Which is what you’d expect as you take more trees off the landscape and start plowing,” said Neiman. The shift to wheat also triggered noticeable changes in how Monticello’s slaves lived. Under the tobacco swidden system, Jefferson and other growers typically divided their lands into so-called quarter farms, each with its own overseer and group of enslaved workers, who lived near the crop. At Monticello, archaeologists have found evidence of one such labor settlement, which was occupied from roughly 1770 to 1800. It sat about a half-mile east of the main house on now-forested plots known as Sites 7 and 8. At Site 7, discoveries such as bricks, rusty nails, sherds of pricier imported pottery, coins, buttons, and other higherquality household objects indicate that an overseer occupied a small house there. Nearby at Site 8, a mix of imported and locally-made pottery suggests two slave settlements sat adjacent to the overseer’s house. By the early 1800s, however, both the overseer and the slaves had abandoned that relatively flat area—which was ultimately converted to wheat fields—and moved to new housing on steeper slopes farther away from the mansion. Other living arrangements changed too. The new overseer’s

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A sample of artifacts from Site 8, a domestic area that was home to enslaved field laborers in the late eighteenth century. (From left) A European wine bottle neck, three ceramic sherds, a bone-handled fork, a bone toothbrush, three men’s clothing buttons. (Bottom) An imported English clay tobacco pipe.

house, instead of sitting directly adjacent to the slave quarters, now was more distant. In addition, the slave houses themselves were scattered more widely, and in some cases were out of sight of each other and the overseer. Together, such changes may have provided some enslaved workers with greater autonomy, and researchers are exploring the hypothesis that autonomy was in part an outgrowth of the more complex labor arrangements necessary to grow wheat. Growing the grain required slaves to acquire specialized skills associated with plowing fields, such as maintaining draft animals and tools like plows and scythes. Wheat often required the slaves to work in smaller groups scattered widely across the plantation, which made it too costly to sustain the tobacco-era practice of using a single overseer to monitor a compact group of relatively lowskilled workers, often using violence to maintain discipline. Researchers believe a more nuanced relationship evolved in which some enslaved field workers were able to achieve modest improvements in autonomy and material wealth thanks to their greater skills, and hence value, to slave owners.At the same time, because wheat was less labor intensive than tobacco, enslaved families were more likely to be divided as Jefferson and other Virginia slave owners sold surplus laborers into the deep south. As wheat took hold, changes were also occurring within

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thomas jeFFerson Foundation

Two portions of a Chinese porcelain plate that was broken in the 1770s. Archaeologists found the portion on the right in a deposit associated with construction of Jefferson’s terraced vegetable garden next to the mansion. The left portion was found in a subfloor pit at Site 8, which was home to enslaved field laborers.

Monticello’s enslaved households. During the tobacco era, for example, slave quarters that once sat along Monticello’s Mulberry Row—a lane next to the main house that was lined with workshops, gardens, and living spaces—tended to have relatively large barracks-like rooms that featured multiple pits dug into their floors. Neiman said the residents likely used the pits, which would have been covered by floorboards, as “safe deposit boxes” for their weekly rations of food and other valuables. In the 1790s, however, the rooms in newly built slave dwellings at Monticello were generally smaller and had only one pit, or none at all.That, Neiman surmised, suggests slaves were allowed more say over who they lived with, and they chose others they trusted, such as family.

Monticello became established, there is evidence of increasing material wealth among some of the plantation’s slaves. During the tobacco era, for instance, archaeologists found relatively little evidence of fancier imported ceramics and commercial goods in sites occupied by enslaved field laborers, suggesting they had little access to the consumer economy. One intriguing exception is one-half of a hand-painted porcelain plate, imported from China, found in 2003 in a subfloor pit at Site 8 that dated to the 1770s.

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Karen Smith, a Monticello archaeologist, noticed that the fragment fitted perfectly with another, found more than twenty years earlier near the main house a half-mile away. One plausible scenario is that the mansion’s residents had broken the plate and then thrown it out in the mid-1770s. “And it appears that, at that time, even half a porcelain plate was considered unusual and valuable enough by [a slave] to be worth picking out of the trash and carting home,” Neiman noted. By the early 1790s, however, sherds of Chinese porcelain appear with greater regularity in areas occupied by enslaved people. The shift suggested that “over time, some of Monticello’s slaves were gaining access to the cash economy and consumer products,” he said. “Porcelain began to become a regular part of the household inventory, and a broken piece that would have been a valuable find twenty or thirty years earlier becomes less attractive.And instead of trying to mend broken pieces, slave households are just throwing them out, and we are finding the pieces with the rest of their trash.” The pottery sherds are also providing intriguing evidence of differences in wealth and stability among contemporaneous slave settlements located near one another. At one cluster of slave houses at Site 8, for instance, researchers have found numerous bits of imported Chinese porcelain, one of the costliest types of pottery in the late 1700s. But

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thomas jeFFerson Foundation

there are far fewer such sherds at a second cluster just a they were staying at Monticello, while others sheltered few hundred feet away. And while the first cluster of houses laborers that Jefferson had temporarily “rented” from other featured subfloor storage pits, it appears that the second had slave owners. none. Both observations suggest that slaves living in the first Recent digs have also examined the lives of slaves who community were somewhat better off than those in the sec- lived and worked at the main house.This past summer archaeond, according to researchers. ologists examined two rooms in Monticello’s south wing. A similar story of inequality among Monticello’s slaves Historical records suggest that one of them—which one is emerges from studnot clear—was used ies of the size and by Sally Hemings, distribution of who was a half-sister ceramic sherds and to Jefferson’s wife metal nails found and mother of six of at adjacent slave Jefferson’s children. communities. In the In these thirteen1980s, archaeoloby-fifteen-foot wingists recognized that dowless spaces, they mapping the chardiscovered traces of acteristics of artithe original brick facts—such as their floor and a plaster size or completefinish and marks to ness—around a site hold shelving on could offer insights the brick chimney. into the stability One of the rooms and permanence of will become home the occupation. For to an exhibit about example, residents Hemings and her tended to be tidier life, while the other at more permanent will be devoted settlements: they to the Greeting disposed of large Word oral history pieces of cracked project that tells pottery. This often the stories of Moncreated a pattern of ticello’s enslaved larger debris encirfamilies and their cling a settlement. In descendants. contrast, temporary Not far away, occupations were in the basement of characterized by the the South Pavilion, residents dumping which served as trash, regardless of the original kitchen, size, next to their diggers discovered dwellings, because the brick remains of they weren’t around a waist-high “stew long enough to be stove” built around bothered by it. 1790 to prepare the These contrastFrench food that ing patterns are seen Excavation of three feet of fill, deposited in the South Pavilion cellar around 1809, Jefferson favored. at slave settlements revealed the original brick floor of Monticello’s first kitchen. Archaeologists found food The stove, a state-ofdating to the wheat remains, including egg shell fragments and fish scales, in the gaps between the bricks. the-art, four-burner era. “It may be that model based on we have two classes of folks living side-by-side,” said Neiman. European designs, was probably one of the first of its kind “One appears to have more stability and control over their in the American colonies. It was likely used by two brothers lives, while the other appears to be much more uncertain, of Hemings: James, who Jefferson brought to Paris in 1784 and not sure how long they are going to be around.” One to learn French cookery; and Peter, who James trained prior possibility is that some settlements housed slaves who knew to being freed by Jefferson in 1796. (James later committed

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mark east

The most important discovery in the South Pavilion cellar was the foundation of a stew stove—an eighteenth-century cook top— that was added to the kitchen after Jefferson returned from four years in France. The stove was necessary to prepare French sauces, fricassees, and custards.

suicide, historical accounts suggest). Jefferson abandoned the stove and the kitchen as part of a major remodel in the early 1800s. Archaeologists were surprised to find its formidable brick base still intact beneath several feet of dirt which Jefferson’s enslaved workers dumped into the room to level its floor with that of the South Wing, which had just been built. Other finds have helped confirm exactly where Jefferson planted the rows of trees that once lined the flanks of his home. Jefferson was a renowned plant collector and botanist, and he drew meticulous diagrams of his beloved plantings. So it was not a major shock when diggers last summer found telltale splotches of dark soil—a sign of decayed tree roots—in areas along the south wing that Jefferson had designated for saplings. Still, Neiman said, such evidence “is useful for understanding what the grounds actually looked like in Jefferson’s time. Jefferson was an imaginative doodler and only archaeology can tell us which doodles he actually implemented.” The tree diagrams are just one reminder of Jefferson’s many talents. In the end, however, it turned out that business wasn’t one of them. After returning to Monticello in

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early 1809 to live out the final years of his life, the former president continued to pile up debts and struggled to make ends meet. After Jefferson died in 1826, his daughter Martha was forced to sell the plantation—including 140 of its slaves, furnishings, and farm equipment—at auction. Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the United States Navy and a big fan of Jefferson’s political views, eventually acquired the property in 1836. The Levy family lost control of Monticello during the Civil War. During the ensuing twenty years, neglect and time took its toll on Jefferson’s house and landscaping, until Jefferson Monroe Levy, Uriah’s nephew, regained control of the property and made extensive repairs to the house, ensuring its survival. Now, nearly 200 years later, archaeologists are getting a better idea of where those trees once stood, and how the people who once worked under their branches were connected to each other, and influenced by the chaotic world far beyond Monticello’s borders.

DAVID MALAKOFF is a deputy news editor at Science magazine. He is a frequent contributor to American Archaeology. 27

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THE LOST HISTORY OF

Tlaxcallan

tlaXcallan archaeological project

By Lizzie Wade

Excavations of residential areas such as this one have led some archaeologists to conclude that Tlaxcallan had a more equitable society than other Mesoamerican cities.

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Archaeologists are investigating a rare and forgotten republic in the mountains of central Mexico.

CLIMBING UP A HILLSIDE away from the heart of Tlaxcala, Mexico, it doesn’t take long to leave behind the well-maintained churches and immaculate plazas of this colonial city. The road grows steep and bumpy, the pavement giving way to cobblestones, and then dirt. Cinderblock houses are replaced by the cornfields the local residents plant and tend every summer. Urban life, while still visible in the valley below, seems far away. Just off this dirt road about two dozen people are hard at work unearthing the remains of a remarkable city: Tlaxcallan, the capital of a pre-Columbian state that resisted domination by the powerful Aztec empire and whose leaders were accountable to their people. On an August afternoon, with the volcano Malinche towering above, archaeologist Lane Fargher with the Mexican research institute Cinvestav strode onto this terrace high above the modern city to check on his team’s progress. Under the terrace’s surface they found stone walls from a 600-year-old

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from the city’s prominent merchants and best warriors. Archaeologists once believed that such pre-modern collective societies did not exist outside of Europe. But armed with a theoretical framework defining the political differences between autocratic and collective states, as well as Spanish chronicles that record undeniably cooperative, and even democratic, features of Tlaxcallan’s government, Fargher and his colleagues are helping determine how to identify and study a collective state using the archaeological record. FARGHER FIRST GREW INTERESTED in collective societies when he was doing postdoctoral research with Richard Blanton, a Purdue University archaeologist who recently retired. Trained in the 1960s, Blanton was taught that Mesoamerican cultures—like all pre-modern non-European societies—were ruled by despotic kings. In Mesoamerica, signs of all-powerful royalty were particularly clear among the Olmec, who lived along the Gulf Coast between 1200 and 400 B.C. and left behind enormous stone heads archaeologists believe are portraits of rulers, and the Classic Maya, who carefully documented the political intrigues and military clashes of royal dynasties in southern Mexico and parts of Central America between A.D. 250 and 950. Neither of these civilizations occupied Oaxaca, where Blanton did most of his fieldwork. But he still expected to unearth signs of kings, such as monumental palaces, art venerating individual rulers,

lizzie Wade

house. It’s a comfortable size, with five or six rooms plus some patio areas—plenty of space for a family of about seven to ten people. “But it’s not spectacular,” Fargher said. “Not by any means a palace.” And that makes what’s next to the house—an enormous two-tiered public plaza, with the remains of low walls and ramps that once allowed people to move between the two levels—highly unusual. Fargher believes the two connected public spaces ensured there was room for everyone in the neighborhood to watch and participate in community rituals. Other than that minimal architecture, the plazas are devoid of artifacts, an indication that they were used for public events and cleaned in between, he said. In other Mesoamerican cities, this kind of public space would have been in the center of the city, surrounded by palaces, temples, and the sprawling houses of the most elite residents. But in Tlaxcallan, which was occupied from about A.D. 1250 to 1550, this is just one node in a vibrant urban network of more than twenty neighborhood plazas, connected by paved hilltop roads and flanked by the relatively humble homes of the city’s typical citizens. According to Fargher, this decentralized but carefully designed urban plan is a sign of Tlaxcallan’s unusual form of government. Rather than being ruled by an autocratic king who inherited his power and wealth, Tlaxcallan was governed by a senate of approximately 100 men chosen

The stone walls of one of Tlaxcallan’s centuries-old houses is seen here.

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A fragment of an elaborately designed polychrome vessel.

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and royal tombs stocked with exotic and expensive goods. He didn’t find them.“If you open up your eyes a little bit and look around…you’ll see a lot of things that don’t seem to fit that [despotic] pattern very well,” he said. For example, the Zapotec capital of Monte Albán in Oaxaca and the monumental city of Teotihuacan near Mexico City both had pyramids and extensive urban planning, but lacked palaces and artistic representations of kings. The art in these types of societies focused on deities or symbols of rulership— the office, rather than the individual occupying it. In 1996, Blanton co-wrote a seminal article in Current Anthropology proposing a new way to interpret such states. Perhaps they weren’t autocratic at all. Perhaps they were collective, governed by various people or factions working together to provide public goods and services to their citizens. Blanton started to think the conventional wisdom that pre-modern, non-European cultures were despotic was wrong, both factually and ethically. “Why were we saying that only Europeans are somehow the geniuses that invented democracy, and everyone else had to wait around?” he said. After finishing his work with Blanton, during which he helped analyze the traits of collective states that had been documented ethnographically and historically, Fargher was eager to find the remains of a collective state that he could investigate archaeologically. He ran across Mexican historical documents from the colonial period describing

These bichrome and polychrome pottery sherds were recovered during household excavations.

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early sixteenth century—making it the second largest city in Mesoamerica after Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, which housed 150,000 people and lay just over the mountains to the west in what is now Mexico City. The Aztecs and the Tlaxcaltecans shared a language, an ethnicity, and a pantheon of deities, but they were sworn enemies nonetheless. At its height, the Aztec empire controlled almost all of central and southern Mexico. Tlaxcallan was the only place in the region that fended off Aztec domination and remained unconquered. “The Aztecs said they could have conquered Tlaxcalla, but didn’t feel the need. This is the dominant view, but I don’t buy it,” Smith said. He thinks the Aztecs concocted this narrative because they “could not succeed in conquering Tlaxcalla.” Fargher sees evidence of Tlaxcallan’s independence in its ceramics. “The assemblage of pottery is completely different [from the Aztec empire],” he said. He’s found only a handful of pieces of typical Aztec pottery, which had black designs on an orange background. Tlaxcallan’s ceramics, on the other hand, tend to include at least three colors and much more elaborate designs, some of which represent deities and rituals, but never kings. “We lack representations of individual people,” said Aurelio López Corral, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History who is co-directing the excavation with Fargher.

lizzie Wade

pre-Columbian Tlaxcallan as a group of four small towns that cooperated politically. “This is perfect,” he remembered thinking. “It was obviously very collective.” But when he arrived in Tlaxcala (the name for the modern city and state) in 2007 for his first survey, he was stunned by the extent of the territory brimming with ceramics. When he used that survey to map the settlement, Fargher saw a continuous urban layout featuring many neighborhood plazas, none of which seemed to be more spectacular or important than any other. It wasn’t four small towns at all, he realized.“It’s a city!” “Those sixteenth-century sources have been taken at face-value for so long,” said David Carballo, an archaeologist at Boston University who studies collectivity at Teotihuacan. “[Fargher] has made a good case” for a continuous city— and in the process confirmed that archaeology could reveal pieces of Tlaxcallan’s past that colonial history had misinterpreted. “The evidence [of a collective government] from Tlaxcallan is certainly tantalizing,” agreed Michael E. Smith, an archaeologist at Arizona State University who has studied the Aztec empire. Eventually, Fargher mapped about 1,000 terraces like the one his team excavated this summer. Most seem to hold multiple houses, each large enough for about ten people, and some kind of public space. Fargher estimates that at least 40,000 people lived in Tlaxcallan at its height in the

The remnants of a household group consisting of four structures. The square in the foreground was an interior patio.

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lizzie Wade

Germán Ramírez Jiménez (left) excavates a brick inside a structure as Lane Fargher looks on.

“That fits well with what we know about Tlaxcaltecan collectivity.” (López Corral also directs the institute’s Tepeticpac Archaeological Project at Tlaxcallan. Though Fargher’s project is separate from Tepeticpac, the two share their data, and the Tepeticpac team’s discoveries have informed Fargher’s conclusions.) In the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which was ruled by a king who inherited his title and a powerful council of advisors, such colorful and elaborately decorated ceramics are only found in the most elite households, according to Fargher. In Tlaxcallan, everyone had them. Fargher believes this suggests a low degree of economic inequality, a trait he and Blanton detected in many collectively governed states in their historical study. If a state is investing its resources in public goods, it’s “pulling the commoners up,” Blanton said. “You get a narrowing of wealth differences.” According to Blanton and Fargher, limited economic inequality is a common by-product of collective governments in which leaders share power and are accountable to their citizens. López Corral, however, doesn’t believe life in Tlaxcallan was quite as equitable as Fargher does. He pointed out that there could have been pronounced differences in wealth between the capital city of Tlaxcallan and the state’s hinterlands, which have barely been studied. And he argued that, even in the city, some households have ceramics that

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look elaborate but were in fact crude copies of the truly fancy objects found in other homes, indicating economic class divisions. Fargher is currently measuring the proportion of elaborately decorated ceramics in different types of households to see if the elites owned more of the highest quality objects, while lower status people could only afford a select few. But even if further research reveals that fancy ceramics were more or less equally distributed between Tlaxcallan’s different classes, Smith questions the assumption that’s indicative of limited economic inequality as well as the idea that limited inequality indicates a collective government. In the state of Morelos, which was controlled by the Aztecs and governed by local, wealthy lords, Smith found that commoners also owned their share of high-quality goods despite the clear economic distinctions between themselves and the elites. “The presence of fancy ceramics in commoner contexts is a direct measure of the operation of market systems, and only a very indirect measure of inequality,” he said. “That’s not evidence about government.” ON THE UPPER LEVEL of the plaza, overlooking the house the archaeologists are excavating, stand the ruins of a Catholic chapel.Today it is barely more than four crumbling stone walls, the roof long gone and the floor overgrown with

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adam Wiseman

grass. But when it was built, in the late 1570s, it marked a political, religious, and social merger with the Spanish that had already transformed Mexico and the world. While some Tlaxcaltecans were initially wary of the Spanish, who arrived in 1519, most of the city’s leaders welcomed them with open arms, united by their shared desire to defeat the Aztecs. Hernán Cortés and his troops lived under Tlaxcaltecan protection for years, allowing them to prepare for and recover from battle—and giving their priests plenty of time to document the peculiarities of life there. The Spanish didn’t understand everything they saw, Fargher said, but they recorded Tlaxcallan’s brutal elections—candidates for the senate were beaten by a mob of their neighbors and then isolated in a temple for over a year of training—and The walls of a sixteenth-century Catholic chapel still stand. the large-scale community bloodletting rituals that the Tlaxcaltecans engaged in. Central America and as far north as Texas to colonize terriWhile these practices may seem grisly today, they publicly tory for the Spanish crown. “They were treated very differdemonstrated citizens’ commitment to a state that depended ently than any other indigenous group in Mexico,” he said. on their cooperation, according to Fargher. “These types of Eventually, the city’s people left their hilltop terraces collaborative rituals are very important for creating public and moved to the new colonial city the Tlaxcaltecans were trust. After all that, you believe that when your neighbor building under Spanish direction in the valley below. Fargher goes home, he’s going to follow the law, he’s going to pay surmised that Tlaxcallan was completely abandoned around his taxes,” he said. 1550. Within just a few centuries, the pre-Columbian repubTenochtitlan fell to the Spanish and Tlaxcaltecan forces lic had faded from Mexico’s memory. Mexico declared its in 1521. While this event is now called the conquest of independence from Spain in 1810 and subsequently, when it Mexico,“[the Tlaxcaltecans] didn’t see it as a conquest,” said began to valorize the fallen Aztec empire, the Tlaxcaltecans Fargher. “From their perspective, they defeated the Aztecs.” were seen as traitors. But dig under the surface of these terFor hundreds of years afterward, the Tlaxcaltecans received races-turned-cornfields, and the old city is still there, waiting special treatment by the Spanish as compared with other to tell a very different story about Mexico’s past. native populations, even receiving honors like royal coats of arms for their families. They also travelled as far south as LIZZIE WADE is a correspondent for Science magazine based in Mexico City.

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A survey of part of Florida’s northern gulf coast is revealing how people dealt with rising sea levels centuries ago. Location in Florida

Current Shoreline

1500 BC

FLORIDA

2500 BC

Suwannee River

3500 BC

4500 BC

jan underWood

Gulf of Mexico

North 0

5 Miles

This map shows how a portion of Florida’s northern Gulf Coast shoreline has changed over a 6,500-year period.

A Tale Of Prehistoric Climate Change By Julian Smith american archaeology

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in the near future. It’s also to use this information to help contemporary policy makers respond to climate change and its consequences.“In our lifetime, we could see half of lower Florida under water,” Sassaman said. “We’re trying to understand how people who lived through this sort of change anticipated different futures.” The LSAS study area spans twenty-six miles of coastline, in the center of which is the mouth of the Suwannee River, the only major gulf-draining river in the state that hasn’t been altered by canals or dams.The study area encompasses 54,000 acres of federal land in two national wildlife refuges, Lower Suwannee and Cedar Keys. Together they protect dunes, salt marshes, and tidal creeks, with low islands and oyster reefs offshore. The low-relief landscape created abundant and productive estuarine and intertidal habitats, which helped draw the first humans here in the late Holocene. It has also been sensitive to the slightest changes in sea level. Geological studies

kenneth sassaman

lorida, with an average elevation of six feet above sea level, tops the list of states at risk of flooding due to climate change. Over three-quarters of the Sunshine State’s twenty million residents live on or near its 1,350mile coastline, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that sea levels are already rising more than a third of an inch a year. Even modest projections show Florida’s sea levels up to seventeen inches higher by 2030. While politicians and urban planners debate how to deal with this, archaeologists are looking to the past to see how its earliest inhabitants adapted to changing sea levels long before high-rises filled the streets of Miami. The Lower Suwannee Archaeological Survey (LSAS) was launched in 2009 to investigate prehistoric sites along Florida’s northern Gulf Coast, fifty miles north of Tampa. Its goal, said project leader Ken Sassaman, an archaeologist with the University of Florida, is more than just recording and interpreting data from sites that may well be underwater

University of Florida graduate students and members of the Friends of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge conduct test excavations on the steep slope of the south ridge of Shell Mound in 2012.

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kenneth sassaman

In consultation with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, archaeologists from the University of Florida, the National Park Service, and the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research teamed up in March of 2013 to salvage a 4,500-year-old cemetery of thirty-two individuals at McClamory Key.

have shown that, since the end of the Ice Age, ocean levels have risen by roughly 300 feet, shrinking the Florida peninsula by about half. Within the past 4,500 years, the rate of increase has slowed, and sea levels have stayed within five or six feet of the modern range. But as long as people have lived on the north Gulf Coast of Florida, they have had to deal with a shoreline that has changed over time, and for the most part they’ve done it by moving inland. Many prehistoric settlements were in former coastal areas that are now underwater. Of the 112 documented archaeological sites, the LSAS team has done test excavations at twenty-five of them. AMS and radiocarbon assays from charcoal, nut shells, animal bones, and marine shells recovered from these sites have yielded dates between 2600 B.C. and A.D. 1300, with most concentrated in the first millennium A.D. Overall, Sassaman said, the sites have a history of centuries of relative stability punctuated by periods of abandonment and relocation, sometimes apparently as a result of climate events. The earliest inhabitants lived a subsistence existence in communities of a few dozen people that, when necessary, could move easily. Geological evidence shows a significant climate event around A.D. 1 – 200 caused a rapid sea level rise of one and one-half to three feet, enough to

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move the local shoreline up to two miles inland. Immediately thereafter, residents moved from the coast and coastal islands farther inland.

he Middle Woodland period (ca. A.D. 100 – 500) was a time of dramatic cultural change throughout the Southeast. Small groups came together and moved into larger and more permanent settlements with plazas and elaborate ceremonial and burial mounds. In the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, intensive “terraforming”—the construction of platform and burial mounds from sand and shell, some over six feet high, as well as straight and ring-shaped shell deposits up to 230 feet in diameter—took place, perhaps partly in response to the rising seas. Half a dozen of these civic-ceremonial centers are located in or near the LSAS study area.The two largest, called Crystal River and Garden Patch, were both built around A.D. 100 – 500. Crystal River, twenty-five miles south of the river delta, was almost five miles inland. It probably had the largest population, Sassaman said, up to 150 people. Garden Patch, twelve miles north of the delta and about 1.2 miles inland, was the next largest, with perhaps as many as 100 residents. Every civic-ceremonial center was preceded by a cemetery

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that was already in use for hundreds of years. In all, almost thirty percent of the LSAS sites contained human remains, some of which are about 4,500 years old. Many had secondary burials, meaning human remains were dug up and moved. “During the Late Archaic period, cemeteries were being removed to higher and drier land as sea level rose,” Sassaman said. Only then did the living relocate nearby. He sees this as clear evidence they were planning for the future, motivated by a variable climate. The new construction doesn’t seem random or contingent on available space.“It looked like they were being smart,” he said, “because building right on the coast would be really vulnerable. Instead of waiting for the crisis, the big storm surge, they’re getting out in front of it.” Tom Pluckhahn of the University of South Florida, who directs work at Crystal River, said there’s no better explanation for why they moved inland. “There’s not much evidence for conflict, and there wasn’t much farming. Occam’s Razor says people are moving either because of sea level rise or increased frequency of storms, similar to what we’re seeing now.”

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The civic-ceremonial centers were connected to places hundreds of miles away, as shown by the amount and diversity of artifacts found in cemeteries and mounds. Palmetto Mound has a nearly-ten-pound piece of galena, the biggest piece found in Florida, that came from Missouri, and large cutting tools made of greenstone that likely came from eastern Alabama. Pottery stamped with the same identifiable maker’s marks—carved wooden paddles printed into the clay—has turned up at Garden Patch, the Block-Sterns site in Tallahassee, and Kolomoki in Georgia. Over a dozen soapstone vessels from a cemetery at Bird Island, a site at the north end of the study area, were sourced over 300 miles north. All but one of the centers in the study area were depopulated by A.D. 700, although bodies and grave goods were still being deposited in cemeteries as late as A.D. 1300. “We have a pretty good sense that settlement following the abandonment of centers was dispersed, small-scale, and mobile—what appears to be a return to earlier times,” said Sassaman. There is no archaeological consensus for why the centers were abandoned. The only exception was a site

kenneth sassaman

In 2014 and 2015, University of Florida field school students excavated test units on the top of Shell Mound to document the emplacement of oyster shells around A.D. 550 to modify the mound into the U-shaped configuration seen today.

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abandoned not because it’s too wet or vulnerable to flooding, but because the last storm infilled a channel or impacted local oyster beds.” The flexibility and resilience of a nomadic existence may have been critical to survival in an environment as variable as the northern Gulf Coast.“We are increasingly learning the lesson that once you’ve made significant infrastructure investment, the harder it is to adapt,” Pluckhahn said. The presence of Hopewell artifacts also suggests the possibility that immigrants from the Midwest brought new ideas and beliefs that weren’t compatible with coastal existence over the long term. “What happens when you take a nature religion that’s developed in one environmental context and transfer it to one that’s radically different?”

steve mcFadden

called Roberts Island, which was terraformed into a civicceremonial center around A.D. 700 - 800. Sassaman suspects that investing in large-scale construction and infrastructure was ultimately a liability in the long term. Even though it likely spurred innovations like mariculture, building the civic-ceremonial centers also anchored residents in place. At the same time, the ritual infrastructure and cemeteries undoubtedly made it more likely that residents would try to hold out in the face of rising sea levels. “It’s hard to walk away from so much symbolic capital,” he said. He also emphasized that the effects of rising sea levels extend beyond whether or not a site is underwater. “The estuarine ecosystem, navigability of waterways, and more are affected by changing water levels so a place may be

Kenneth Sassaman (blue cap) and several researchers take core samples in Horseshoe Cove to document changing sea levels over the past 4,500 years.

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Not all of the new civic-ceremonial centers were located inland. On the shoreline about eight miles south of the river delta, the Shell Mound site centers on a C-shaped mound roughly 400 feet in diameter and about twenty-three feet above sea level. Part of the mound was built on top of one end of a large parabolic dune open to the southwest. Archaeologists estimate the mound contains the shells of up to 1.2 billion oysters, making it the largest shellwork in the study area. Evidence suggests that the site’s residents practiced oyster mariculture. Shell Mound rose to prominence about A.D. 400. Sassaman thinks it was built on the shore to be close to a large cemetery called Palmetto Mound, which occupies an island a third of a mile west across a narrow channel. Palmetto Mound, which contains hundreds of burials, is the largest cemetery found from its time period in the lower Southeast, according to Sassaman. Some burials predate Shell Mound by at least 800 years. Shell Mound’s residents dug hundreds of pits, some up to six feet deep and six feet across, that were backfilled with sand, pottery sherds, and vertebrate remains such as sea turtles. The pits were probably used for cooking during feasts, and Sassaman found that one large pit had an unusually high proportion of mullet bones, as well as the bones of at least eighteen water birds such as ducks, grebes,

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A Civic-Ceremonial Anomaly

These exotic items were found in a pit feature in Shell Mound: (clockwise from top) drilled shark teeth, a quartz flake, chert flakes, mica, a quartz crystal, and the premolar of a panther with ground roots (middle).

herons, egrets, and spoonbills. Half the samples were white ibis, and four of those were juveniles, likely from rookeries on islands to the south. They would have reached that age in June, around the summer solstice, when sea turtles would have been coming ashore to lay eggs. Taken together, Sassaman thinks this could be evidence of large social gatherings, perhaps ritual feasts at a spiritually significant time of year. —Julian Smith

Sassaman said. “Does it serve people well, make them more or less vulnerable? It could be a religious sensibility that does not take into account that change is inevitable, like earlier coastal people had.”

t’s a challenge to draw a direct parallel between thirdcentury coastal dwellers and the modern residents of Miami, according to Neill Wallis of the Florida Museum of Natural History, who directed work at the Garden Patch site. But it’s not impossible.“The main lesson to learn is planning for the future, anticipating the social requirements you’re going to need,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious that the inhabitants of the Lower Suwannee saw sea level change was part of life, not an unexpected event, and planned for it.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels will rise eleven to twenty-four inches by 2100 even with aggressive emissions reductions. But the organization admits that this doesn’t factor in the collapse of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, since there’s simply no precedent for events of that magnitude. One key lesson for modern policy and planning experts, Sassaman said, is that the past 4,500 years of relative climate stability

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are not a good benchmark for the future. A better analog is 12,000-11,000 years ago, when sea level change was so dramatic it would have been obvious within as little as five to ten years. “It is not enough to look back to see forward,” he said. “We have to look back at conditions that parallel those projected for the future.” Planners can design coastal communities and related infrastructure to take into account, and even take advantage of, changing sea levels. “We could plan for the inundation of coastal settlements with landscape modifications and set-asides that accommodate rising water,” he said. “The Dutch do this well, creating capacity in flooded areas for mariculture, transportation, and even recreation.” Sassaman acknowledged that the simplest solution—not building on the coast—isn’t going to happen. “We can’t give up on the coasts,” he said.“We can still have access, but maybe we don’t need to be right on the most vulnerable places, like those people in A.D. 200. I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little, but the water’s coming up, there’s no question. We’re going to keep seeing impacts like we saw these past months.” Coastal archaeological sites are particularly vulnerable, as the team has witnessed firsthand. In 2017, Hurricane Irma

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kenneth sassaman

A winter storm overturned these oak trees on the shore of McClamory Key in December 2012. Four years later Hurricane Hermine stripped away up to a foot of the island’s seventh-century A.D. midden

spared the Lower Suwannee area, but in 2016, Hurricane Hermine brought a six-foot storm surge and eighty-miles-per-hour winds that scoured eight to twelve inches from McClamory Key, where the team had excavated a cemetery a few years earlier. Derrick Key, a nearby island, has vanished completely. Sassaman still has long stretches of coastline to survey, and there are more sites to examine on offshore islands and at the mouth of the Suwannee River.The island town of Cedar Key, population 702, sits on the remains of another civic-ceremonial center. In the future he plans to deploy underwater archaeologists to look for evidence of near-shore settlements. He is also interested in how large a role astronomical cycles played in residents’ decision-making over time. A graduate student is investigating what “traditional” subsistence looked like before the centers emerged. “My sense is that we will see little, if any, difference in before-andafter conditions, supporting the idea that the abandonment of civic-ceremonial centers cannot be reduced simply to a downturn in the ecological production capacity,” Sassaman

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said. “It may have been more of a sociopolitical problem— which, of course, is not mutually exclusive of environmental challenges.” If there is a silver lining to the story of early life on the north Gulf Coast, Sassaman said, it may be that the same social networks that brought objects and beliefs from outside also gave people somewhere to go when things got difficult. “We think that when they left the coast, they already had well-established networks to draw on to relocate.” Maybe we should be thinking about places like South Florida in the same way, he said, to help prepare for the inevitable.“We could start by analyzing their social networks. Let’s ask every person: who do you know that doesn’t live in Miami? What’s your relationship, and would they mind if you stayed with them?”

JULIAN SMITH is the author of Smokejumper: A Memoir by One of America’s Most Select Airborne Firefighters. He is a frequent contributor to American Archaeology. 41

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Whistling Past The Historic Graveyard The inadvertent discovery of historic burials during a construction project in Philadelphia has revealed lax and confusing historic preservation laws in this historically-rich city. By Tamara Jager Stewart ON JANUARY 26, 2017, Kimberlee Moran, the director of forensic science at Rutgers University-Camden in New Jersey, and Anna Dhody, a forensic anthropologist and director of the Mütter Research Institute in Philadelphia, visited a construction site in Philadelphia’s Old City Historic District.The site, a vacant lot at 218 Arch Street, is where the developer, PMC Property Group, plans to build an apartment complex. In November of 2016, Moran and Dhody had read a Philly.com story that a construction crew with Fastrack Builders, which was hired by PMC, had uncovered human remains while excavating the lot with heavy equipment. So Moran and Dhody contacted PMC and asked permission to recover a small box of bones for analysis and to survey the site.“There were bones on the surface of the grounds,” said Moran, and they were clearly from humans. They collected some bones—“enough to fit in a shoebox,” Moran recalled— for analysis. Before departing, they offered to monitor the excavation on a voluntary basis in the likely event that

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more remains were uncovered, but PMC declined. Approximately three weeks later, Moran and Dhody were contacted by the construction foreman: the workers had uncovered more bones and they didn’t know what to do with them. As the construction project continued, many more bones, and in some cases entire skeletons enclosed in their caskets, were uncovered. It turns out that a portion of the lot at 218 Arch Street covers the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery, which was in service from 1707 to the mid 1800s, when the First Baptist Church moved to another location. It was assumed that all of the graves in its cemetery were removed and reinterred in Mount Moriah Cemetery in another part of Philadelphia at that time. But after researching the historical archives, Moran and Dhody realized it was possible that many more bodies were still buried in the vacant lot.“If records are correct, thousands of (bodies) were interred in this cemetery.” From February twentieth to March seventh, PMC

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mütter research institute

A team of archaeologists and volunteers excavate the site in March.

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A coffin containing a skeleton is placed on a plywood board (top) and then wrapped in plastic before being taken to the laboratory.

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“THIS IS A FAIRLY regular occurrence” in Philadelphia, Moran said of uncovering unmarked burials during construction projects. “But still, it always throws everyone into confusion.” Despite having researched Pennsylvania historic preservation laws, Moran and Dhody were uncertain as to how the remains should be handled. If they took the skeletons to Moran’s laboratory at Rutgers in New Jersey, would they be violating a law by transporting the bones across a state line? One local archaeologist, who Moran wouldn’t name, chastised her and Dhody for getting involved in PMC’s project and thereby giving it a veneer of respectability.“You’re going to set Philadelphia archaeology back thirty years,” the archaeologist scolded Moran. The archaeologist was of no help when Moran asked for advice about how to handle the skeletons. PMC owns the land and the construction project is privately funded; consequently federal preservation laws such as NAGPRA and the National Historic Preservation Act are not in force. And there is a debate as to whether any state and local laws apply. The City of Philadelphia, which issued the permit to PMC to build the apartments, argued that there is no law that compelled it to stop the construction project once the human remains were uncovered, or to take any responsibility for them. A lawyer for PMC echoed the city’s argument. Doug Mooney and Mark Zecca dispute that contention. Mooney is an archaeologist and the president of the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum (PAF), a nonprofit organization that protects and preserves the city’s archaeological resources. He stated that there is a protocol for dealing with human remains that is “codified in numerous Pennsylvania statutes.” That protocol mandates that the police and medical examiner be alerted so that an investigation can be conducted to determine if the remains are associated with a recent crime or are historical. If the remains are historical, as they are in this case, the property owner must petition the Philadelphia Orphans’ Court for permission to exhume and rebury them in another cemetery. The Orphans’ Court has legal jurisdiction over any unmarked graves or burial grounds, which is to say the court has jurisdiction over remains for which there are no known descendants or other persons who can represent them. Zecca, a private attorney who is representing the PAF

evi numen / mütter research institute

allowed them to monitor the construction work. “We had to rearrange our lives trying to make sure someone was at the site,” Moran said. But try as they did, there were times when they were unable to be on the site. Then, from March seventh to the thirteenth, PMC let Moran, Dhody, and a team of about a dozen volunteers they hastily assembled excavate the human remains. By the end of their time on the site, having excavated seventy-eight burials, the archaeologists had dug down to a sterile layer with no bones or associated artifacts. They had recovered all of the First Baptist Cemetery’s human remains. Or so they thought.

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from the Medical Examiner’s Office visited the site and found no evidence of criminal activity, but they didn’t instruct PMC to petition the Orphans’ Court. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Philadelphia’s Historical Commission, and the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, which issued PMC’s permit to build the apartment complex, were also informed, all of whom said they had no authority to intervene in this situation. So the project continued. Then in June, Stephan Salisbury of the Philadelphia Inquirer received an anonymous call, presumably from a member of the construction crew, informing Salisbury that human bones were scattered throughout the site. As of early March, the project was receiving a considerable amount of media attention. (Moran and Dhody had thought about informing the media before then, but Moran said PMC discouraged them from doing so, and they feared if they did PMC would forbid them to work at the site.) The city urged PMC to hire a cultural resource management firm to excavate the remains, and in July PMC chose AECOM. By mid September, when AECOM’s excavation had concluded, nearly 500 sets of human remains had been exhumed from the lot and given to Moran’s group for storage and future analysis at Rutgers University-Camden. Before the remains were reinterred, the city advised PMC to petition the Orphans’ Court and request a ruling as to how to proceed. In August, the Orphans’ Court judge

mütter research institute

and who previously worked as a senior attorney for the city for twenty years, argued that the state’s Probate, Estates and Fiduciaries Code determines who has the authority to dispose of remains in situations like this.“If you’re going to disinter or reinter (human remains) you have to have approval of next of kin or a court order,” he said. But for months PMC had neither as its construction crew continued to uncover burials at 218 Arch Street. PMC was excavating the bones with backhoes and disposing of the excavated dirt and associated items in a landfill. There were allegations that bones were being dumped in the landfill along with the dirt. Jonathan Stavin, executive vice president of PMC, said that numerous bones were uncovered, and “it’s absolutely possible that some remains” ended up in a landfill, but if so “it wasn’t intentional.” Though PMC has been in business for several decades, this is the first time a construction project of theirs has uncovered an unmarked cemetery. “I refuse to let anyone paint us as this big, callous developer,” he said.“We did everything in our power to comport with the law, or lack thereof. We treated everyone and everything found with respect.” According to accounts in the local media, when human bones were first uncovered in October of 2016, the police and the Medical Examiner’s Office were alerted by an anonymous caller, rather than by PMC. (Stavin said PMC called city officials when the bones were discovered.) Representatives

Students clean and document the exterior of a coffin prior to excavating it.

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Volunteer Chelsea Saal-Cordle examines one of the skeletons for abnormalities and evidence of trauma.

issued a preliminary decree asserting the court’s sole legal jurisdiction over the remains and gave PMC until August, 2020 to analyze and rebury the skeletons, either at Mount Moriah or another acceptable Philadelphia cemetery. “The issue of unmarked historic burials and burial grounds being impacted by construction is one that the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum, and I personally, have been working on for at least ten years,” said Mooney, who also serves on the Philadelphia Historical Commission’s Historic Designation Committee.“There has never been an archaeologist on the historical commission,” he said, and no archaeologists have served on the commission’s staff since 1989. “In the absence of anyone with specific expertise in dealing with archaeological resources, the commission has simply done nothing to protect them.” Mooney has documented eightyfive instances in Philadelphia in which historic cemeteries were disturbed or merely exposed since 1800. Salisbury has been writing about the uncovering of the First Baptist Church Cemetery as well as similar occurrences. “It happens all the time,” he said. “Most often, no one hears about it because the developer quietly tosses the bones into the dumpster and no one is the wiser.” Though Moran is no fan of PMC’s, she said “I can’t really blame them, because there’s an absence of regulation and

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an absence of enforcement.” For this she blamed the city. Mooney agreed. “Because the city never stepped in to take charge,” he said, “there’s an unknown number of graves that were disturbed or destroyed.” He called the city’s argument that PMC was not legally obligated to immediately petition the Orphans’ Court upon uncovering human remains “ridiculous,” and added that it ensures “it’s going to happen again.” “There is a law, but there’s no enforcement of the law,” said Zecca.“The average person on the street” knows enough not to throw away human remains. “The (city’s) law department is running and hiding from its legal obligation,” he said “I believe that the Mayor and the Commissioner of Licenses and Inspections have their hearts in the right places and would do the right thing if the city’s law department properly advised them of their authority.” This past summer a public forum was held regarding the city’s unmarked burials, at which Mooney proposed a plan for dealing with the issue that included listing all historic cemeteries on the state Register of Cultural Properties and giving the Philadelphia Historical Commission legal authority over them.The plan also suggests that the city pass an ordinance establishing a clear process and protocol for treating unmarked burials. PAF has developed a database of the city’s historic

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george leader

The People Who Were Buried There Most of the individuals in the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery were simply buried in shrouds, although one man was found with cufflinks and one juvenile had gold ring clusters in both shoulder areas. A few associated artifacts such as ceramic pipe stems were found in the dirt fill around the coffins. Kimberlee Moran is working with AECOM archaeologists to obtain their field notes, photographs, site maps, and other data in order to better understand the remains in context. “We will use all that information as well as the burial records to narrow down the dates,” she said. “We want to be able to stitch all this data together.” In the rush to quickly recover the burials prior to construction, researchers and volunteers didn’t have time to fully document each individual before removal. “The constraints we were under did limit the information we were able to obtain on site during excavation,” said Moran. Without headstones and a map of the cemetery, many key questions remain, such as the identities of the buried individuals. The First Baptist Church’s archives have “very good records that we are going through now, looking at various lists of people buried at the cemetery, trying to determine which remains had been moved, and to find a map,” Moran said. Numerous individuals were recovered in their intact coffins. “We are trying to document and recover these, sampling soil, wood from the coffins, and collecting data regarding coffin hardware such as handles, decorative plates, nails, and screws, for which a relative chronology exists.” AECOM did remove juvenile coffins intact, but adults were taken out of deteriorating coffins and put in boxes, so Moran’s team is trying to match the coffin assemblages with the individuals, a very challenging and time-consuming task. The researchers hope to work with the descendant community of the individuals to find out more about their lives and possibly to undertake facial reconstruction and conduct DNA analysis of some of the remains so they can be grouped by families. “There are lots of individuals with quite phenomenal soft tissue preservation,” said Moran. “Lots of brains were found preserved, and even a man’s moustache. Some of the coffins were badly deteriorated, so we’re not sure why some had such great preservation. We are doing soil analysis to try to understand this.” The researchers would like to study the preserved brains and other tissue to better understand the health and pathologies of the burial population, one of which had evidence of an autopsy having been done, something very uncommon in the eighteenth century, and another who possibly had syphilis. “But this analysis is far away. We have four to six months more of skeletal washing before any analysis can take place,”

cemeteries, and is in the process of making it available to the public.“By making this data available we hope that developers will be able to make informed decisions about whether or not to purchase particular properties that once contained burial grounds, or to provide them with advanced warning that archaeological investigations might be necessary to confirm the presence of burial remains,” Mooney said. But the city, which is planning a $500 million renovation of its parks, playgrounds, and recreation centers, many of which Mooney and Moran suspect were built on top of unmarked burials, is looking to the state to enact legislation. “Given Pennsylvania’s rich history, this type of situation is unlikely to be limited to Philadelphia, and we would like to see a statewide law enacted to address it,” said Ajeenah Amir, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office.“Currently Pennsylvania does not have such a law, and the statutes on the

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A late eighteenth-century coffin handle.

These gold rings were found in a juvenile’s coffin.

Moran said. A number of potential relatives of the buried individuals have contacted her offering samples of their DNA for comparative analysis, but DNA sampling of the burials is destructive and analysis is very expensive, so for now they are just keeping the names on file. Moran and her crew of students and professional volunteers were relieved this summer when the Orphans’ Court gave them until 2020 to work with the remains before they must be reinterred. “Now this gives us a level of certainty so we can apply for funding for future analysis. We’ve been dropping everything else in order to focus on this,” Moran said, “so now we have a little time.” –Tamara Jager Stewart

books that regulate related matters—such as cemeteries, disinterment, and burials—are insufficient and in some cases, contradictory.” “I have to be optimistic that the situation might soon be changing,” said Mooney. Mayor Jim Kenney recently launched the Mayor’s Task Force on Historic Preservation, of which Mooney is a member.“We only just recently started work for the task force and we’ll see how effective I can be advocating for archaeology.” Philadelphia “is the custodian of so much of the nation’s history,” Zecca noted. The city should take this obligation more seriously. After all, “the dead in a very old cemetery have no one to speak up for them.”

TAMARA JAGER STEWART is the assistant editor of American Archaeology and the Conservancy’s Southwest region projects coordinator. 47

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A Glimpse Of The Zuni

jjim Walker

The Conservancy obtains Tinaja Pueblo.

Mark Michel, the president of the Conservancy, walks behind an excavated masonry room.

he Conservancy recently acquired Tinaja Pueblo, a proto-Zuni site located near the foothills of the Zuni Mountains in the El Morro Valley of northeastern New Mexico. Named after the nearby abandoned Village of Tinaja that was established in the 1860s by several farming and ranching families, this thirteenth-century masonry pueblo has more than 130 rooms. A large, associated stone roomblock is situated on a small mesa about thirty feet above the valley floor, and several smaller roomblocks were built around the base of the mesa. The gated subdivision of El Morro Ranches surrounds the forty-acre tract containing Tinaja Pueblo on three sides. The Village of Tinaja served as a stopping place for travelers and pioneers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by 1940 it was deserted, with just a few

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stone foundations and a small cemetery remaining. Archaeologist Leslie Spier first recorded Tinaja Pueblo in 1917, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that test excavations were conducted there by the Cibola Archaeological Research Project, directed by the noted archaeologist Patty Jo Watson. The Cibola archaeologists were able to obtain tree ring cutting dates from beams of A.D. 1270 and 1284, indicating that construction of the pueblo took place during that time.A few excavated rooms can be seen on the site today, which were probably left uncovered by the Cibola archaeologists.The site is within a few miles of the Conservancy’s Scribe-S and Spier 142 preserves, both contemporaneous proto-Zuni sites that likely had interactions with Tinaja and with each other. One of the excavated rooms appears to be a burned storeroom. In the book Zuni Origins, linguist Jane Hill concludes

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that the Zuni language is a linguistic isolate unrelated to any other Southwestern native language. “Zuni speakers have been present in the Southwest for a minimum of 7,000 to 8,000 years,” Hill postulated, placing its linguistic origins near the beginning of the Archaic Period. Zuni oral histories recount an emergence from a place deep in a canyon along the Little Colorado River, probably the Grand Canyon. Their migration accounts take the group to the San Francisco Peaks, which tower above present-day Flagstaff.The oral histories speak of the Zuni breaking into smaller groups at various points in time, with some groups traveling south, east, and north into parts of Arizona and New Mexico, including the Rio Grande Valley, and finally converging at the “Middle Place,” roughly interpreted as the current Zuni Reservation. In looking at the archaeological evidence within the upper drainage of the Zuni River in New Mexico, which loosely defines the core Zuni culture area, sites have been identified that span the full period of human occupation from Paleo-Indian through Spanish Contact and into the modern era. In the Zuni culture area, the transition from pit houses to above-ground structures occurred during the period from A.D. 900 to 1100, along with a movement to higher elevations. The early pueblos tended to be small, containing just four to twelve rooms, usually with a kiva built in front of the main roomblock. By A.D. 1300, the trend of living in small,

dispersed pueblos dramatically changed when the Zuni began building pueblos containing 400 to 1,400 rooms. The population also shifted to the western end of the culture area. When the Spanish arrived in A.D. 1539, they found almost the entire Zuni population living in six or seven large pueblos along the Zuni River just east of what is now the New Mexico-Arizona state line. In 1999, the Conservancy collaborated with the Zuni Pueblo Cultural Resource Enterprise, the pueblo’s contract archaeology firm, and the Lannon Foundation in Santa Fe, to acquire, map, backfill, and preserve a portion of the ancestral Zuni site known as Box-S Pueblo that was slated for development into a subdivision. Located about twenty-five miles northeast of Tinaja, Box-S is a 1,100-room stone pueblo that straddled the Zuni Reservation boundary. Occupied between A.D. 1260 and 1285, the 160-acre, privately-owned portion of the site purchased by the Conservancy is now part of the Zuni Reservation. The owner of Tinaja Pueblo, who also developed the El Morro Ranch subdivision, passed away recently and the property was listed on the open market to facilitate the settlement of her estate. The Conservancy negotiated a purchase price of $40,000 cash at closing.The Conservancy will be developing a management plan for Tinaja Pueblo with the assistance of Zuni Pueblo, local archaeologists, and the State Historic Preservation Division. —Jim Walker

POINT Acquisitions

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Tinaja Pueblo

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

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C O N S E R VA N C Y

field notes SOUTHEAST—The Mississippi Department of Archives and History is wrapping up a long-term salvage project on the Conservancy’s Carson Mounds preserve in northwest Mississippi. The noted archaeologist Cyrus Thomas visited Carson, and in his Report on the mound explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, which was published in 1894, he included a map of the site showing eighty-nine mounds. After years of continual row-crop agriculture, only six of the largest mounds remain. In 2008, the Conservancy purchased four of those mounds. At that time, in an approximately eight-acre area at the site where mounds once stood but had long been plowed down, the new landowners did precision landleveling, taking dirt from higher areas of the field and moving it to lower areas. In the process human remains were exposed, at which point the land leveling stopped and State of Mississippi archaeologists recorded and removed the burials, as per state law. The landowners granted the Conservancy a temporary easement on the exposed mortuary area so the work, which included removing the human remains as well as mapping and documenting archaeological features, would not be rushed and as much information as possible could be gathered. The work has taken several years, and in 2016 an agreement was reached for the Conservancy to purchase the entire area that contained human remains as well as many archaeological features. With all the exposed burials removed and the site no longer in danger of

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jessica craWFord

Volunteers Survey Carson Mounds

Virgil “Duke” Beasley with Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research uses ground-penetrating radar in the area surrounding a buried structure.

being disturbed, archaeologist John Connaway with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History is mapping and recording the remaining features. Three stockades, nearly six hundred storage and trash pits, seventy structures, and almost eight thousand postholes have been recorded. The Carson preserve has hosted many Conservancy tour groups, Boy Scouts, school groups, and ten university field schools. Much of the work at Carson has been accomplished with the help of dedicated professional and amateur volunteers. In late August, a group of volunteers spent a day at Carson with Virgil “Duke” Beasley with Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research of Huntsville, Alabama, who volunteered his time to conduct a ground-penetrating radar

survey. Beasley focused on an area of the site in which a trench had been dug in a former mound location to locate the buried original surface. The trench revealed a pattern of posts at a depth of about four feet that suggests some type of structure. The structure was identified as a semi-subterranean house of the style commonly found at Cahokia, the Mississippian capital near what is now St. Louis. After analyzing the ground-penetrating radar data, Beasley identified the probable edges of the structure, and he also identified other possible structures nearby. The structure’s floor contained a midden full of white Burlington chert flakes and tools that came from Cahokia. The results will be helpful to future researchers working at Carson, especially those focusing on the Cahokia-Carson connection.

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suzy henrikson

Croft Preserve Stabilized WEST—Due to heavy snow fall and spring melt water, unexcavated sediments in Owl Cave have been gradually eroding over the past thirty years. Owl Cave is one of three caves in southeastern Idaho comprising what was previously called the Wasden site, named after rancher Leonard Wasden, who once owned the land. The Conservancy acquired the tenacre site in 2012 from the Croft family, and it is now known as the Croft Archaeological Preserve. Between 1966 and 1976, a research team from Idaho State University uncovered significant archaeological deposits, including a mammoth and Folsom points, overlain by an early Holocene bison kill. Despite previous stabilization efforts, the caves continue to experience erosion. In the fall of 2017, a team that included Suzann Henrikson, the Conservancy’s Croft site steward, and the founding members of the Wasden Archaeological Association, was assembled to prevent further loss of the remaining intact deposits in Owl Cave. The Wasden Archaeological Association is a not-forprofit organization recently formed by Leonard Wasden’s grandsons, Stephen and Randy Harris. It was primarily created to generate funds for the stabilization and protection of Owl, Coyote, and Dry Cat caves, as well as to encourage

The team constructs a snow fence near Owl Cave.

professional research of the existing collections from Owl Cave that are currently housed at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. With funds from the Carr Foundation, the team purchased supplies to construct 300 feet of snow fence around the cave entrance, along with 200 sand bags to prevent spring melt water from washing into the cave. Additional stabilization efforts are slated for summer of 2018, including the removal of graffiti from the cave walls.

david pollack

New Discoveries At Singer-Hieronymus MIDWEST—The Singer-Hieronymus site is a complex of four separate Native American villages, scattered across a ridgetop in northern Kentucky, that was occupied by the Fort Ancient people. Last spring an East Tennessee State University research team conducted geophysical and aerial surveys of two of the villages, known as A and B, whose locations and sizes were uncertain. The aerial survey, which was done using a drone, didn’t find any remnants of the villages above the ground. But the geophysical survey identified the locations of both villages. Features in both villages that appeared to be trash pits were also identified. Then last summer a University of Kentucky field school conducted test excavations at the two villages. In the first few weeks of the field school, seven trash pits in Village B were excavated, recovering primarily animal bone as well as pottery, projectile points, and other stone tools. A like number of trash pits were excavated in Village A. These pits, which were much larger than those at Village B, contained mostly animal bone, but also pottery, stone tools, and gaming stones. The fieldwork revealed new information about the two villages. It was confirmed that these villages were circular in shape, and the researchers uncovered evidence of a palisade that surrounded the village. Very few palisaded Fort Ancient villages have been identified. Based on the pottery styles and the sizes of the features, it seems that the Fort Ancient

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Researchers work in an excavation trench in Village A.

occupied Village B earlier, and for a shorter time, than Village A. It also appears that these villages were occupied sometime between A.D. 1200 and A.D. 1400. This assumption will be tested with radiocarbon dating in the near future. —Daniel Sea

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Reviews Prehistoric Games of North American Indians Edited by Barbara Voorhies (University of Utah Press, 2017; 400 pgs., illus., $65 cloth; www.UofUPress.com)

Archaeology of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic Edited by Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit (University of Alabama Press, 2017; 288 pgs., illus., $70 cloth or ebook; www.uapress.ua.edu)

This is the first in-depth look at the archaeology of African American life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Eighteen established and emerging scholars present thirteen articles spanning the period from the 1690s to the 1950s. Through the lens of archaeology, the authors examine the experience of individuals, families, and local communities as they progressed from slavery to freed men and women, and to full citizens. The essays are organized by general topics, beginning with “Slavery and Material Culture,” which gives fresh insight on how non-Southern blacks existed as slaves and how the decline of the institution changed the lives of the people. This volume is an important regional contribution to the story of African Americans in a borderland that has been little studied. It uses the latest techniques of the growing field of historical archaeology to provide us with new insights on a critical part of American history.

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Games are ubiquitous in human societies. In fact, it is virtually impossible to find a human society where games are not an important part of the culture. Like language and religion, they seem to meet basic human needs. This collection of fifteen case studies by twenty-one archaeologists examines games in prehistoric North America, some of which are still played today. There is a huge variety of games people played in North America. Detecting the presence of games in prehistoric societies is difficult, but determining their role in those societies is even more so. That’s why the study of games in prehistoric societies has been neglected even though its importance is enormous. The editor of this volume, Barbara Voorhies, a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Barbara, defines “games” as recreational activity that involves play, competition, two or more sides, a method for determining a winner, and agreed upon rules. They fall into three broad categories whose outcomes are determined by physical skill, strategy, or chance, although these categories are not mutually exclusive, and often overlap. Since prehistoric games are difficult to detect, the archaeologists producing this book use a wide variety of evidence to build their theories of gaming. Foremost among them is the discovery of artifacts that can be interpreted as game paraphernalia, such as dice made from bones or potsherds. Chunkey stones are commonly found in village sites in the Southeastern United States. Occasionally, the archaeological record will give us a picture of people playing games, such as the Mimbres bowl on the cover of this book that shows four people at a game board. A ceramic depiction of the Mesoamerican ballgame was discovered at Nayarit, Mexico. Architectural features uncovered by archaeologists sometimes provide important evidence of games, such as stone game boards or ball courts. All these authors also rely heavily on ethnographic evidence of gaming recorded by the earliest European colonists. Putting all this evidence together gives the authors a pretty reliable picture of many prehistoric games. Games are, and were, very important in human societies. Even though understanding them in prehistoric North America is a daunting task, it is an important one that the authors of this volume are seeking to achieve.

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Mississippian Beginnings Edited by Gregory D. Wilson (University of Florida Press, 2017; 346 pgs., illus., $90 cloth; www.upress.ufl.edu)

The Mississippian culture dominated most of the Southeastern and much of the Midwestern parts of the United States from about A.D. 1000 to 1600. It was characterized by large villages featuring mounds around a central plaza, often surrounded by palisades. The mounds were mainly platforms for houses and temples rather than burial mounds. The society was stratified with powerful chiefs and a common religion and belief system. The economy was based on intensive maize agriculture, and trade was extensive throughout the region. Until recently, most archaeologists believed that the Mississippian culture evolved from the earlier Woodland culture. Fresh evidence questions that interpretation, and this volume presents the results of recent fieldwork from a wide variety of sites, archival studies, and new investigations of collections. Sixteen scholars present this new evidence that provides the latest information about the emergence of the Mississippian culture. They discuss migrations, missions, pilgrimages, violent conflicts, and extensive trade, factors that worked together to develop a single unified culture over a vast area. The center of the Mississippian world was at Cahokia, the enormous site across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Mounting evidence indicates the culture emerged here, and then spread throughout the region driven by some kind of religious movement. As the cult spread, new centers developed that influenced others, each with some local variations. Seven of the ten essays in this volume deal with a local version of the Mississippian culture. Each example is different, but also strikingly alike, with similar architecture, pottery, iconography, economies, and religion. The volume is a badly needed update on the latest research and perspectives on how the Mississippian culture emerged and spread. Much of this information comes from new techniques, such as remote sensing and AMS dating, and more information is on its way. Clearly there is much more to learn about this great native culture, and Mississippian Beginnings gives us a new understanding at both the site level and the entire region. —Mark Michel

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Talking Stone: Rock Art of the Cosos By Paul Goldsmith (University of Utah Press, 2017; 112 pgs.; illus., $20 paper; $16 ebook; www.UofUPress.com)

Award-winning cinematographer Paul Goldsmith spent years filming and photographing the tens of thousands of Native American petroglyphs and pictographs of the Coso Range on the edge of the Mojave Desert in southeastern California. This amazing rock art locale is located on the China Lake Naval Weapons Range and is largely off limits to visitors. Created over thousands of years, the art collection contains images of shamans, animals, anthropomorphs, and mysterious abstract forms. With 160 color photos, this volume is a visual delight, showing examples of all the art of the Cosos, a people who seem to have disappeared about 800 years ago. Goldsmith supplements these photos with a narrative that is both personal and well informed. He treks into the remote desert canyons, and he meets archaeologists, Native Americans, a psychologist, an artist, bow hunters, and the base commanding officer, all with insights about the rock art. This book will delight everyone with an interest in Native American rock art.

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The Archaeological Conservancy

Expeditions

Maya of Yucatán and Calakmul When: February 15 - 25, 2018 Where: Mexico How Much: $2,995 per person

($325 single supplement)

vicki marie singer

The amazing Maya culture flourished for centuries in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. We’ll visit some of their most splendid sites, including Dzibilchaltún, Balankanche Cave, Mayapán, and Chichén Itzá. We’ll also drive deep into the forest to visit Calakmul, which has been undergoing significant excavations in recent years. Calakmul is believed to be the largest of all the Maya cities. More than 100 stelae and 6,500 structures have been discovered there so far. During the Late Classic period it dominated the entire southern Yucatán. Accompanying us will be John Henderson, one of the nation’s leading Maya scholars. Chichén Itzá, in southern Mexico, was occupied until the thirteenth century.

Guatemala Highlands and Copán the archaeological conservancy

When: March 29 - April 8, 2018 Where: Guatemala and Honduras How Much: $2,995 per person ($325 single supplement)

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 ranging from ancient ruins to modern-day cities. Our travels will take us from beautiful Lake Atitlán to the Honduran rain forest, where we will visit Copán, considered the crown jewel of the southern Maya cities. Mayanist John Henderson from Cornell University will accompany us on the tour.

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

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Yampa River When: June 1- 8, 2018 Where: Colorado and Utah How Much: $1,995 ($175 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.

Ancient Peoples of the Andes

jim Walker

When: June 8 - 22, 2018 Where: Peru and Bolivia How Much: $5,395 per person ($1,185 single supplement)

Machu Picchu remained a secret to the outside world until 1911, when archaeologist Hiram Bingham discovered it almost by accident. Perched on a ridge more than 2,000 feet above the Urubamba River, this ancient city is among the most spectacular sites in all of the Americas. And Machu Picchu is just one of the many highlights of the Conservancy’s new two-week Peruvian and Bolivian Andes tour. From the magical Inca city of Machu Picchu, to the splendor of Cuzco, and the beautiful and mysterious Lake Titicaca, our tour of the ancient civilizations of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes promises to be an unforgettable adventure. Accompanied by John Henderson, an expert in the region’s archaeology, we’ll learn about the vast empires that once reigned in the land. The adventure begins with visits to several archaeological museums in Lima to familiarize you with the country’s past cultures. Then, we’ll explore the Sacred Valley of the Incas, where we’ll visit an ancient salt works, the market at the village of Pisac, and the ruins of Pisac. After spending two days exploring Machu Picchu, we will spend several days in the Inca capital of Cuzco. We will then drive through the Andes, visiting three ancient

The complex architecture of Machu Picchu is a testament to the Incas’ sophistication. One of the New World’s most amazing sites.

Andean sites on our way to Puno on the shore of spectacular Lake Titicaca. Then we’ll cross into Bolivia, where we’ll visit the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Moon. The next day we will visit the massive site of Tiwanaku, which dominated the region from about A.D. 700 to 1200. To conclude our trip we will observe the winter solstice sunrise through the Sun Gate of Tiwanaku and tour more of the site including Puma Puka, which has megaliths weighing 130 tons.

Effigy Mounds of the Upper Mississippi Valley national park service

When: To be determined Where: Wisconsin and Iowa How Much: To be determined

In what is now Wisconsin, prehistoric Native Americans constructed thousands of earthen mounds, more than in any other area of comparable size. We’ll visit the best surviving examples of these fascinating constructions with an emphasis on the sites of the Effigy Mound Culture, the characteristic moundbuilder culture of the upper Midwest. The sites we’ll visit include Lizard Mounds Park, Effigy Mounds National Monument, and Aztalan State Park. The tour will begin and end in Milwaukee.

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Thirty-one of the 195 mounds in Effigy Mounds National Monument are effigies. These mounds are known as the Marching Bear Group.

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Since the inception of the Conservancy’s Living Spirit Circle in 2002, participation has grown to over 100 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.

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 2017. Their generosity, along with the generosity of the Conservancy’s other members, makes our work possible. Life Member Gifts of $1,000 or more Betty J. Annis, New Mexico Rick Dekker, Indiana Jim D. Feagins, Missouri Farley Fisher, District of Columbia John and Allis Gillmor, Tennessee Leslee Hackenson, California Antony Caldwell Haper, South Carolina Brett M. Harper, Ohio Pam S. Hilty, New Mexico Jo Ann Howell, New Mexico Michael Kasler, Ohio Dan F. Morse, Florida Holly and Bob Sieck, Ohio Clinton and Stephanie Smullen, Tennessee Robert J. Twieg and Deborah L. Daly, Ohio Harry and Deborah Whitehill, Texas Anasazi Circle Gifts of $2,500 or more Kathryn H. Colbert, New Mexico Gretchen H. Munroe, South Carolina Dorinda J. Oliver, New York Jim Walker and Michael Palmer, New Mexico Foundation/Corporate Gifts Sidney Stern Memorial Trust, California The Candelaria Fund, California Antrim Township Supervisors, Pennsylvania Bequest A.C. Wilson, California

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Albert and Becky Abel, Illinois Charlotte Adelman, Illinois Michael F. Albertini, Washington 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 Robert L. Buell, Indiana William V. Burlingame, North Carolina Harryette Campbell, Missouri Jean Carley, Oregon Suzanne and Donald Carmichael, Maine Catherine I. Crawford, Illinois Al Crossman, Arizona Richard W. Dexter, Wisconsin Bill DiPaolo and Laura Hall, Colorado 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 Mary Faul, Arizona Mary Gwyn Fitzgerald, Colorado Mr. and Mrs. Preston Forsythe, Kentucky Patricia G. Foschi, New Mexico Robert Freed and Barbara Hollenbeck, Washington Veronica H. Frost, Ohio Derald and Bridget Glidden, California Maiya and Ross Gralia, Colorado Norman and Gilda Greenberg, North Carolina Daniel A. Grossman, Ohio Lucinda Beyer Headrick, Georgia Dale and Barbara Henning, Iowa George M. Hidy, New Mexico Susan F. Hodgson, California Judith Hollander, Illinois Rodney and Virginia Huppi, California Judith Husted, California Barbara J. Jacobs, District of Columbia Mr. & 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 D. Landis, Connecticut Elva J. Lane, Arizona William J. Lannin, Illinois Gail A. Larson, Iowa Jay Last, California Debby Leitner Jones, Maryland Joyce E. Lively and Ronald J. Karden, California Margaret A. Lussky, Minnesota Nancy L. Malis, Indiana William L. Mangold, Indiana Laura Marianek, Ohio Robin Marion, New Jersey Barbara Mead, Michigan Mark Michel, New Mexico

Gerald and Becky Mitchell, 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 Mr. & Mrs. Jan Novak, New Mexico Lee O’Brien, Indiana Dorinda J. Oliver, New York Margaret Ann Olson, Wisconsin Priscilla A. Ord, Maryland Jonathan F. Orser, Ohio Margaret P. Partee, Tennessee Tim Perttula, Texas Donald E. Pierce, Texas Gavine Pitner, North Carolina Kim Poggenpohl, Georgia Willow Powers, New Mexico 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 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 A. 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 George and Jolene Tanty, New Mexico Mike and Kellee Taylor, Washington Ronald and Pat Taylor, Virginia Jeanne Tucker, Oregon Anne W. Vanderslice, California 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

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Give a Historic Gift this Holiday Season Help protect America’s threatened archaeological sites

by enrolling a friend as a member of The Archaeological Conservancy. The person you designate below will receive a membership packet announcing your gift and an annual subscription to American Archaeology. ❏ Please enroll the person I’ve listed below. Enclosed is my gift of $30. ❏ Please charge my $30 gift to: ❏ VISA ❏ MasterCard ❏ AmEx ____________________________

______________________________

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ACCOUNT NUMBER

EXP. DATE

DONOR’S NAME (please print clearly)

STREET ADDRESS

CITY, STATE, ZIP CODE

SIGNATURE

GIFT RECIPIENT’S NAME (please print clearly)

STREET ADDRESS

CITY, STATE, ZIP CODE

Conservancy membership is $30. Send your check to: The Archaeological Conservancy 1717 Girard Blvd. NE, Albuquerque, NM 87106

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To purchase by phone: 505-266-1540 WI17A

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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.

Wells Petroglyphs, new mexico

Began as a Conservancy Preserve in 2000

Whatever kind of gift you give, you can be sure we’ll use it to preserve places like Wells Petroglyphs and our over 515 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

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

Name: ______________________________________________________________________ Street Address: _______________________________________________________________ City: _______________________________________ State: ______ Zip:_______________ Phone: (

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) ___________________________

Or call: (505) 266-1540

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American Archaeology | Winter 2017-18 | Vol. 21 No. 4

Articles inside

A TALE OF PREHISTORIC CLIMATE CHANGE

THE LOST HISTORY OF TLAXCALLAN

SAVING AN ANCIENT LIBRARY

READING JEFFERSON’S LANDSCAPE

WHISTLING PAST THE HISTORIC GRAVEYARD

LAY OF THE LAND

LETTERS

EVENTS