The Moki Messenger
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The Moki Messenger NEWSLETTER OF THE SAN JUAN BASIN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY Chapter of Colorado Archaeological Society October, 2012 Our Field Trips SJBAS Upcoming Meeting Oct 3-5, Cedar Mesa, 3-day car camping Our meeting will be held on October 11, 7:00 trip to hike sites in White Canyon and on p.m. at the Center for SW Studies Lyceum, Fort Cedar Mesa. Hikes will be several miles Lewis College. Bob Bernhart will speak on long, moderately difficult, with some expo- "Evidence of Moiety Organization at Jackson's Cas- sure on sandstone ridges. High- tle, Southwest Colorado”. Evidence will also be pre- clearance 4WD vehicles required. Limit: sented that supports the argument that ancestral 12. (TL: Barb & Lyle Hancock, 764-4531, Puebloans from the Mesa Verde area migrated to [email protected]). the northern Rio Grande area in the late AD 1200s. Bob is an avocational archaeologist living in Oct 13, Historical Ranches in Largo Can- Cortez. He retired from the CO. Dept. of Transporta- yon, "Wild, Wooly and Wonderful: The tion Durango Office in 2009. He has a Bachelors Upper Landscape of Upper Largo Can- Degree from Ohio State University and an MBA from yon," day trip, with Jim Copeland, BLM the University of Phoenix. He is Vice President of archaeologist. Limit: 20. (TL: Rhonda the Hisatsinom Chapter; a Site Steward in Colorado Raffo & Jim Mueller, 259-8870, rhon- with the San Juan Mountains Association; and a Site [email protected]. Stewart in Utah with the BLM, where he monitors Oct 24-28, Little CO River Basin and Hopi several sites, including Coal Bed. Bob volunteers in Land. 4-day motel trip, but several mem- the Lab at Crow Canyon Archeological Center. bers will be camping. Preliminarily we A shorter version of this speaking material, leave Durango at 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 24, prepared in conjunction with co-author Dr. Scott Or- and spend the first two nights in Holbrook, man, was presented at the 2011 Conference for Ar- AZ, then Winslow, followed by the Hopi chaeoastronomy of the American SW at UNM. Visitor Center's Hotel. In Holbrook we will (Continued on page 2) Officers for 2012 What’s Inside President Andy Gulliford Field Trip Reports..…………..2 Vice President Jim Shadell & Field Trip Planning…………..2 Florence (Foxie) Mason Speakers/Lectures…….……...3 Secretary Diane Skinner Conferences..………………...5 Museums Exhibits.…………..7 Treasurer Mark Gebhardt Editor’s Corner……..………..8 CAS Representative Bob Powell Chimney Rock Events…….....8 PAAC Co-ordinator Eliane Viner Fee Free Days………………..8 MOKI Editors Jill Ward, Jan Sheftel, & Fund Seeks Gift to Raffle……8 Beverly Stacy Dittmer PAAC Classes……………….8 Archeology Near & Far: SW..9 Page 1 (Our Field Trips—Continued from page 1) visit the Petrified Forest Nat'l Park, an area known for its HARD wood forests but under appreciated for its many fantastic archaeological sites. The Chief Archaeologist will take us on a hike to explore some of these sites on Thurs. On Fri., Oct. 26, we will visit several of the Homol'ovi State Park's in- teresting ancestral Hopi sites with one of the park's rangers. Homol'ovi is operated by the Hopi Peo- ple. On Sat., we will visit Hopi Land and visit an old village, several artists, petroglyph sites and learn about the Hop culture. Contact Richard at [email protected], or 970-259-1943, for additional information and reservations. Limit: 20. Nov 11-13, Jemez Mountains, 3-day motel/car camping trip to attend San Diego Feast Day at Jemez Pueblo, with food and dances. See sites and petroglyphs on east side of Jemez River. Limit: 20. (TL: Janice and Brooks Taylor, [email protected].) For Hisatsinom Chapter field trips, call Jane Williams, trip coordinator, 565-8867, [email protected]. Some are limited to only Hisatsinom members. SJBAS Field Trip Reports (Provided by Richard Robinson) On July 11, 2012 eight SJBAS members met Rudy Davison at the Silverton Visitor center to travel over Cinnamon Pass and up a rough road to Carson City. Rudy has a radio receiver/mike system allowing for communication along the way. We made stops for explanations about mines, geology and flowers, and at Burrows Park and Sherman Town sites as well. The area, rich in mining activity, happens to be scenic as well. We visited the Tabasco mine and mill which operated around 1901–1904. Sherman Town site was a convenient way station for traffic between Animas Forks and Lake City. A 150 ft. dam collapsed in 1900 and removed most of Sherman. Burrow Park Town was a mining camp around 1877 near Tellurium, White Cross, and Ster- ling. Hopes were high, both in altitude and dream-wise, but few aspirations ever materialized. Car- son City was another active mining town, with Carson #1 mine built in 1881 after the discovery of silver over the divide, to be followed by Carson # 2 on the north side of the continental divide, where gold was the item of interest in 1896. There, we walked through a large motel/boarding house with many outside entrances and walls covered with the names and initials of recent visitors, to the dis- gust of our crowd. Four of us camped and took Engineer Pass back to Animas Forks the next day. We only had one flat tire, but the break allowed for lunch and a rest stop. It was a long trip to see some unique sites and scenery. Rudy as always adds something special that no one else can provide. SJBAS Field Trip Planning It's time to hold our 2013 SJBAS field trip committee meeting. Gail and Marlo Schultz will have this year's event on Tuesday, October 16 at their home, starting at 6:30 p.m. RSVP by calling Gail and Marlo at 259-3249. Please plan to bring a tasty treat to share at this event. It is a critical step in determining our field trip schedule. Come with ideas about locations to visit, best dates, and trip leaders so that our schedule can be prepared. If you have some good ideas, but can't make this annual event, please e-mail them to Richard Robinson at [email protected] ASAP. We can't have field trips without your input! Page 2 Speakers/Lectures Hisatsinom Chapter Speakers: At the September 4 Hisatsinom meeting, Dr. James Potter discussed Early Village Development and Collapse: The Case of Ridges Basin. Migration into the present-day Durango area in the early A.D. 700s produced a landscape of clusters of pit structures, one of which was large enough to be considered one of the earliest settled villages. This process created a social environment in which some community members occupied a village with highly visible communal ritual architecture and others settled in dispersed hamlets. Dr. Potter explored the social dynamics in the Ridges Basin community and some of the consequences that appear to have resulted from a lack of social inte- gration in this early village. Dr. Potter is Senior Archaeologist and Principal Investigator with Pale- oWest Archaeology in Tucson. Before coming to PaleoWest in 2011, he was the principal investiga- tor for the Animas La Plata ("ALP") Project, the results of which are the topic of this presentation. In the early 2000s, ALP was the largest publicly-funded archaeology project in the US. Seventy-four sites were excavated and sixteen monograph volumes resulted from the work. Currently, Dr. Potter is the principal investigator of the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project in NW NM. Future Hisatsinom Chapter meetings are at 7:00 p.m., Cortez Cultural Center and will be held as follows: October 2, Tim Kearns (patination/"desert varnish"); November 6, Joel Brisbin (kilns). 2012 Four Corners Lecture Series. Dr. Laurie Webster presented "Pueblo Weaving and the Te- nacity of Tradition: The First Two Thousand Years," at Crow Canyon Archeology Center Dry preser- vation conditions of the arid American SW have yielded an unbroken record of Pueblo weaving spanning two thousand years. Laurie provided an overview of ancestral Pueblo weaving traditions, and discussed the impacts of Spanish and American colonial contact on Pueblo textile production and the continuation of this ancient craft among contemporary Pueblo communities. Laurie is an an- thropologist from Mancos who specializes in SW perishable material culture; a visiting scholar in the Dept. of Anthropology at the U of AZ and a research associate at the American. Museum of Natural History and the Crow Canyon Archeology Center Her publications include the edited volume "Beyond Cloth and Cordage: Archaeological Textile Research in the Americas" and the book "Collecting the Weaver's Art: The William Claflin Collection of Southwestern Textiles," as well as nu- merous journal articles about archaeological perishables. For more information on the Four Corners lectures, call 564-4396 or 800-422-8975, ext. 136. Denver CAS: Dr. Richard Wilshusen, CO St. Archeology, spoke in April 2012, on The Beginnings of Chaco and Mesa Verde, More Tangled Up with One Another than you Might Think. (Summary, CAS All Points Bulletin, May 2012) In the SW when the Spaniards arrived, there were seven to ten different languages among 30,000 people, and the cultures were fluid. The 13th century was the Great Pueblo Period. There were nu- merous well-populated villages and there had been experimentation going on with different types of ceremonial structures and social organization. Population curves, some of which were discovered through NAGPRA compliance, showed a "baby boom" in Mesa Verde after 700 AD, probably due to subsistence farming (especially when beans were introduced along with the corn staple), which al- lowed people to be more stable and to be able to store grains.