A Minor Quibble

Back Wall of Kin Klizhin

I mentioned that I have some criticisms of Keith Kloor’s article on Chaco, and I do, but before getting to the more substantive issues I’d like to just mention a minor error of fact.  This is a very common mistake, and it’s certainly not Keith’s fault for making it, but I think it’s important to point it out when I see it precisely because it’s so common.

Hosta Butte Framed by Kin Klizhin

The article begins at Kin Klizhin, which John Stein and Taft Blackhorse are showing to Keith and interpreting in their own inimitable way.  In an aside Keith says that the name of the site means “Black Charcoal” in Navajo, which it most certainly does not.  It means “Black House,” which is a rather generic name for an Anasazi ruin that has been applied to many different sites.  I even once heard a Navajo from the Chaco area use it for Pueblo Alto, which is interesting given that site’s more common name “Gambler’s House.”  While confusions of Navajo words are very common among Anglos who only know a little bit of Navajo, this is a very straightforward, obvious name.  Navajo kin means “house” (specifically a “square” Pueblo or Anglo house as opposed to a hogan), and łizhin means “black.”  These are both common words, and there’s nothing confusing about their combination here.  The voiceless lateral fricative at the beginning of łizhin is often rendered “kl” in English transliterations of Navajo words, since English doesn’t have this sound.

Sign at Kin Klizhin

Nevertheless, the translation of “Kin Klizhin” as “black charcoal” or something similar persists, even in the official park interpretive literature, which is probably where Keith got it.  (I can’t imagine John and Taft would have gotten this wrong; indeed, Taft is known for making fun of Anglos mispronouncing or misinterpreting Navajo words.)  The description of the site on the park website gets the translation right, because I wrote it, but the official site brochure linked as a (rather slow-loading) pdf from that site still translates it as “black wood.”

Tsin Kletzin Sign on South Mesa Trail

So where does all this mistranslation come from?  It seems to come from a confusion between Kin Klizhin and another site with a similar name: Tsin Kletzin, which is atop South Mesa in the main unit of the park.  There are a variety of versions of the Navajo name for Tsin Kletzin, but they all seem to mean “charcoal” or something similar.  The standard English name “Tsin Kletzin” seems to come from tsin, meaning “wood,” and łizhin, the same term for “black” found in “Kin Klizhin” (perhaps involving some confusion with the word łitso, meaning “yellow,” as in Kin Kletso, another site in the canyon), which makes the literal meaning “black wood,” i.e., charcoal.  There are other ways of describing charcoal, however, such as tsin nitł’iz, meaning “hard wood,” which is sometimes cited as the origin of “Tsin Kletzin” although it doesn’t make much sense phonetically.

Corner of Room Containing Blocked-In Kiva at Tsin Kletzin

As I say, this is a very minor point that doesn’t make much difference to anything, especially since the Navajo names for these sites are by no means fixed.  Since it is a very clear mistake, however, and especially since it’s in the very second sentence of Keith’s article, I figured it was worthwhile to point it out and correct it before getting bogged down in more important matters.

Fallen Walls at Tsin Kletzin

So Who’s This Gambler, Anyway?

Kin Klizhin

Keith Kloor reports that his piece on Chaco in Archaeology magazine is finally online.  (Full disclosure: Keith interviewed me while he was working on the story, although I’m not quoted in it, and he gave me a free copy of the print issue when it first came out.)  Unlike most accounts of Chaco, both scholarly and popular, this one focuses on the Navajo traditions about it, which revolve around a legendary villain known as the Great Gambler.  There are various versions of the Gambler story, but the basic idea is that the Gambler came to Chaco from the south and challenged the people there to games of chance with increasingly large bets.  He won all the games and, since the people ended up betting themselves once they had no possessions left to bet, all the people ended up as his slaves.  Once he had them in his control, he forced them to build the great houses of Chaco.  The details of the end of the story differ among the various versions, but in all of them the Gambler is overthrown and the people regain their freedom.

Burned Kiva at Pueblo del Arroyo

This is a very negative, sinister view of Chaco, which is considerably at odds with the sunny idea of a peaceful ceremonial center that dominates the park’s interpretive material.  Indeed, Chacoan archaeology in general tends to avoid this story, relegating it to irrelevant oral tradition of an unrelated people, if indeed it gets mentioned at all.

Navajo Exhibit at Chaco Visitor Center Museum

There are, however, some archaeologists who take it more seriously.  Keith’s article focuses in particular on the idiosyncratic theories of John Stein and Taft Blackhorse, who have for many years been putting forth the controversial argument that the Navajos, rather than being an unrelated people who came into the Southwest centuries after the fall of Chaco, are actually the descendants of the Chacoans, and that the Gambler story is based on the actual history of the Chacoan system, which they have endeavored to confirm through archaeology.

Navajo Hogan at Una Vida

Keith does a good job of presenting this point of view, as well as the typical reaction of mainstream archaeologists, fairly.  When he gave me the magazine he expressed some concern that John and Taft would come across as crazy fringe figures in contrast to their sober, scholarly opponents, but I don’t think they seem any crazier than their theories necessarily make them sound.  Of course, I’ve been around Chacoan things for so long that I may just be desensitized to how crazy theories about Chaco can sound.  In general, Keith’s article is a very good account of the Gambler story, the implications of it for the archaeology of the Southwest, and the problems with it as a basis for understanding that archaeology.

Huerfano Mesa from New Alto

If anyone has been curious about what the name of this blog refers to, reading this article should give some idea.  One thing it doesn’t mention, interestingly, is the association of the Gambler with Pueblo Alto, often referred to as “Gambler’s House,” more than with other sites in the canyon.  The header image of this blog is a detail of a picture I took at Pueblo Alto.

Corner at Pueblo Alto

I do have a number of criticisms of the piece, but I’m going to leave those for a further post (or perhaps more than one).  For now I’ll just recommend it as a very readable and accurate introduction to a number of important issues that rarely get discussed in Southwestern archaeology.

Chuska Mountains from Tsin Kletzin

Building a Religion: The Rock Art Evidence

Ridge at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

The idea that the kachina cult was not an indigenous development among the Pueblos but was instead introduced from the south seems to have originated with a 1974 article by Polly and Curtis Schaafsma.  As they note, while some previous scholars had noted some elements of the cult that suggested Mesoamerican influence, the general consensus had been that it developed in the western Pueblo area, probably among the Zunis, and spread at some point in prehistory to the Rio Grande Pueblos further east, perhaps through a migration of Keres speakers.  This model was based largely on ethnographic evidence, particularly the way the cult is highly elaborated among the Hopis, Zunis, and Keres (as well as at Towa-speaking Jemez) but much more rudimentary among the Tewas and apparently absent entirely among the Tiwas.  Archaeologists hadn’t paid much attention to it, probably because of its abstract nature and the difficulty of identifying specific material correlates of religious cults.  Another likely reason for archaeological neglect could be that so much attention throughout the history of Southwestern archaeology has been focused on the Four Corners region, which shows no evidence of adoption of the kachina cult before its total abandonment around AD 1300.

Petroglyph Panel Showing Three Quadrupeds

This all changed with Polly Schaafsma’s pioneering studies of rock art throughout New Mexico.  This is the main concern of the paper, which shows quite convincingly that the “Rio Grande style” of rock art that spread throughout the Pueblo area in late prehistoric times contains many elements that seem to clearly reference the kachina cult, particularly the masks that are worn by kachina impersonators.  This is in stark contrast to the earlier rock art tradition centered on the Colorado Plateau, which since Basketmaker times had maintained a fairly stable mix of abstract forms such as spirals, simple anthropomorphs, and images of certain animals, especially quadrupeds and lizards.  This is the style of rock art found at Chaco, and it’s quite widespread at pre-1300 sites throughout the northern Southwest.

Mask with Earrings at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Another style that bears much more resemblance to the Rio Grande Style, though in use at the same time as the Colorado Plateau style, is what the Schaafsmas call the Jornada style.  This is named after the Jornada Mogollon who inhabited what is now south-central New Mexico, but the style actually spreads over a larger area of southern New Mexico and West Texas.  It appears around AD 1000 in the Mimbres region of southwestern New Mexico, at a time when that region began to develop its distinctive culture, best known for figurative black-on-white pottery with designs that sometimes echo the rock art motifs.  By AD 1150 the style had spread east to the Jornada proper, where it developed a high level of elaboration seen especially in painted mask designs at places like Hueco Tanks near El Paso, as well as in petroglyphs at sites like Three Rivers.  The imagery in this style is strikingly similar to what would be seen in the Rio Grande style beginning around the time the Jornada people seem to disappear in the fourteenth century, which the Schaafsmas interpret as evidence for the kachina cult and its symbolism developing in the Jornada area and then spreading north up the Rio Grande.  They point to some similarities between the Jornada style and some of the rock art in the Tompiro area just to the north as evidence for the early stages in this process.

Complex Panels at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

That’s all well and good, and fairly convincing, although the broad application of the term “Jornada style” could be a bit problematic.  They define it to include the Mimbres as well as the Jornada proper, which suggests that the route of transmission of the style and the cult could have been to the northwest from the Mimbres to the western Pueblos rather than to the north from the Jornada to the eastern Pueblos.  It’s clear from their discussion, however, that they see the eastern origin and transmission as more likely, and they point to a relative lack of attestation of the style in the mountainous region between the Mimbres and the western Pueblos as evidence against that route.  This isn’t all that convincing, though, and my understanding is that more recently some people have indeed argued for a Mimbres origin and/or western route of transmission.

Petroglyph Panel at Puerco Pueblo, Petrified Forest National Park

All of this leaves out an important issue, though: What about the ethnographic evidence pointing to the western Pueblos as having developed the cult? If the cult came up the Rio Grande from the Jornada Mogollon, why don’t the modern Southern Tiwa Pueblos of Isleta and Sandia seem to have it at all, and why is it so much more developed among the Hopis and Zunis, further from the alleged source, than among the closer Tewas?

Sign at Homol'ovi Ruins State Park Describing San Francisco Peaks

The Schaafsmas have a response to this concern that I think is pretty convincing.  It’s important to keep in mind that the ethnographic Pueblos are the result of hundreds of years of close and often hostile relations with the Spanish and other groups, and especially early in the colonial period the Spanish missionaries were particularly aggressive in trying to stamp out the kachina cult.  This effort was not ultimately successful as a general matter, but among some groups, especially the Southern Tiwa, it may have succeeded in extinguishing the cult entirely.  Elsewhere, as among the Tewa, it may only have succeeded in encouraging the Pueblos to cut back on outward display of the kachina rites.  Among the western Pueblos, less troubled by the Spanish, the cult was able to flourish and likely to change in various ways, and many of these changes may have filtered back to the eastern Pueblos once Spanish pressure declined, creating the illusion of the whole cult being introduced from the west.

San Francisco Peaks from Homol'ovi Ruins State Park

The final issue the Schaafsmas address, and it’s an important one, is why the Pueblos adopted the cult.  They note earlier explanations for the adoption of the kachina cult and other social integrative systems that cross-cut kinship connections tying them to the process of aggregation into ever-larger communities starting around 1200.  The creation of these large communities out of previously autonomous groups, probably organized along kinship lines, resulted in social stresses that could be smoothed over by the adoption of organizational systems not related to kinship.  The kachina cult, which is not at all connected to kinship, would have been a useful solution to this problem.  Earlier proposals along these lines had posited an indigenous development of the cult as a response to the pressures of aggregation, but the Schaafsmas propose instead that it was introduced from the south around the same time that the process of aggregation was really taking off (the early fourteenth century), and that its popularity was due to the recognition that it offered a solution to the organizational problems communities were facing.  It therefore spread throughout the region very quickly.

Three-Dimensional Mask at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

There’s much more to say about this proposal, of course, and I’ll get more into it later.  This initial paper, though, makes a good case for it, and my impression is that while the details are disputed, there’s a general consensus that the overall model is more or less correct.  One potential issue is that this particular paper rests entirely on rock art evidence, without considering other possible correlates of the cult such as pottery style and architecture.  But that’s a matter for later.

Schaafsma, P., & Schaafsma, C. (1974). Evidence for the Origins of the Pueblo Katchina Cult as Suggested by Southwestern Rock Art American Antiquity, 39 (4) DOI: 10.2307/278903

History and Archaeology

Welcome Sign at North Entrance

Keith Kloor links to an interesting piece talking about history and archaeology in South Africa.  It’s short and definitely worth reading in full.  In general I think the issue of the proper relationship between history and archaeology as disciplines is under-discussed, partly because the relationship in practice varies considerably in the scholarly traditions of different parts of the world.  I found this particularly interesting:

I sometimes pity archaeologists, for theirs is a strict discipline pertaining to discovered facts. Archaeologists can only see the blades of grass; they cannot see the complete lawn.

They cannot speculate on the vastness of the other side; they can only report on the little that they see and find.

I don’t know that this is strictly true, at least in the US.  Archaeologists certainly do sometimes speculate on a large scale.  But there’s often something missing in such speculations, and they rarely read like the sort of history that historians write.  I think this quote may get at part of that, which has to do with archaeology’s conception of itself as very much a social science, in contrast to history’s more ambiguous position between the humanities and social sciences.

Plaque Identifying Chaco Canyon as a World Heritage Site

Replication

Looking North from New Alto

When I was working at Chaco, we would often get visitors who would complain about how hard it was to get there.  They usually focused on the road in and asked why there wasn’t more effort to pave it and make it more accessible to the American public.  After all, isn’t that what national parks are for?  Well, no, I would often respond.  The Park Service mission is preservation foremost and visitor services secondarily, and most of the time concerns about preservation trump concerns about accessibility and interpretation.  There is one interesting exception at Chaco, but for the most part the park is concerned more with preserving the sites than with showing them to the public.

"Area Closed" Sign on Peñasco Blanco Trail

Some people were satisfied with this explanation, but many weren’t.  I didn’t have much to say to those who took a more absolutist position on the right of the public to access the parks.  That’s just a basic philosophical difference, and the best we could do was agree to differ.

Downtown Farmington, New Mexico

One thing I often thought about saying, however, was that it might be better to just build a full-scale model of Pueblo Bonito in downtown Farmington (or even Albuquerque).  For a lot of the visitors who come to Chaco, it’s really just a matter of seeing Pueblo Bonito, marveling at it, and going on their way.  They’re the ones who complain about how hard it is to get there; arguments about how the isolation is part of the point carry no water with them.  I never actually said this, but I do wonder if it might be a good idea.  One of the ways in which the two aspects of the Park Service mission are very much in tension is that preservation and visitation are not only different, they’re actually often in direct conflict.  Visitor impacts are among the most serious threats to the preservation of the sites.  Sometimes people deliberately vandalize the sites, carve their names one the canyon walls, or steal artifacts, but even the vast majority of visitors who don’t do anything deliberately nonetheless destabilize the sites just by being there, walking through them, inadvertently touching the walls, and so forth.  The biggest single thing the park could do to improve preservation of the sites would be to limit public access to them.

Pueblo Bonito from Above

A full-scale replica of Pueblo Bonito in another location would have a similar effect: drawing the casual visitors away from the canyon and leaving it to the more serious people who are willing to brave the road to get there.  There would be little need to recreate any of the other sites, except perhaps Casa Rinconada; Bonito is what people come to Chaco for.

Casa Rinconada, Looking North

It won’t happen, of course, but it’s not as crazy an idea as it sounds.  I was reminded of it by Paul Barford’s recent post on an idea proposed by Trevor Watkins for dealing with the recent disputes among governments over some high-profile antiquities.  The proposal is to make replicas indistinguishable from the originals, then trade both the originals and the replicas back and forth between the source countries and the countries that currently have the objects without telling the public if what they see is original or a copy.  This seems like a bizarre thing to do, and I kind of doubt the source countries will be in favor of it (though they might like a version in which they get to keep the originals permanently and the acquiring countries have to make do with copies), but the proposal notes that there are actually some archaeological sites, particularly the Paleolithic caves at Lascaux and Altamira, that have full-scale replicas, and visitors seem to like them just fine and to even say that they are better than the originals because they allow better visibility of the interesting parts, which in the case of the caves are the cave paintings for which they are famous.  This is kind of an extreme version of the reconstruction of prehistoric sites that was popular in the Southwest in the 1930s, moving beyond that only in that the replicas are not adding on to the originals but are separate entirely.  In addition to being more convenient for visitors, this would also be better for preservation of the original sites.  I think American archaeology might actually be moving in this direction too, with the reburial of Baker Village after excavation, with only the protective capping on the walls visible from the service, being an early indication.

Low Walls at Pueblo Alto

More directly relevant to Watkins’s proposal, perhaps, is the famous jet frog found in Room 38 at Pueblo Bonito by the Hyde Exploring Expedition in 1897.  Often considered one of the most remarkable Anasazi artifacts known, the frog is made of jet with turquoise inlay forming its eyes and neck, and is intact except for a couple of pieces of inlay on the neck.  Like all the rest of the material found by that expedition, the frog was sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it remains to this day, not on display but somewhere back in the storage cabinets.

Jet Frog Replica at Chaco Museum

There is, however, a jet frog prominently displayed in the museum at the Chaco visitor center.  Although it is not labeled as such, this is an exact replica of the original, right down to the missing inlay pieces.  Since the American Museum is notoriously protective of its collections, this is the best the park could do to show what the jet frog looks like.  This is exactly what Watkins is advocating: exact replicas, put on display without any indication that they aren’t original.  Unlike his proposal, of course, in this case the original and the replica don’t move back and forth, but any real-life implementation of the proposal would probably end up that way.

Museum of Chaco Culture

What all this goes to show, I think, is that most people who come to archaeological sites and museums to see the wonders of the past aren’t all that concerned with the “authenticity” of what they see.  Indeed, for a lot of people an impressive reconstruction is preferable to an unimpressive original.  We would get some people who really wanted all the sites to be rebuilt to their original state.  (No way that’s ever going to happen, for a lot of reasons.)  There are visitors who only want to see the “real stuff,” but it’s important to realize that that isn’t everybody, and it may not even be a majority.  Many people go to see this stuff as entertainment, and they judge it on that basis.

Pepper, G. (1905). Ceremonial Objects and Ornaments from Pueblo Bonito, New Mexico American Anthropologist, 7 (2), 183-197 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1905.7.2.02a00010

Another Archaeology Blog

Interpretive Sign at Ballcourt, Wupatki National Monument

Mike Smith points to a new blog, apparently modeled after one of his, reporting on ongoing research at a site in central Mexico.  Looks interesting.  Archaeology is a notoriously conservative discipline in general, and, true to form, it’s been very slow to adopt blogs.  Because of the small blogosphere in archaeology (especially American archaeology), I like to link to archaeological blogs even if they’re not directly relevant to the things I discuss here.  I’ve therefore added the Xaltocan blog to my blogroll, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.  In the case of Mesoamerican archaeology, of course, the connection to Chaco isn’t as distant as one might think, or as most people thought as of a year ago.

Interpretive Sign on Trade, Edge of the Cedars, Blanding, Utah

Mike Kabotie Dies

Salt Lake Mural by Fred Kabotie at Painted Desert Inn, Petrified Forest

Via Southwestern Archaeology Today, I see that Hopi artist Mike Kabotie of Shongopovi on Second Mesa has died in Flagstaff of the H1N1 flu.  In addition to being an acclaimed artist in his own right, Mike was the son of Fred Kabotie, who did murals inspired by Hopi tradition for several Park Service facilities in the southwest, including the Painted Desert Inn at Petrified Forest National Park.  I met Mike once when he stopped by Chaco.  He was a very nice guy and a talented artist.  He will be missed.

Planting Mural by Fred Kabotie at Painted Desert Inn, Petrified Forest

A Virtual Tour of Kin Klizhin

Sign at Kin Klizhin

Chaco Culture National Historical Park includes, in addition to the famous archaeological sites in Chaco Canyon itself, four “outlying” great houses located outside the canyon but in close proximity to it and showing considerable evidence of close contact with people there and integration into the system centered on the canyon.  One of these is Kin Klizhin (Navajo for “black house”), which lies just west of the main canyon on a small tributary of the Chaco River known as Kin Klizhin Wash.  The land surrounding Kin Klizhin was originally a detached unit of the park like the land surrounding the other in-park outliers, but over time the park boundaries have been expanded to connect it to the main unit.  This can be seen clearly on the official park map.  Also evident on the map, however, is that Kin Klizhin is not accessible directly from within the main park unit, and it is necessary to leave the park to get to the road that leads to it.

Sign on Road to Kin Klizhin

The road to Kin Klizhin is a small two-track dirt road that branches off from New Mexico 57, the south road out of the park heading toward Seven Lakes and Crownpoint.  There isn’t a sign right at the junction, but there is a small one a short distance afterward, and there aren’t a whole lot of other roads around there so it’s hard to miss.  The junction comes at the point where 57 curves from going east-west along the San Juan-McKinley county line to going south toward Seven Lakes.

Road to Kin Klizhin

The road to Kin Klizhin is considerably more basic than 57 (which is to say that if you think 57 is the worst road you’ve ever seen, you probably shouldn’t try to go to Kin Klizhin), but it’s generally passable with any sort of vehicle.  After the summer rains it may become washed out in places, so a high-clearance vehicle would be preferable.  Four-wheel drive isn’t really necessary except maybe if it’s actively raining, in which case you probably shouldn’t be trying to do this trip at all.  The road goes over some fairly hilly terrain for a few miles before reaching Kin Klizhin, which is right on the edge of the park boundary.

Kin Klizhin

Kin Klizhin is completely unexcavated, and it isn’t very large as Chacoan great houses go, but it’s one of the better-preserved and more impressive ones.  This is due largely to its tower kiva, which is still in fairly good shape (although a look at the historic photographs at the Chaco Archive shows that it has deteriorated quite a bit in the past century).  Tower kivas are among the more mysterious aspects of the Chacoan system.  The term often gets thrown around a bit loosely, but it is generally used to refer to round rooms that have multiple levels with floors between them.  This is in contrast to the “elevated” or “blocked-in” kivas built into the roomblocks at many great houses both inside and outside the canyon; although those can in some instances be more than one story in height, they always have only one floor.

Interior of Tower Kiva at Kin Klizhin

Tower kivas, which are found mostly at outlying great houses, usually  have two or three levels remaining.  Some have argued that they all originally had four levels, symbolizing the four worlds through which the people passed in some Pueblo origin legends, but this is a rather extreme jump to conclusions given that we don’t actually have any idea what these tower kivas were for.  There’s nothing like them in modern Pueblos.

Hosta Butte Framed by Kin Klizhin

Some have argued that the tower kivas were part of a signaling network using line-of-sight relationships between great houses.  A fair amount of data on the line-of-sight relationships has been assembled, but the role of the tower kivas in it is doubtful, and some research by John Kantner has recently suggested that at least in the southern San Juan Basin (where tower kivas are pretty common) they probably didn’t serve as part of a signaling network.  Whatever they were for, tower kivas are certainly impressive, and the one at Kin Klizhin is a good example.  It has collapsed enough that the main parts still standing are the corners, but they are still standing quite high, and from certain angles they look like football goalposts.

"Goalposts" at Kin Klizhin

The function of the outliers in general, not just those with tower kivas, is a matter of intense debate and little consensus.  “Inner-ring” outliers like Kin Klizhin are particularly odd.  Were they examples of Chacoan colonization out from the canyon into the surrounding area?  If so, why were the Chacoans moving out?  If not, who was building them, and why?

Earthen Dam near Kin Klizhin

These aren’t really answerable questions given current information, but a few possibilities have been suggested.  Kin Klizhin lies in a relatively promising area for floodwater agriculture, in a valley near the canyon with a wash that could be easily dammed to provide a reservoir for water storage.  There is in fact an earthen dam near the great house, although it’s impossible to tell if it’s actually ancient rather than a modern Navajo construction.  (It could also be both; Navajos have been known to use and modify Anasazi dams in many areas.)  One intriguing thing about the area around Kin Klizhin is that despite its agricultural potential it seems to have relatively few small-house sites compared to other outlier communities, which suggests a small population that could have easily produced an agricultural surplus for export to Chaco.

Rim Sherd at Kin Klizhin

Like the other outliers, Kin Klizhin gets many fewer visitors than the main sites in the canyon.  This makes it a very peaceful, quiet place to visit.  There are a lot of potsherds and other artifacts lying around near the great house, since fewer people come around and steal them.  A visit to Kin Klizhin isn’t for everyone, and it’s particularly not for the many people who come into the Chaco visitor center furious about the lack of paved roads, but for the adventurous few who are willing to take the effort to get there it’s definitely worth a visit.

Heavily Reduced Walls at Kin Klizhin

And, of course, there are some other interesting ideas out there about Kin Klizhin and its role in the Chaco system, but discussion of them will have to wait for another day.

Tower Kiva Bench at Kin Klizhin

Look Over There!

Oil Tanks, Mentone, Texas

I seem to have acquired for myself yet another blog.  This one is intended as a place where I can discuss things I read that have to do with energy, which is a topic I’ve become increasingly interested in since I’ve been at school.  I’ve talked about it a bit here, and I do think it’s relevant to what I’m trying to do with this blog, but I think it makes more sense to focus more on archaeology here and shift most of the energy stuff elsewhere.  I’ll still talk about energy-related issues here when they are directly related to Chaco or Southwestern archaeology in general, but for the most part I’ll be limiting discussion of energy to Follow the Energy.  So if you want to keep up with things like my coalbed methane paper, that’s the place to look.  Enjoy!

Trailers and Bloomfield Oil Refinery from Salmon Ruins, Bloomfield, New Mexico

Dig, Baby, Dig

Excavated Room at Casa Malpais, Springerville, Arizona

Via Paul Barford, an interesting post on pay-to-dig programs in the US.  These aren’t extremely common, but they’re out there.  The basic idea is to charge artifact collectors to dig at a site and let them keep whatever they find.  The sites are on private land, so this is all legal, but it’s definitely sleazy and just as destructive of the archaeological record as anything Jeanne Redd did.

Sherd with Checkered Pattern, Kin Klizhin

I found this one particularly interesting, given my own interests.  The text on the website is terse and very circumspect, but there are a few details evident from the About page and the pictures.  The sites are described as being in “northeastern Arizona” (hm, sounds familiar…), and judging from the architecture and pottery in the photos, it looks like they’re probably in the White Mountains/Mogollon Rim area, which is known for numerous sites with mixed Mogollon and Anasazi cultural influences.  The Black-on-white sherd in one of the pictures looks like Cibola White Ware, which is common in that area, although it wouldn’t look out of place at Chaco either.

Texas Farm Road 1933 Sign, Mentone, Texas

Also interesting is this effort by collectors in Texas to move away from looting-in-all-but-name and more toward some sort of collaborative effort with developers to excavate sites with professional methods in a salvage framework.  Salvage archaeology is one of the main things professional archaeologists do, of course, but it’s almost always on public lands or for publicly funded infrastructure projects, where it’s mandated by law.  On private land it’s generally not necessary, and an enormous amount of information is lost all the time when private development occurs in archaeologically rich areas.  Some states have laws regulating this and requiring efforts to reduce it, but Texas has nothing of the sort, and indeed it has particularly strong laws protecting landowners’ rights to their property.  Unlike most other states, at least in the Southwest, Texas doesn’t even have a burial law, so as far as I know there aren’t even any restrictions on dealing with human remains on private property.  In this context it’s pretty interesting to see this effort by collectors, and I think it might be one of the most viable ways for the collecting community to contribute positively to archaeological knowledge.  The leader certainly seems to have a vision for transforming the artifact trade.  It’s going to be hard work to change things, though, especially since the only way to really make a difference would be to create and enforce a very stringent code of ethics among collectors that would force illegally or unethically excavated artifacts off the market.  It’s conceivable that this could be done, but like any collective action problem it’s a daunting challenge.  If it could be done, though, it would definitely be worth the hard work, and I don’t think there are any easier or more plausible solutions on offer, so I wish these folks luck.

Federal Courthouse, Austin, Texas