On Site...
at Chaves-Hummingbird

July 17: The team posts its first report...

Mike Adler, Taylor West and Richard Chaves, the land owner of the Chaves-Hummingbird site, working in Room 39.

We've now spent two full days in the field...
... and already have too much to talk about during dinner. To address our focus on architectural variability at the site, I've distributed our excavations across the three main architectural blocks at the site. Like all archaeological digs, we are uncovering materials and contexts that are expected. But there are surprises as well.

In the northern roomblock, comprised primarily of adobe rooms aligned in a roughly U-shaped configuration, we are excavating a set of rooms that were damaged by earlier looting activities. These rooms still contain important information given that the looting did not completely empty the earthen fill in the rooms. The first room (Room 39), has a large looter's pit in the center. After emptying the backfill we placed in the room in 1996 (to better preserve the damaged room) we began excavations in the undisturbed portion of the room. Finds by Frank Cerruti and Dean Rudoy so far include a stone axe and various pottery types that were either thrown into the abandoned room as it filled with sediments or were washed into the roofless structure due to later erosion.

The volunteer crew on site.

The adjoining room to the south (Room 38) we believed to have been entirely excavated by Frank Hibben during his earlier archaeological work at the site. We removed the backfill in this room in order to show the Earthwatch crew the structure and look of coursed adobe walls. The exhibition netted more than a good visual example. The room is not a single architectural entity, but one room built on the remains of an earlier structure. The earlier room is a rectangular adobe structure with a central hearth that still contained the ashy remains of the last fires that heated the room nearly seven centuries ago. After the room had outlived its usefulness, a second later room was built over the earlier, filled room. While the earlier archaeological work in this room removed most of the floor of the upper room, one small portion of the room floor remained in the southwest corner. Careful excavation of this remainder by Earthwatch volunteers uncovered a beautifully prepared adobe floor with a plaster coating. Only one corner of the room appears to have had this very special preparation, a coating that would have required the collection and calcining of locally available selenite crystals.

We've also placed an excavation unit to investigate the plaza area just to the south of Room 38. This sounding will allow us to identify plaza surfaces that may have been in use during the various occupation phases represented by Rooms 38 and 39. Plazas are present on most ancestral Pueblo sites, but are often given less attention by archaeologists because they rest outside of defined roomblocks. These open areas were, and still are, important public spaces, used for rituals, group activities, food processing, and other activities. Our excavations have just begun to scratch the surface of the plaza, but Amy Raes and Taylor West have recovered ceramic and stone tools in the plaza deposits.

Screening for artifacts.

Moving over to the eastern roomblock, we've got groups working on two very different rooms contained in this large mass of adobe structures. The first room (Room 5), under excavation by Jeannie McDowell, Adam Shea, and Christine Hung, is an archaeobotanists dream. Identified as a probable burned room during surface clearing, excavations in the southwestern quadrant of the room have yielded buckets of burned corn and wood. The room was clearly a storage location for corn, both on the cob and shelled, at the time it went up in flames. Excavations have reached the adobe floor of the single-story room, and we will be looking for earlier rooms underneath Room 5 in the coming days.

Across the roomblock, excavators Susan Anderson, Susan Bruning and Aaron Ostrovsky are uncovering a very different room. The unburned remains of Room 43 are being investigated because of evidence for plastered walls uncovered during surface clearing. The fill of this adobe room contains very few artifacts, but the sediments tell a tale of a long period of room in-filling after abandonment. We don't know how far we are from the room floor, but that's archaeology. We move from the known to the unknown, recording our observations and searching for sense in the silt and stones.

Carefully searching for artifacts in the screen.

The main mound of the site is the third excavation focus of this summer's work. As can be seen on the aerial photograph of the site, the main mound rises 3-5 meters above the rest of the site. This elevation gain is the direct result of several episodes of construction and reconstruction in this part of the site, rooms built on rooms, in turn built on yet earlier rooms. We have placed two excavation areas in this area to investigate the earliest and latest occupations of the main mound area. The earliest levels of occupation are being sought by Jim Zurn, Michael Brake, and Jay Theuer who are excavating in the base of the bulldozer cut that bisects the main mound. This 1 x 2 meter trench probes the early occupation levels, and has already documented several levels of deposition in this part of the site. The artifacts in this part of the site are heavy in bone artifacts, including remains of deer, turkey, dog, and other species.

On the highest point of the main mound we're putting our efforts into understanding the latest occupation levels, at least in this part of the site. With some help from Tim Jaster, Jane Vawter and Mary Freeman are excavating a portion of Room 901, a large room constructed of masonry that has been partially damaged by an earlier episode of bulldozing at the site. Unlike the rest of the rooms in the adobe-dominant areas to the north and east, Room 901 and its surrounding architecture have been built of the native sandstone found on the nearby mesa escarpments. This is the sort of architectural variability on which we are focusing our research efforts at the site. Exposed stratigraphy in the bulldozer cut shows there to be at least two separate floors in Room 901, so we will be looking for additional evidence of architectural construction styles and contemporaneity as we work through the next dozen days.

Chaves-Hummingbird Pueblo is one of only two major settlements built by ancestral Pueblo peoples in the Rio Puerco Valley during the period spanning the abandonment of the Four Corners region (Mesa Verde and Kayenta areas) and the arrival of the Spaniards in 1540. The research will study the processes of late prehistoric village formation and population migration in this portion of central New Mexico, the present home of several modern Pueblo communities.

The Rio Puerco basin occupies roughly 16,000 square kilometers of northwestern New Mexico. Rio Puerco is one of the main tributaries of the Rio Grande, entering the river near Bernardo. Learn more about this watershed here.

Create your own map, showing the Rio Puerco in relation to major roads and rivers, and to state, federal and Native American lands. Click here for Enviromapper.

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