On Site...
at Chaves-Hummingbird

July 26: The two rules of archaeology...

There are two rules in archaeology:

• First, you will find the most important finds the final day of your excavations.
• Second, your most important finds will show up just outside your excavation area.

The excavations at the Chaves site have kept to the rules. Today we stood next to Room 27, excavated by Susan Anderson and Michael Bletzer, looking at several smashed ceramic vessels that fell from the roof of the room into the fill of the room. We moved up to Room 901, where Jane Vawter, Mary Freeman, and Tim Jaster were exposing the bottom floor of a room that had been buried by tons of rubble. In the northern roomblock we've found three levels of rooms, one on top of another.

We'll put the pictures up for you later. Right now we are trying to make sense of all of this.

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.

The contents of this Web site are copyright materials of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at Southern Methodist University. All rights are reserved.

The contents of this Web site are the sole responsibility of the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man and do not necessarily represent the opinions or policies of Southern Methodist University.

The administrator of this site may be contacted at isem@mail.smu.edu.