Mule Creek Underground
New blog entries are now being posted to our Preservation Archaeology Blog. Please check there!
At Home and on the Road
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant It’s hard to believe we’ve been back from the field for a little over a month now. Thanks again to our students for all the hard work that made this field season such a success! Now that the field work is over, it’s time to get laboratory analysis underway. [...]
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Student Post: Wrapping up the Season
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Nathan Thrapp summarizes this season’s field school: With the field school coming to an end today, I thought a short summary of our shared experiences at Mule Creek would be fitting. Starting our journey in Tucson, Arizona, eleven strangers were put together to accomplish a task. We broke [...]
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Student Post: Road Trip!
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Sarah Griffith shares her impressions of our recent field trip: This past weekend, the crew and staff packed up and headed out for a fun-filled weekend. Little did I know how incredible our road trip would be. First, we stopped at Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico. We [...]
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Student Post: Time Well Spent
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Emily Kvamme reflects on the past month: I came to this program not knowing whether I would enjoy doing archaeology. Now I know that I do—thoroughly! Over the past month, I have learned so much by working with different supervisors and seeing how their methods differ slightly, [...]
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Student Post: Reaching Out, part 2
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Elizabeth Newcomb describes our second community outreach event: I had expected that I’d be doing a lot of different things at the Preservation Archaeology field school, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that our assignments included two outreach events. My background experience includes outreach and public [...]
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…And More Questions Raised!
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant In my last post, I described three goals for our research at Fornholt this year. In this post, I’ll discuss the second of these goals. Last year, in the two-story part of the southern room block, we found a burned storage room filled with the carbonized remains of [...]
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Student Post: For the Love of Obsidian
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Jordan Taher’s encounter with the Mule Creek obsidian source has been a pilgrimage of sorts: One of the main reasons I wanted to attend the Archaeology Southwest-University of Arizona Preservation Archaeology field school at Mule Creek was the nearby obsidian source. Now, I’m kind of a rock fanatic—though, [...]
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One Question Answered…
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant Somehow, we’re more than halfway through the field season—time really does fly out here!—and now it’s time to provide an update on our research. Older blog posts will give you an idea of how our fieldwork last summer shaped our understanding of the Fornholt site, so I’ll begin [...]
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Student Post: Reaching Out
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Andi Sei understands why we must share what we are learning with the community: Archaeology isn’t just for the academic. Public education is vital for the community and the archaeologist. This past Saturday, our field school held this season’s first public outreach event for the youth of the [...]
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Student Post: Reading the Dirt
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Kelly Sweeney and her crew are learning to “read the dirt”: It is always exciting to start a new unit and uncover what lies beneath the soil. When I first arrived at the Fornholt site, I felt this exact sentiment. My crew’s goal was to uncover the pit [...]
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Student Post: The Importance of Field Training
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Field training is proving invaluable to student Madeline Weinberger: If you have any doubts about the importance of field training in archaeology, let me end them. Attending a field school is incredibly important. After talking to other students and faculty members, I learned that field school training is [...]
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Student Post: Expectations
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Our student Mac Mattingly discovers the reality of archaeological fieldwork: So much has happened over the past week, it’s hard to know where to begin. When I first heard about this field school, I had no idea what to expect. Maybe what I really envisioned was something out [...]
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Student Post: Blissfully Disconnected
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Field school student Megan Smith settles in to the rhythm of camp life: I often feel that I have lost sight of what is really important in my life as I scramble to meet deadlines and constantly focus my views so narrowly on stressful and pointless details. Am [...]
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Student Post: First Days at Mule Creek
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Our first student blog post comes from Tom Sprynczynatyk: As we drove up to the field school camp, I couldn’t help but feel some trepidation. Leaving Safford, about 50 miles southwest from Mule Creek, I could see smoke from the Whitewater-Baldy Fire on the horizon. As we drew [...]
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2012 Field Season Begins
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant This Tuesday, we arrived in Mule Creek with the new students, officially beginning the 2012 Mule Creek Preservation Archaeology field school. For those of you who haven’t visited the blog before, we began this journal during the 2011 field season as a way of sharing our research and experiences [...]
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Counting Down the Days
…to the 2012 Preservation Archaeology Field School! By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist It’s nearly here, and our staff is busy making final preparations for the 2012 Archaeology Southwest/University of Arizona Preservation Archaeology Field School at Mule Creek, New Mexico. Soon we’ll be loading up the vehicles and heading to our field camp! We [...]
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Mule Creek in Memphis
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant The Society for American Archaeology held its 77th Annual Meeting last week, and several of Archaeology Southwest’s staff, research associates, and friends traveled to Memphis to talk about archaeology, see old friends, and enjoy some barbeque and blues. Archaeology Southwest’s research was highlighted in two sessions. On Saturday [...]
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Salado polychrome pottery, part 2
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist A major part of our research at Mule Creek—and in the Upper Gila region in general—is to identify compositional and stylistic variability in Salado polychrome pottery (also known as Roosevelt Red Ware) through time and across space. We are using these data to track processes of migration, population [...]
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Salado polychrome pottery, part 1
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist A major part of our research at Mule Creek—and in the Upper Gila region in general—is to identify compositional and stylistic variability in Salado polychrome pottery (also known as Roosevelt Red Ware) through time and across space. Identifying compositional variability means looking at what the pottery is made [...]
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Have Pottery, Will Travel: Trade Ware at Gamalstad
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant If you’ve been following the blog, you already know a little bit about the Gamalstad site, where we worked in 2009 (you can find my earlier posts here and here). Before we set Gamalstad aside to focus on the upcoming field season, I’d like to discuss some of [...]
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Finishing Our Student Updates
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant Our last update for the time being comes from Ahren Wardwell, who was one of our students in 2008, at the first Mule Creek field school. Ahren writes: “I finished my BA in anthropology at Hendrix in 2009 and immediately started seeking CRM work around the country. Eventually I [...]
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Catching Up, continued
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Here are a few more updates from our field school students and staff. From Meaghan Trowbridge (2010 Volunteer and 2011 Field Supervisor): “Since last August, I have worked for Statistical Research, Inc,. doing cultural resource management (CRM) work in various contexts. I have excavated kivas for a highway-widening [...]
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Updates from Our Students and Staff
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist I thought I’d share a series of updates about what some of our former Mule Creek field school students and staff members have been doing lately. Here is the first installment: From Jake Mitchell (2011 Field School, Hendrix College): “In October I started working for a CRM firm called [...]
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The Sherds of Gamalstad: Ceramic Chronology in Mule Creek
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant In a post back in October, I discussed the Late Pithouse period at Gamalstad, one of the sites we investigated during the 2009 field season. As I wrote then, we have evidence of a substantial pithouse occupation (c. A.D. 550–1000), underneath smaller Mimbres pueblo (that is, Mimbres Classic Phase, c. [...]
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Fruitful Discussions at the Southwest Symposium
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist, with Katherine Dungan, Research Associate A few weekends ago, several Archaeology Southwest staff members had the opportunity to attend the 13th Biennial Southwest Symposium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This year’s symposium title was “Causation and Explanation: Demography, Movement, and Historical Ecology.” Presenters were asked to explore causal explanations for [...]
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Learning from Pottery, Part 2: Migration and Trade
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist A few weeks ago, I wrote about how decorated pottery is helping us determine when the various large sites we have investigated in the Mule Creek area were occupied (see Learning from Pottery, Part 1: Dating). We can also use pottery to understand phenomena such as long-distance trade and [...]
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November 23rd, 2011 Talking Turkey: Unexpected Encounters with New World Domesticates
With Thanksgiving nearly upon us, we thought that it would be fun to share with our readers our own memorable turkey experience, as captured on film when we were recording Archaeology Southwest’s Mule Creek videos
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Learning from Pottery, Part 1: Dating
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist When an archaeologist says that a site was inhabited, say, during the late 1200s A.D., how does he or she know that? There are many methods used to date archaeological sites. Some, like radiocarbon dating of materials like burned wood or corn, measure the age of a sample directly [...]
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Inclusion and Exclusion
By Jeff Clark, Preservation Archaeologist After spending more than twenty years scrutinizing the Salado in nearly every valley and basin in the southern part of the American Southwest, it’s time for us to step back, think deep thoughts, and hopefully come up with some profound conclusions—maybe even some with modern relevance. We believe that the [...]
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Even Farther Underground: The Pithouses of Mule Creek
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant As you know from previous posts, our work in the Upper Gila focuses on the Kayenta and Salado migrations of the late 13th through mid-15th centuries and on the 13th century occupation at the Fornholt site, where we worked this past summer. Mule Creek’s archaeological record stretches back even [...]
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What does a nuclear reactor have to do with prehistoric pottery?
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Every once in a while, my research requires me to do something a little out of the ordinary. For example, this spring I spent several days at the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) in Columbia. I was there to analyze ceramic compositional data collected at the MURR Archaeometry [...]
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A Day’s Excavation in 2 Minutes
By Rob Jones, Preservation Fellow This summer, during our work at Fornholt, we were lucky enough to be joined by Josh Gilbrech, a photographer from Tucson. He took a time-lapse video of excavations in progress at the deep test unit on the two-story section of the site. Josh’s video gives you a sense of the [...]
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Tracking Kayenta, Understanding Salado
By Jeff Clark, Preservation Archaeologist Our work in Mule Creek and the Upper Gila is part of Archaeology Southwest’s long-term research project to assess the scale and impact of Kayenta migrations in the southern Arizona during the late 13th and 14th centuries A.D. The Kayenta were a relatively small “group of groups” that substantially influenced [...]
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Preservation Archaeology in Action
By Deborah L. Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist What can be learned about an archaeological site without digging? Quite a lot, it turns out, especially if that site has been kept in pristine condition. I recently visited such a site that is managed by the National Park Service (NPS). Although this large pueblo has been documented and [...]
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Mapping the Past
By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant In our posts during the field season, we mentioned various aspects of Fornholt’s site layout—that it has northern and southern room blocks, two-story sections, a large depression in the southern room block—but we never posted a map of the site. I haven’t added our 2011 excavations to the master [...]
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Student Post: Chaco Canyon Field Trip
Early on a Friday morning, the students of the Mule Creek Field School dragged themselves from their tents and piled into the Suburban and the fifteen-passenger van. After an eventful drive in very close quarters—a trip that was supposed to take seven hours, but ended up taking ten due to a tire blowing out on [...]
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Student Post: Public Outreach in Archaeology
Public outreach is often an overlooked aspect of archaeology. The general public outside of the archaeological community plays an integral part in the work that we do, by giving us access to sites and helping to preserve them. It is also important for archaeologists to share their work with the public in order to explain [...]
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As the Sun Sets on the 2011 Field Season, Stay Tuned for Ongoing Research
Last week saw the official end of the 2011 field season. We celebrated the 4th of July with a party and drove the students back to Tucson on the 5th. We couldn’t have asked for a better group of students, and we’re very grateful to them, to our hosts in Mule Creek, and to the [...]
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Student Post: Anthropology Across the U.S. – Regional Variation in Archaeological Questions and Methods
One of the reasons I was most excited for this field school—aside from the charm of the Upper Gila and the completely foreign ways of life I was told I’d encounter every day—was because it gave me a chance to compare how archaeology was practiced across regions, particularly within the U.S. and North America. Fortunately, [...]
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Student Post: Preservation Archaeology
The other day we had our Ethics Bowl, where we split into different groups and were given different cases that could arise when working on an archaeological project. We then had to discuss the different ethical issues that are [...]
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From the Field: Daily Life at Mule Creek
We’re getting the students involved in producing blog posts that highlight an interesting aspect of each day’s field work. As a supplement, I’ll be posting short photo essays of daily field life in the field, dust and all. …
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Significant Results
Archaeology Southwest President Bill Doelle writes: I recently returned from my second visit to Mule Creek, and we are far enough into the season that there are significant results emerging from the Fornholt excavations. Our research design includes several basic questions about the Fornholt site that are based on observations made last season, when a [...]
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Still Dusty: Archaeology of the Day
One of our major research questions for the summer is the large depression in the center of the south room block at Fornholt. We are currently calling this the plaza/kiva—both types of communal architecture have precedents in this area. In the kiva fill [...]
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Still Dusty: Archaeology of the Day
A unit excavated into the southern room block has produced a substantial quantity of burnt corn—not a cob or two, but entire lumps of fused, carbonized corn. The kernels are still visible due to carbonization from intense heat.
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Barbacoa
On our first day off of the season, most of the students headed in to Silver City to do laundry and pick up necessities that had been used up or forgotten. A few stayed behind to help our hosts with the yearly task of branding and castrating their cattle, and did a fine job as [...]
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Fire Update
It’s not that often that this part of New Mexico makes the news. Unfortunately, the extra wet summer last year and the extra dry one this year have led to one of the largest fires in Southwestern history, burning up more than forty miles away and across two rivers, but we are making plans should [...]
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Camp Life
We get out on the site only a little after sunrise and make it back in the late afternoon, which is often taken up with artifact washing, lecture, and the business of trying to get the New Mexico silt scrubbed off. The field house is for cooking, reading, and getting out of the rain (if [...]
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Underground
The first few days are always a little tough, as folks grow calluses where there were none, and stretch muscles that haven’t been called on before. Sometimes, even bloggers get too worn out to get much blogging done (sorry). But now we’ve hit our stride. We have five active excavation units: three in collapsed rooms, [...]
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Off to a Good Start
The last few days have been incredibly busy, but the field school is now underway! The students arrived late Sunday afternoon to a meal of turkey mole prepared by our wonderful hosts. They gave a brief introduction to their ranch and life here in Mule Creek, and Bill Doelle talked to the students about the [...]
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Lunch for Twenty
The nearest grocery stores are either an hour east in Silver City, New Mexico, or an hour west in Safford, Arizona, so we have to stock up. We’ve got limited refrigeration and storage in the field house, so we generally keep about a week of food at a time. This can be shocking for the check-out clerk. [...]
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Field Prep
After a month of gathering gear, compiling reading lists, and writing plans of work, we departed Tucson to set up camp in Mule Creek ahead of the students. One of the challenges of working more than an hour away from the nearest store is being absolutely sure that nothing (or at least nothing essential) gets [...]
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Welcome to Mule Creek Underground
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Mule Creek Underground! We’ve started this blog to give you a feel for the process of planning, conducting, and living through an archaeological research project. First, a little history is in order. This will be our fourth year working in Mule Creek, and our largest effort to date. We’re [...]
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