Archaeology Southwest - Exploring and protecting the places of our past

Mule Creek in Memphis

By Katherine A. Dungan, Research Assistant

The Society for American Archaeology held its 77^th 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 afternoon, we presented a poster session on our work in Mule Creek and the Upper Gila region—view the posters from that session at the links below—and on Sunday morning, several papers highlighted work being done as part of the University of Arizona School of Anthropology and Archaeology Southwest’s Southwest Social Networks project. One of those papers was presented by Hannah Jane Carmack, who was a student and later a volunteer in Mule Creek.

The Mule Creek poster session included posters by two of our students from the 2011 field school. Christopher Caseldine (now in the graduate program at Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change) presented Go Fish: An Analysis of Fish Consumption among Tularosa Phase Sites, in which he discusses the presence of fish bone at sites in Mule Creek. Colleen Kennedy (about to graduate from the anthropology program at Texas A&M) presented Corn and Culture, which compares maize recovered from sites in Mule Creek.

Michael Diehl of Desert Archaeology Inc. contributed Late Prehistoric Farming and Food Harvesting along Mule Creek, New Mexico, a macrobotanical comparison between the Fornholt and 3-Up sites. Deb Huntley presented Ceramic Production and the Development of Salado Identity in the Upper Gila Region of the American Southwest, the results of the compositional analysis of Salado polychrome and Maverick Mountain series sherds in the region. My poster, Mule Creek and the Great Kiva Tradition of the Mogollon Highlands, compares what we currently know about the Fornholt great kiva to other great kivas in the eastern Mogollon Highlands.

Thanks again to everyone who presented as part of the session and to everyone who stopped by. We had lots of interesting conversations, got some good feedback, and had a great time in Memphis. It’s hard to believe that in only a few short weeks we’ll be back in the field with new students and new questions to answer about the Fornholt site…stay tuned for field preparations and the start of the new field season!

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 coalescence, and long-distance interaction in the study area. I talked about typology in my previous post; today I’ll talk about style.

Photo 1: Tonto Polychrome jar with black and white serpent imagery; note the coiled tail (left) and plumed head (right). From the Mills collection at Eastern Arizona College.

Archaeologists use the term style to describe the particular way an item is decorated or made. In the case of pottery, style can be a visual characteristic—incorporating a certain color scheme or layout or repeated pattern—known as design style. It may also be may be a technological characteristic, such as the clay recipe used by an individual or group of potters. Archaeologists assume that styles had meaning to their creators.

In her definitive study of Salado polychrome pottery published in 1994, Dr. Patricia Crown pointed out that this ware was one of the most widely distributed in all of Southwestern prehistory. Salado polychrome bowls and jars were made in a number of different regions and decorated using a variety of design styles. These design styles are seen on other types of Southwestern decorated pottery. For example, the Pinedale style seen on many Salado polychromes is common on White Mountain Red Ware and Cibola White Ware from east-central Arizona and west-central New Mexico.

Photo 2: Cliff Polychrome bowl (from Mills collection at Eastern Arizona College) with mirror image of parrots in center of bowl and wings or plumed serpent around this image.

Crown linked the popularity of Salado polychrome pottery with the florescence of a Southwest regional cult, a religious movement associated with rain, fertility, and community well-being that had deep roots among Southwestern groups. Some examples of particular design motifs and icons that express this ideology are serpents (both with and without plumes or horns; see photo 1), clouds, lightning, feathers, flowers, and birds (see photo 2).

We have yet to identify strong regional patterning in design motifs or iconography among sites in the Upper Gila study area. That is, potters from individual villages or river valleys appear to have had no clear local preference for particular suites of icons. This agrees with the results from Crown’s study and supports her interpretation that Salado polychrome pottery served to integrate diverse social groups.

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 of, what materials were used. Stylistic variability has to do with what the pottery looks like, how it is decorated.

We are using these data to track processes of migration, population coalescence, and long-distance interaction in the study area. In the context of our work in the American Southwest, coalescence refers to the process of combining social groups from diverse backgrounds into large, multiethnic communities. This occurred after A.D. 1300.

Since I’m working on a poster presenting this analysis at the upcoming meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Memphis, I thought I would talk a little bit about the preliminary results of our typological and stylistic studies. Today I’ll address typology; next week, style.

Salado polychromes are a general class of pottery known as a ware, which means they are made using similar raw materials and share many aspects of technology and style. Archaeologists have traditionally divided Salado polychromes into three main types—Pinto, Gila, and Tonto—based mainly on their design configurations. Pinto Polychrome was the earliest type made (from about A.D. 1280 to 1330), followed by Gila Polychrome (from about 1300 to 1450) and Tonto Polychrome (from about 1350 to 1450). In addition to different date ranges for their manufacture, each type seems to have somewhat different spatial distributions.

Cliff Polychrome and Gila Polychrome bowls from the Mills collection at Eastern Arizona College.

Archaeologist Patrick Lyons recently examined variability within Salado polychromes and argued that late versions of this ware can be split into several distinctive types based on their stylistic and morphological characteristics. One of these types, Cliff Polychrome, would have been lumped with Gila Polychrome under the traditional typology. Cliff Polychrome only occurs in bowl forms, almost always has a recurved rim, and differs from Gila Polychrome in that it has a dual design field, with one design above and one design below the rim banding line. Gila Polychrome bowls typically have direct rims and a single design field below a rim band.

The other newly defined late types overlap quite a bit with Tonto Polychrome, but have additional distinctive attributes, such as a smudged (blackened and polished) interior surface. Archaeology Southwest’s previous research in the San Pedro Valley and elsewhere suggests that these types were among the latest Salado polychromes to be made, well into the 15^th century, and that they were associated with some of the latest occupied coalescent communities in the southern Southwest.

In the Upper Gila region, we are finding some variability in Salado polychrome types among different river drainages. For example, Gila, Tonto, and Cliff Polychrome are found at nearly every post-1300 site in our study area, including the Mimbres Valley. Other late types like Dinwiddie Polychrome (see below) are common in the assemblages from sites like 3-Up in Mule Creek, Ormand Village in the Cliff Valley, and Buena Vista/Curtis in the Safford Basin, but are absent in our sample of Mimbres Valley Salado site components.

Dinwiddie Polychrome bowl from the Mills collection at Eastern Arizona College.

Does this mean that Mimbres Valley potters were somewhat isolated from later developments in Salado polychrome style? Or were the Mimbres Valley sites abandoned prior to the 15^th century, when many of the latest Salado polychrome types were being made? We are still investigating these questions.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Mule Creek, Writ Large

By Rob Jones, Preservation Fellow  

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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. …  

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]