Southwest Archaeology Today for Oct. 24, 2005

Archaeology Making the News – A Service of the Center for Desert Archaeology

– Bill Before Congress would Expand Casa Grande National Monument: Casa Grande Ruins National Monument may grow by 257 acres if a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rick Renzi is passed, and the Coolidge City Council did its best to give the bill a boost by passing a resolution of support on Oct. 10. The bill, known as House Resolution 1019, would authorize the monument to take over management of four separate pieces of property as well as providing funds to purchase at least two of the sites.
http://tinyurl.com/axj5v – Casa Grande Dispatch

– New Issue of the Texas Historical Commission’s ‘Medallion’:
http://www.thc.state.tx.us/medallionmag/medallionPDFs/MDWWII-05.pdf

– Pottery Types and Politics (Albuquerque): Pottery found during excavations in downtown Santa Fe indicates the people who once lived there moved to pueblos in the south — not north to Tesuque.The glaze on pottery recovered at the site is similar to that found in the ruins of San Marcos, San Lorenzo and San Cristobal pueblos in the Galisteo Basin to the south.
http://www.kvia.com/Global/story.asp?S=4011006

– Graham County Historical Museum Gets New Director: After six years of dedicated service in preserving evidence of the past, former Director Raydene Cluff is ready to pass the keys of the museum on to Mel Jones.
http://www.eacourier.com/articles/2005/10/20/local_news/news03.txt

– Public Archaeology, Student Project at Crow Canyon: The sixth graders and chaperones flew from St. Louis to Albuquerque, where they chartered a bus to Crow Canyon. The trip was from Sept. 25 until Oct. 1. Students are now Pueblo fact dispensers – ready to explain how the Native American people have lived and evolved with their desert environment over the years — covering a span from pre-10,000 B.C. to the present day.
http://www.timesnewspapers.com/stories/20051021/archeology.html

– Petroglyph Panels at China Lake (California) Protected by Naval Air Station: It’s a mystery, really. Experts aren’t even positive who carved more than 6,000 images on the walls of the milelong Little Petroglyph Canyon in the Coso Mountains. What message were they trying to convey? Why this place? Were carvings sacred? Did these people shred cheese? What is clear is that this canyon and others nearby are a mother lode of prehistoric pictures, the highest concentration of ancient rock art in the Western Hemisphere and a focal point for hundreds of early Americans who told their stories in stone for more than 15,000 years. Also clear is that, because of the canyon’s location on the remote, highly secure Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake — quite literally protected by people who blow things up for a living — only a few hundred people see it each year.
http://tinyurl.com/crghp – San Francisco Chronicle

– Should America’s Nuclear Legacy Sites be Given National Monument Status? ( Los Alamos, Trinity, etc. ) Next month, the National Park Service will launch a two-year study of sites around the nation where work was done on the Manhattan Project — the top-secret effort to help produce the first atomic bomb. The government wants to determine if the bomb sites should be included in the park system, and that’s sparking controversy.
http://www.aip.org/history/newsletter/spring2005/nps.htm