(July 10, 2025)—It’s summer, and that means our Preservation Archaeology Field School is back in action! If you follow us on social media (Instagram, Facebook), you’ve probably already seen some photos of our students on field trips, working in the museum, and out in the field doing archaeological survey and experimental archaeology.
Our new program is a partnership among four institutions: Archaeology Southwest, the University of Arizona (UA), Western New Mexico University (WNMU), and the WNMU Museum. We live and work on the beautiful WNMU campus in Silver City, New Mexico while drawing on expertise from all four institutions.
Together, we analyze and catalog existing collections from the NAN Ranch archaeological site. This Classic Mimbres period (1000–1130 CE) village was excavated by the Texas A&M University field school in the 1970s and ’80s and is now curated at the Western New Mexico University Museum. WNMU Museum Director Dr. Danielle Romero and UA PhD candidate Rebecca Harkness bring decades of expertise in museum collections work and Mimbres pottery analysis to share with our students, and I’m happy to be back to working in the Mimbres area where I did much of my research back in graduate school.
This year, we’re doing archaeological survey on two very different properties. One is in the Redrock Valley in a desert environment outside Lordsburg, and the other is in the Mimbres Valley in the same area these museum collections came from. Our survey director, Noah Place, a UA PhD student, teaches our students to map and document archaeological sites from all time periods. The survey component ensures our students are prepared for field technician positions on Cultural Resource Management projects as soon as they finish the course.
Experimental archaeology and ancient technologies expert Allen Denoyer takes students all over the landscape, visiting sources of obsidian, pigment, important plants, and other locations to better understand how ancient people located raw materials on the landscape and used them to make everything they needed. He teaches us to make replicas of many of the items we see in museum collections, giving us new insights into how these items were used in the past.
In the evenings after dinner, students pop by the staff dorm room to borrow grinding slabs for pendant-making, return books and pick up new ones, or check in about plans for the next day. I’m happy to be back in Silver City with my friends and colleagues for the summer, and we’re enjoying getting to know our new students. Over the next few weeks, you can get to know them a little bit, too, as they share blogs about their experiences and all the new things they are seeing and learning in beautiful southwest New Mexico. We look forward to sharing some glimpses of our summer with you!
