Southwestern Archeology News

Major newspapers rotate stories off their servers after a week or so and journals do the same after a somewhat longer time. Many of the older links are now inactive, but my summaries should help you decide if you want to search for the stories in the publishers' archives. In many cases, you will need to subscribe to access the archives, but the costs are typically modest.

Rights to the stories are held by the original publishers, but my summaries are yours to use as you like. Please give me credit when you do.

The good news is that we have a new publisher (www.CreateSpace.com) and both books will be available by the end of January. The Ancestral Puebloan Primer will show up as a new printing  with only modest changes. We've done more to The Anasazi Guide and the net result is a second edition. In addition to incorporating recent research,  we have moved references to our web site and adopted a more convenient format. The latter two changes made it possible for us to reduce the size of the volume and the new edition will be priced around $15.95.

We also have two more books in process. America's Southwestern Treasures describes nearly 200 archaeological sites, provides directions to those open to the public, and includes suggested itineraries for week-long excursions. In addition, Treasures  has a unique rating system that makes it easy to identify "must see" sites as well as indexes by location and culture. We expect the book to  be available by the end of March priced under $20. 

The final book in the series, Off Limits, describes a dozen archaeological sites at the forefront of current research. None are open to the public and Off Limits describes both the sites and the archaeological techniques used to explore them.  Excavations are ongoing at a couple of the sites, but we expect the book to be available by June priced just under $25. 

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that a "Landmark deal [has been] reached to save Nine Mile's rock art riches." The new agreement ends nearly a decade of controversy arising from a Bush era decision to allow Bill Barrett Corporation to drill for natural gas in the archaeologically sensitive area. 

Nearly a year of negotiation has been required to reach agreement and signees include the Bureau of Land Management, the Ute Tribe, the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, the Southern Paiute Tribe, the state Public Lands Policy Coordination Office, the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Archaeologists estimate there are nearly 10,000 rock art sites in the canyon system and highlights of the agreement include elements intended to satisfy all parties:

• Bill Barrett will fund all cultural-resources fieldwork, analysis, monitoring, data recovery, reporting, curation, rock-art conservation and other actions to protect the art except for the 63 sites now registered as historic places.
• The BLM will continue to consult with the concurring parties and the tribes regarding sites with religious and cultural significance. The agency also will continue to study industrial dust's effects on rock art in Nine Mile Canyon and how to remediate any damage.
• Because the Hopi Tribe has expressed concerns regarding traditional use of the West Tavaputs Plateau, the BLM will complete an ethnographic study of Hopi use of the region. The study's results will be released only to the Hopi Tribe.
• Bill Barrett will pay for BLM's visitor-interpretation sights, including parking, walking paths, signs or information kiosks. Priority sites include First Site, Owl Panel, the Great Hunt Panel, Rasmussen Cave, Daddy Canyon and Gate Canyon's historic road.
• The BLM will obtain easements from willing private-land owners for development of an additional two to four interpretive sites, including the Long Neck Sheep and Balanced Rock sites.

1. Mitochondrial DNA and Populating the World
2. PreClovis and Peopling the Americas

For details regarding each and additional resources, click on the topics.

New research indicates that woolly mammoths, horses, and other mega fauna survived in North America far longer than previously believed.  Most scientists believed they were extinct by 10,000 BC, but DNA extracted from frozen soil suggest some may have lived as recently as 5,000 BC.

The conventional date coincided with arrival of modern man in North America and some specialists argued that hunting was responsible for the extinctions. The new data cast doubt on the hunting explanation and you read the news release at www.ScienceDaily.com.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports second view. Reviewing current archaeological evidence, the authors note that corn found at five sites in Arizona and New Mexico is nearly 2,000 years old and predates evidence of migration from the south. The full text of the study is online.

The Canyons of the Ancients property accounts for about 25 percent of the private lands inside the Monument and contains 25 documented sites of cultural importance, including Jackson's Castle and the Skywatcher Site, a 1,000-year old Ancestral Puebloan solstice marker. The property is believed to contain more than 700 other as yet undocumented sites of cultural importance. The press release is available at the USDA portal.

Range Creek Canyon was home to a large Freemont community until around 1200 AD. Since 2004, the area has been managed by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and access has been tightly monitored.  Beginning in September, the area will be monitored by University of Utah archaeologists who will build a permanent research installation.

A land swap facilitated the arrangement and you can read details in either the Salt Lake Tribune or the Vail Daily.n approving the purchase of Range Creek Canyon, which was later transferred to the state, he said.

In an article titled "Stealing the Past,"  Laura Paskus summarizes the illegal trade and its consequences. You may read the complete story in the Santa Fe Reporter.

Recent work by paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill of the University of Wisconsin–Madison raises doubts about the comet theory. After examining lake sediments from the critical epoch,  Gill concluded that  "There's no physical trend to suggest that there was an impact event." Gill's findings add credence to the overhunting hypothesis.

A pdf document on the Monument's Management Page explains the proposed expansion and the Center urges anyone interested in helping with the preservation effort contact Andy Laurenzi at the Center for Desert Archeology, (520) 882-6946, or at alaurezi@cdarc.org

The protected area includes nearly 540 square miles with as many as 316,456 cultural sites including pilgrimage trails, shrines, archaeological sites, burial sites, petroglyphs and other artwork as well as places where tribes gather minerals and plants. For additional details, see the Associated Press story and previous entries here describing the controversy.

Details of the proposal and supporting documents are available on the Department of Cultural Affairs web site. In addition, the Cibola Beacon is running a series of articles about the significance of Mount Taylor and probable effects of the nomination on property owners in the area. To find individual articles, search the archive for "Mount Taylor."

The study was published in Science and its findings have been widely disseminated in other media including BBC News, Kris's Archeology Blog, ScienceNews, Science Daily, and the Washington Post.

 And, while busy writing,  I've archived the scattering of news reports coming out. I will  be adding them to this list in a week or so.

The story has been repeated in a variety of publications, but this New York Times article is the most complete report. The original research report appears in Science Now but nonmembers will have to pay a hefty access fee.

Conservationist have objected to the proposed site by site listing strategy  because they hope to have whole sections of the canyon listed.

The research was reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science and is summarized in a brief article in The Columbus Dispatch.

Proposals to improve the road have typically stumbled over conflicting interests of those who would like to preserve the canyon's remote feeling and local residents who desire more reliable access to their properties. In addition, County Commissioners have been unable to get easements from some local land owners, and costs of surveying and securing environmental impact clearance now appear to exceed the San Juan County's resources

The proposal would change the status of agreements whereby the the National Park Service is responsible for  preserving  artifacts and ruins within the monument while the land is owned by the Navajo reservation. The National Park Service has not taken a position on the proposal. However, several canyon residents who are members of Tsegi Diné oppose the  takeover because they don't believe the Navajo Nation has the expertise to manage the canyon.

Dating is complicated by the salt water which sometimes distorts carbon dates, but preliminary indications are that the skeleton represents human presence in the Americas before the ice free corridor which made it possible for people to migrate from Beringia. In addition, physical characteristics of the skull suggest that the individual represented came from south asia rather than from the north.

You can read the full report on National Geographic News.

These areas include some of the most distinctive and well preserved Anasazi sites and public reaction to the proposed redesignation has been decidedly negative. The Salt Lake Tribune headlined " BLM proposal jeopardizes ancient ruins" and Utah channel Fox 13 noted that "Critics Fear BLM Land Plan Risks Anasazi Relics."  The Desert News has chimed in as well and has space for reader comments.

According to the critics, redesignating the area will substantially change the "focus" of activity, but the BLM counters that it will more accurately reflect conditions on the ground and improve oversight and protection. My opinion is that the BLM is right for once! The focus has already changed as a result of countless visitors hiking the trails and visiting the sites. For example, I first visited Moon House a couple decades ago and substantial local knowledge was required to find the site. Today, well-trod trails lead to it along with other sites in the area. 

The Salt Lake Tribune has followed up with an editorial (dated September 8, 2008) vigorously attacking the BLM  for inviting destruction of relics and "trying to make a clean sweep of it before President Bush leaves office, issuing management plans for Utah public lands that favor all-terrain vehicles and energy development over wildlife, water, scenic beauty and archaeological treasures."

You can download the proposed plan from this link.

Utah Department of Transportation archaeologist Pam Higgins describes the site in deep red, sandy soil as home to a single family and noted that no human remains were found. The pit house measured about 13 feet in diameter and contained several storage containers plus a hearth in a covered communal area.  Several broken pots were also found at the site and Higgins says they could be repaired easily.

The final site report will not be available for  a year or two, but a brief account is printed in The Salt Lake Tribune.

The pre-Clovis sites along with DNA evidence suggest that early wanderers may have traveled by boat or along the coast from Siberia to North America. Waters near the Bering Strait are the most likely route and US News & World Report has a nice essay summarizing current thinking.

For details, visit http://www.swanet.org/twitter/20july2008.pdf.

However, this is a good time for secondary players, like yours truly, to summarize theories that are being fleshed out. Chapter 1 of The Anasazi Guide summarizes much of what's known about the origins of the Anasazi and Kris Hirst has recently synthesized current speculation about the peopling of North America.  Her Archeology Blog is always good reading and this entry summarizes four lines of theorizing: 

• Clovis and the Ice Free Corridor
• Preclovis and the Pacific Coast Migration
• Solutrean Precursors to Clovis
• Trans-Pacific Contacts

A few, a very small minority, hold that people could have reached the new world from Europe by following a north Atlantic ice shelf. Represented by archaeologists Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford, this minority position emphasizes similarities between Clovis artifacts and those created by the Upper Paleolithic Solutrean culture. The similarities include the shape and flaking of Clovis points, use of ivory shafts and points, and presence of needles and shaft straighteners.

Kris Hurst has posted a nice synopsis of the evidence supporting the Solutrean-Clovis connection along with a number of helpful links.  Incidentally, although Kris does not mention it, there is a modest amount of genetic evidence suggesting an Indo-European migration to North America.

Readers may also notice a substantial oversight in the article--it doesn't mention the cultural differentiation that had begun to splinter the Anasazi world long before the ultimate collapse. Although we use the word, "Anasazi," as if referring to a single coherent community (aka, "tribe") linguistic evidence suggests the people did not think of themselves as members of a common group. Pueblo and Hopi descendants speak nearly a dozen distinct languages and I suspect the cultural differences made it easy for the ancestral people to engage in conflict with people where were not like themselves.

Initially reported in Science on April 3rd, the story was promptly picked up by Fox News, the Discovery Channel, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. And, you can watch an interview with Dennis Jenkins, the principal investigator, on The Archeology Channel.

Chapter One of The Anasazi Guide explains why this finding has attracted so much attention and Kris' Archeology Blog has a nice synopsis along with some additional links.

Using isotopic ratios of hydrogen and copper measured by a secondary ion mass spectrometer, Hull and her colleagues demonstrated that it is possible to uniquely characterize turquoise deposits. They analyzed twelve turquoise mines and defined 10 turquoise provenance regions. In addition, they found that 13 of 17 artifacts recovered in northwestern New Mexico "fell into several distribution patterns of characterized source regions, suggesting that turquoise was obtained from several source areas and moved over long distances."

You can read the abstract and purchase the article, "A new approach to determining the geological provenance of turquoise artifacts using hydrogen and copper stable isotopes," or view a capable summary with links on Kris' Archeology Blog.

The Anasazi emerged from a group of hunter-gathers who migrated to the "new world" from Asia. Chapter One of  The Anasazi Guide summarizes what we knew about the peopling of North America just a year ago. Since that time, genetic, linguistic, and archaeological studies have filled in many gaps and several critical publications are noted below; see stories reported on March 12, 2008; March 4, 2008; February 4, 2008; and November 27, 2007.

Keeping abreast of the "breaking news" can be a bit of a headache, but an article published today will simplify the task for you. Ted Goebel and colleagues, "The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas," Science review the existing data and conclude that "evidence implies dispersal from a single Siberian population toward the Bering Land Bridge no earlier than about 30,000 years ago (and possibly after 22,000 years ago), then migration from Beringia to the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago." Nonsubscribers can read the abstract and purchase the article, but  a  capable summary on Kris's Archeology Blog will save you the cost and provides a number of interesting links.

Genetic information about the first people that migrated to North America has been relatively sparse. The result has been a less than complete picture of the origins of the people we call Anasazi. The inadequacies have been at least partially resolved in a recent study by Alessandro Achilli and colleagues, "The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies ."

Drawing together genetic sequences previously cataloged in various publications, Achilli and colleagues demonstrate that 95% of all living Amerinds are derived from just six (6) ancestral mothers who lived between 18,000 and 21,000 years before present. Significantly, the MtDNA characteristics of the six lines are not present in Asia lending support to the claim that the people evolved in Beringia--a now submerged land mass between Siberia and North America (see the news report dated February 14, 2008 below). In addition, the findings are moderately controversial because they raise additional questions about the "Clovis first" hypothesis.

The Achilli study is available online, but many readers will find it difficult reading. Helpful and relatively complete synopses have been reported by The Washington Post and Fox News, and Chapter One of The Anasazi Guide includes a helpful discussion of the genetic evidence.

Vajda has demonstrated that Ket, an "old world" language spoken by a few hundred Siberians living along the Yenisei River in western Siberia, is closely related to the languages spoken by many Athabascan tribes including the Tlingit, Eyak, Navajo, and Apache.  While he stops short of asserting a genetic link between the peoples, others have provided that evidence (see stories reported below on February 14, 2008 and October 25, 2007). 

The Anchorage Daily News has published a readable summary of his work and its significance, and his recently revised essay is available online.  Chapter One of The Anasazi Guide includes background that will help you put this research in context.

In spite of these protections, the Bill Barrett Corporationof Denver, Colorado, holds mineral rights leases that permit it to explore for natural gas and other valuable resources. The company estimates that wells in the Canyon would yield about 1 trillion cubic feet of gas over three decades of drilling, but environmentalists note that retrieving the gas would require  hundreds of trips every week by big rigs. The dust generated alone could bury priceless art panels while vibrations threaten to damage fragile surfaces.

The drilling project and resulting controversy are aptly summarized by Salt Lake Tribune.

For more information about Mesa Verde, see Chapters 9 and 13 of The Anasazi Guide.

1. The root stock of Native American people emerged in Asia at least 50,000 years before present,
2. A portion of this population moved to Beringia--a now submerged land mass between Siberia and North America--and remained there for a considerable period of time, and
3. About 15,000 years before present, this population moved to North America and expanded rapidly to fill the continent.

Since publication, this article has attracted some interesting and well-informed comments.  The thread is available on PlosOne.

For more information about Chaco Canyon, see Chapters 9 and 10 of The Anasazi Guide.

While museums and other organizations have grumbled a bit about returning artifacts, substantial controversy arose in 2000 when scientists opposed returning Kennewick Man to Indian groups of questionable affiliation. In response, two proposed wording changes are now before congress.  

Kris Hirst  has a pair of posts on Archeology.com that summarize the proposed changes as well as responses to them. If you haven't followed the controversy, I recommend that you read her first post before moving on to the second. Links in both posts provide useful background information about the law and controversy regarding its application to Kennewick Man.

As part of an agreement with the Tesuque Pueblo which claims cultural affinity to the recently discovered pueblo, city officials closed the excavations to public viewing and retained artifacts without study or consultation with archaeologists.

Now, the city has taken one more clandestine step; seeking to rebury the artifacts without systematic study or analysis. This peculiar, and probably illegal, procedure is reported by The Santa Fe NewMexican.

To help put their findings in context, there is a helpful summary of prior research on About.com's archeology page.

New dating of Clovis sites is even more interesting. The revised dates between--13,050 to 12,800 years before present--suggest that the culture was more ephemeral than previously believed. Whereas earlier work had suggested that Clovis spanned roughly 500 years, the revised dates roughly halve that figure and push back the dates for the Archaic era.

The first article recounts recent news stories about the collapse of an ancient lake in North America. Dubbed  "Lake Anasazi," the lake collapsed about 8,200 years BP and dumped millions of gallons of cold water into the North Atlantic. The result was a major cooling epoch that significantly altered the climate and roughly bounds the transition from Paleo-Indian to Archaic eras.

The second article summarizes recent debates about Kennewick Man and proposed changes to the Native American Protection and Repatriation Act.

Links to additional information are included with each story.

The account is a helpful introduction to the site and includes links to more detailed discussions.

A less formal summary of the study can be found on the Fox News web site. Chapter One of The Anasazi Guide includes background that will help you put this research in context. 

The article is a brief introduction to the site and you can find more information on the Center for Desert Archeology's "Visiting Places of the Past" page.

1. Migrants from Asia paused in Beringia--a now submerged land mass between Siberia and North America--long enough for mutations to distinguish them from the founding Asian populations, and 
2. Once the migrants entered the new world, the population spread rapidly resulting in relatively little genetic diversity in North and South America.

For more information about Mesa Verde, see Chapters 9 and 13 of The Anasazi Guide.

For more information about Chaco Canyon, see Chapters 9 and 10 of The Anasazi Guide.

For more information about Canhyons of the Ancients, see Chapters 9 and 14 of The Anasazi Guide.

The paucity of news is due to timing of the archaeological field season. In the spring, sites are being opened--or reopened--and many news releases describe the sites and explain excavators' anticipations. During the summer, news releases report important findings that confirm or alter researchers' expectations as well as their implications for theories and interpretations.

News releases taper off with the changing seasons, and the fall is a "slow" season. Researchers are closing sites for the winter and will soon begin the hard work of analyzing finds and composing formal reports. This work is less sexy than excavation, but it builds the knowledge base on which new theories and interpretations rely.

Don't despair. By the end of November, news releases will begin to flow again and you can expect a deluge beginning in January.

While staunchly defended by some, the Clovis Barrier has been called into question by  finds which appear to be older. These pre-clovis finds suggest that earlier migrtions may have taken place, primarily by seaborn hunters working along the coast. A recent article in Times Colonist  summarizes evidence supporting this alternative theory and reports on efforts to locate an early campsite  underwater off the Queen Charlotte Islands.

A more complete summary reads as follows: "The early development of agriculture in the New World has been assumed to involve early farming in settlements in the Andes, but the record has been sparse. Peanut (Arachis sp.), squash (Cucurbita moschata), and cotton (Gossypium barbadense) macrofossils were excavated from archaeological sites on the western slopes of the northern Peruvian Andes. Direct radiocarbon dating indicated that these plants grew between 9240 and 5500 14C years before the present. These and other plants were recovered from multiple locations in a tropical dry forest valley, including household clusters, permanent architectural structures, garden plots, irrigation canals, hoes, and storage structures. These data provide evidence for early use of peanut and squash in the human diet and of cotton for industrial purposes and indicate that horticultural economies in parts of the Andes took root by about 10,000 years ago."

And, Nature.com has added a nice summary with the title  Ancient seeds reveal Andean crops.

Childs' version of Four Corners prehistory, already praised as a popular text, is best read as a nice if overly long travelogue. As revisionist theory prompting further study, it's timely, but the book's intended audience means the prose is often vague, the ideas oversimplified or unsupported and the agenda's emphasis on violence too biased to credit wholeheartedly. 

© Eric Skopec, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010