Interesting -
We have heard from local members expressing concern
We have heard from non-members from Mesquite, Nev., Colorado, and Washington.
BUT WE HAVE NOT HEARD from the BLM. Do they care? Are they really protecting our cultural assets or just giving lip service?
Tell us your experiences with subjects like this and the BLM. Does the response vary from office-to-office or are all offices terrible in trying to accept help? I will try to communicate with Nevada enforcement and see if we can get some help.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Damage at Mud Wash, Gold Butte, Nevada
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The following was submitted to the Las Vegas BLM office today:
COALITION TO PRESERVE ROCK ART
To: BLM, Las Vegas Office, Nevada November 22, 2008
This brief report is provided for your review.
The Mud Wash Panel located in the Gold Butte area of Southern Nevada is a very nice panel located high on a bluff. It is hard to see how somebody might have gotten close to the petroglyph panel, but they did.
This is a photograph of the panel in 2008:
A picture taken on November 8, 2009 shows a big white marking that was not there previously. The questions that we all ask are:
How did the white marking get there?
Who did it and why?
It is a surprise to see damage to a panel this high but we felt that it should be reported. Your local site steward may have already reported the damage.
We trust that you are as concerned about damage such as this and share the common interest of preservation as the Coalition to Preserve Rock Art does.
We would appreciate your response that:
a: You received this report and either plan to take action or do not plan to do so.
b: The damage has been reported to Nevada BLM Law Enforcement
c: We also want to provide information to our membership on the progress of the investigation, so we would appreciate information from you regarding same.
It is evident that when the BLM and organizations such as the Coalition to Preserve Rock Art work together, we can be more effective, so we appreciate your support and involvement.
If you want any additional information, please contact us at exploringrockart@gmail.com or Jon Gum at 435-627-1086.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Petroglyph National Park
Article includes a couple of comments regarding damage by humans.
Posted on Sun, Feb. 15, 2009
New Mexico's Petroglyph National Monument showcases more than 20,000 remarkable images from the past
Special to the Star-Telegram
Related Content
The petroglyphs have survived hundreds and, in some cases, possibly thousands, of years. But spray-paint 'tagging’ and gunfire have taken a toll. Special to the Star-Telegram/Ed Timms
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ALBUQUERQUE — Suburbia is on one side of the street, traces of an ancient people on the other.
But it’s easy to forget the 21st century within Petroglyph National Monument, which is home to more than 20,000 images pecked into dark boulders by the ancient ancestors of today’s American Indians, Spanish settlers and later visitors.
Trails wind through desert scrub and the remnants of massive lava flows. And seemingly every few feet, there are remarkable images and symbols chiseled into dark basalt boulders.
As the sun rises and sets, the boulders are cast in different hues, from chocolate brown to reddish orange. Light and shadow play tricks with the petroglyphs; walk along the same trail twice and you’re likely to see images that you missed before.
Diane Souder, chief of interpretation and outreach at the monument, recalls telling one visitor about the more than 3,000 petroglyphs in its Rinconada Canyon section.
"He came back and said, 'I only saw 728,’ " she said. "The reality is, the Pueblo people say the images choose when, and to whom, to reveal themselves. Sometimes you walk right by them."
Some of the images are easy to identify: handprints and footprints, birds, deer and snakes. Others appear to morph different animals together, or humans and animals.
There are images that appear to be masks or tribal clan symbols. And the meaning of some images is lost to time.
Although some of the petroglyphs may be much older, archaeologists believe that most were created from the 1300s into the 1600s. The Rio Grande is not far away, and a prolonged drought may have encouraged migration into the region.
Some people may confuse petroglyphs, which are images or designs that are pecked, chiseled or carved into rock surfaces, with pictographs, which are images or designs that are painted onto rock surfaces.
Spanish colonists later added their own symbols, including Christian crosses, livestock brands and images of sheep. With a little imagination, it’s not hard to visualize a bored shepherd passing the time by leaving his mark on the rocks.
It took geology a long time to create a rock surface ideal for petroglyphs, beginning with a series of volcanic eruptions about 150,000 years ago.
Rangers at the monument explain that the lava flowed through old arroyos and around hills, and then hardened. Over time, the hills and walls of the arroyos eroded, and the old lava flows became the dominant topography. And as the soil under the lava flows eroded, large basalt boulders began to break away.
Exposure to the elements darkened the surface of the boulders. That created a blank canvas of sorts for an ancient people, who discovered that pecking it away with a rock revealed the lighter-colored surface underneath. With successive generations, the number and variety of petroglyphs grew into a remarkable outdoor gallery of images that reflected their spirituality and creativity.
Others have added less welcome marks. Some of the petroglyphs are pocked by gunfire. And "taggers" occasionally have spray-painted scrawls on some of the boulders, which at least can be cleaned.
Despite the proximity to suburbia, Petroglyph National Monument remains a desert environment.
The trail in Rinconada Canyon, for example, passes through classic desert scrub: sage, saltbush, cactuses, snakeweed and other desert plants.
A roadrunner or jackrabbit may dart from the brush. A hint of movement behind distant sagebrush may be a furtive coyote. Hawks and vultures ride the air currents overhead. And in warmer, wetter months, millipedes are a common sight.
Rattlesnakes may rarely be seen, but they’re at home amid the boulders, another good reason to honor the park rangers’ admonition to stay on the trails.
There are other sites in relative proximity for North Texans to visit as well: A variety of pictographs have been discovered in Big Bend Ranch State Park, southeast of Presidio; Hueco Tanks State Historic Site, 32 miles northeast of El Paso, features pictographs and petroglyphs of human and animal figures and more than 200 face designs or masks; and more than 21,000 petroglyphs are carved into rocks across 50 acres at Three Rivers Petroglyph Site in southern New Mexico.
If you go
What you see: Petroglyph National Monument features more than 20,000 images and symbols pecked into the basalt boulders of ancient lava flows. Most were created 400 to 700 years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians and other American Indians, but some of the images may be 2,000 to 3,000 years old. The monument is jointly operated by the National Park Service and the city of Albuquerque.
What you see: Petroglyph National Monument features more than 20,000 images and symbols pecked into the basalt boulders of ancient lava flows. Most were created 400 to 700 years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians and other American Indians, but some of the images may be 2,000 to 3,000 years old. The monument is jointly operated by the National Park Service and the city of Albuquerque.
Getting there: Petroglyph National Monument is on the west side of Albuquerque. From Interstate 40, take the Unser Boulevard exit (154) and drive north three miles to Western Trail. Turn west onto Western Trail and follow the road to the visitor center.
Areas to visit:
Rinconada Canyon: More than 3,000 petroglyphs have been pecked into basalt boulders in the canyon. Visitors can view the petroglyphs from a dirt trail that goes to the head of the canyon and back. Southwest of the visitor center.
Boca Negra Canyon: The most frequently visited portion of the monument, it features a variety of petroglyphs along three relatively short trails. Boca Negra overlooks a residential neighborhood. Northeast of the visitor center.
Piedras Marcadas Canyon: An undeveloped trail takes visitors along the base of a basalt escarpment and many petroglyphs. Development has almost surrounded this section of the monument, but it still has the feel of a remote desert. At the northern end of the monument.
Volcanoes Day Use Area: Hikers can see extinct volcanoes close up and get great views of the Rio Grande Valley, Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains. On the monument’s western edge.
Admission: The fee for parking at Boca Negra Canyon, charged by the city of Albuquerque, is $1 on weekdays and $2 on weekends. National Park Service passes are honored.
Hours: Hours are not restricted on most of the trails within the monument, although gates to the parking areas may be closed. The visitor center and Boca Negra Canyon are open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed on New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. The visitor center typically closes at 2 p.m. the day before Thanksgiving and on Christmas Eve.
For more info: Call park information: 505-899-0205, ext. 331, or visit www.nps.gov/petr.
Sources: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service
Chaco Canyon - Anasazi and Sinagua
And extremely interesting and werll written article from Gambler's World
Aftermath: Sinagua
February 12, 2009 by teofilo
Peñasco Blanco Framing Huerfano Mesa
One piece of data that sometimes gets mentioned in support of more hierarchical models of Chacoan social organization is the diversity of sizes found among Chacoan great houses both inside and outside the canyon. The idea behind this argument is that the great houses fall into a few rough groups based on size, with the number of great houses increasing as the size decreases, which suggests that they were all organized into a coherent, hierarchical system with the largest ones (mostly in the canyon) at the top and the others playing subordinate roles. One conclusion that follows from this interpretation is that the entire Chacoan system was a single highly organized polity with a central leadership at Chaco. Given this type of organization, it is natural to further conclude that that central leadership was composed of a socioeconomic elite with political power over the other people in the system.
While I’m by no means opposed in principle to the idea of a hierarchical Chaco, I’ve never found this particular argument for it very convincing. A hierarchical social system is certainly one possible source for a hierarchical settlement pattern, but it’s by no means the only one; I can think of several other possible ways such a pattern could emerge just off the top of my head. Recent scholarship on Chaco, in fact, has largely turned away from the idea of Chaco as a single, centralized polity, with the idea of a collection of loosely connected separate polities being more popular now and supported by a variety of lines of evidence (some more convincing than others). Even within this trend toward decentralized interpretations there are varying opinions about social hierarchy, which is actually a separate issue that is often conflated with centralization. I’ll have more to say on that in later posts. Here, my main concern is with the idea that settlement hierarchies serve as evidence for social stratification and regional integration.
Casa Chiquita
Chaco is not the only part of the ancient southwest where this argument has been used. Another, the subject of Peter Pilles’s chapter 5 of The Prehistoric Pueblo World, is the Sinagua, who occupied the area that is now north-central Arizona around the modern towns of Flagstaff, Sedona, and Camp Verde. While Pilles stops short of actually endorsing the argument that Sinagua settlement patterns indicate social hierarchy, he does discuss it at the end of the chapter. First, however, he gives a useful overview of Sinagua settlement patterns, focusing on the period that is the main focus of the book as a whole, the “Pueblo III” period from approximately 1150 through 1350.
As Pilles points out at the beginning of the chapter, however, Sinagua archaeology tends to use a different system of chronology from the Pecos system in which “Pueblo III” covers this period. Sinagua archaeology is distinctive in several ways from the traditional approach used in the Anasazi area, both because of clear cultural differences between the Sinagua and the Anasazi and because of the pivotal role played by the Museum of Northern Arizona in early research on the Sinagua. (MNA was, and remains, active in Anasazi research as well, particularly in the Kayenta area, but other institutions have always been prominent in Anasazi studies as well and it never played the dominant role there that it has for the Sinagua.) As a result, Sinagua chronology is based on a system of “phases” which correspond only roughly to the “periods” of the Pecos system.
Vent at Hungo Pavi
To make things even more complicated, there are actually two series of Sinagua phases, one for each of the major regional areas of Sinagua settlement. The northern area, encompassing the Flagstaff, Wupatki, and Anderson Mesa subareas, has one series of phases, while the rather different southern area, basically the Verde Valley and the nearby uplands and tributaries of the Verde River, has another. The northern Elden and Turkey Hill phases correspond roughly to Pueblo III, as does the southern Honanki phase.
In addition, chronology in the Sinagua region is considerably cruder than in the various Anasazi regions. The main reasons for this are a relatively small amount of excavation, resulting in few tree-ring dates, and the inconvenient fact that Sinagua pottery shows little variation over time, meaning that, unlike in the Anasazi case, pottery assemblages are of limited usefulness in making chronological placements of unexcavated sites. The main tool for such placement is, therefore, Anasazi pottery imported into Sinagua sites. Since this is not always present in large enough numbers for reliable sampling, Sinagua sites cannot always be dated at all, and even when they can be the chronological control is pretty crude by Anasazi standards. This leads to some problems, as we will see when we return below to the settlement hierarchy question.
Drainage Path over Slickrock
The name “Sinagua” comes from the Spanish for “without water,” originally applied to the San Francisco Peaks, which the early Spanish explorers found surprisingly dry for such large mountains. This is indeed a dry area, so water sources were always a key factor in settlement patterns. In the northern Sinagua area, the main water sources were isolated springs, while in the south the permanently flowing Verde River was the main source. This resulted in very different patterns of settlement locations in the two areas. In general, northern sites (or clusters of sites) were more isolated from each other, while southern sites were lined up in a row along the river, though the specifics varied over time.
The main reason for that variation also seems to have been water-related. The amount of moisture available varied over time, and in wetter times people expanded into areas that had been too unproductive to farm during dry years, only to retreat back to better-watered areas when the dry years returned. This pattern is visible all over the southwest over the course of the centuries, although from the way Pilles tells it the Sinagua area seems to have been oddly out of sync with other regions. In most of the southwest the wettest time was the Pueblo II period, from roughly 900 through 1150, and this is when most of the Anasazi regions saw their greatest extension (most notably, but by no means only, the Chaco Phenomenon). For the Sinagua, however, this seems to have been a relatively dry period and a time of settlement locations in areas with more reliable water supplies. In the north, this meant the higher elevations near the Peaks, while in the south it meant lowland locations closer to the river. A pattern of small sites surrounding a larger site seems to be present at this time in both areas, and these apparent communities often had either a large communal pithouse or a Hohokam-style ballcourt, either of which would have presumably served to integrate the community. Although there was some masonry construction at this time, the older pithouse form was still predominant, with northern (and southern upland) sites having large pithouses with ramp entry and southern lowland sites having more of a variety of designs, with some similar to Hohokam pithouses. There was clearly a certain amount of Hohokam cultural influence during this period, but Pilles argues against previous interpretations that saw cultural changes as being due mostly to Hohokam immigration.
It is during the following Elden and Honanki phases, after 1150, that the Sinagua reached their greatest geographic extent and cultural florescence. Pilles attributes the substantial growth during this time to favorable climatic change, which is an interesting and potentially important contrast to the deteriorating climate and resulting cultural changes in the Anasazi region at the same time. With the wetter conditions they experienced, the Sinagua expanded into lower elevations in the north and higher elevations in the south. There were a wide variety of site types, ranging from very common small pueblos to larger habitation sites with various layouts. None of these, however, were very large compared to Anasazi sites, especially at this time, though some of them grew considerably larger in subsequent phases after 1300. Almost all of the larger sites before 1300 are in the Flagstaff and Wupatki areas rather than the south.
Fajada Butte from Una Vida
Pilles identifies four types of large sites, although the numbers for some are so small that I’m a little dubious about some of these assignments. In any case, they are:
Massed room block pueblos: by far the most common; basically just large blocks of rooms that generally seem to have grown gradually, with rooms being added on as necessity dictated.
Plaza-oriented pueblos: roomblocks arranged around a central plaza; these are not very common and are found mainly on the fringes of the Sinagua area, near the neighboring Anasazi and Salado regions where these layouts are more common.
Courtyard-oriented pueblos: also rare, but these are distinctively Sinagua and seem to have played some sort of important role regionally; they have courtyards defined by walls, generally two of them with room blocks inside the inner one.
Clustered room block pueblos: basically just multiple room blocks in close proximity; only three of these, two of which are in the Verde Valley.
In addition to the various types of masonry structures, pithouses and cave dwellings known as “cavates” were also common at this time. These are sometimes clustered into apparent communities that would have held populations comparable to those of the larger masonry pueblos.
After reviewing these site types, Pilles concludes that the preferred type of habitation at this time was a small masonry pueblo of 5 to 20 rooms. Smaller and larger sites are present as well, but they seem to have served special purposes which remain somewhat obscure. These are all much smaller than typical Anasazi sites in room count, but it is important to note that Sinagua rooms are typically significantly larger than Anasazi rooms, probably because the Sinagua, unlike the Anasazi, rarely had separate rooms for storage. Large numbers of storage jars are often found in excavated Sinagua habitation rooms. Still, even when this is taken into account, Sinagua sites are generally much smaller than contemporaneous Anasazi sites.
As for the patterns of these sites and their locations at this point, Pilles notes that overall there seems to be a mix of isolated large sites, isolated small sites, and clustered small sites. This is clearer in the north than in the Verde Valley, where sites are strung out along the river and larger sites are sometimes in close proximity to each other. Still, throughout the region there seems to be a mix of dispersed and aggregated settlements.
This is… odd. It’s much more typical to find the same type of settlement distribution across a region, particularly a small one like this. Pilles suggests two main possibilities for explaining this distribution.
Petroglyph Panel Showing What Appears to Be a Mountain Lion
The first is that the dispersed and aggregated communities aren’t really contemporary. As I mentioned above, temporal control for Sinagua sites, especially those known only through survey (which is almost all of them), is considerably weaker than for Anasazi sites, so what we may be looking at here is a process of rapid aggregation, with the dispersed small sites having been occupied for only a short time before the communities aggregated into large pueblos. The time frame under discussion here is somewhere in the range of 100 to 200 years, so a process of aggregation like this would have been very rapid, but when compared with the better-dated Ansazi sites of this period, many of which do indeed show clear evidence of very rapid aggregation apparently in response to increased warfare, it seems pretty plausible. Pilles stops short of endorsing this interpretation, which is understandable given the limited data, but he does present it favorably.
The second possibility, which Pilles also considers at length without ultimately passing judgment on, is that the different site types and distributions indicate a hierarchical regional system. (And here we get back to the issue we started with.) The idea here is that the large aggregated pueblos existed at the same time as the small dispersed pueblos, which were in some sort of subordinate relationship to them. If this was the case, the different sizes of sites could reflect different levels of a hierarchical society. The different site layouts could also reflect this, although since most of them are only present in a very small number of large sites and some seem to reflect outside influence this piece of evidence is considerably weaker than the size differences. Pilles also mentions burial data that has been interpreted as showing a change during the early Elden phase from a “limited stratified society” to a hierarchical chiefdom.
Within a postulated regional hierarchy, the courtyard pueblos seem to be the best candidates for regional centers. Pilles lists a whole series of characteristics that suggest this: locations on prominent hilltops or ridges along probable trade routes, greater numbers of luxury and trade goods, associated public architecture such as large pithouses and ballcourts, and the courtyards themselves. Not all of the courtyard sites have all of these attributes, however, and since there are so few of them the relevance of the list of attributes seems just a little questionable.
Burial data known from the courtyard sites also suggest some form of stratification. The most famous example is the “magician” burial at Ridge Ruin, which had a surprisingly extensive collection of valuable grave goods associated with an older man. To try to understand this rich burial at what seemed like a fairly small and unimpressive site, the excavators consulted some Hopis, who concluded from the evidence that the man had been a high-ranking member of a society, effectively a war chief. Since the Sinagua were one of the many groups that eventually immigrated to Hopi and contributed to the developing society there, the Hopis’ interpretation carries particular weight in this context. Pilles mentions other rich burials as well, and notes that they are generally of older men, which he contrasts with the Anasazi tendency for the richest burials to be of older women. I’m not sure where he got that last part, since the richest Anasazi burials I know of, at Pueblo Bonito, are definitely of older men. Something to look into, certainly.
Kiva A at Pueblo Bonito from Above
Pilles also mentions the presence of community integrative architecture and the persistence of community locations over time as evidence for stratification, which I don’t really see. It’s quite possible for egalitarian societies to stay in one place for centuries and build communal buildings. Pilles doesn’t offer any additional reasons to believe it suggests hierarchy in this particular case.
Of all this evidence offered for hierarchy, I think the burial data is the most convincing, although the general lack of excavation means that it is rather more limited than would be preferable. It’s clear that something interesting was going on in the Sinagua area, which seems to have been something of a frontier zone where influences from various directions met and combined in ways that we now have trouble understanding. I’m not really convinced that social hierarchy was a major aspect of the resulting mix, but I’m not convinced that it wasn’t either. I do, however, find the “rapid aggregation” theory more plausible than the “social hierarchy” theory for explaining the narrow matter of the mixed settlement pattern.
Few (though not quite no) archaeologists seriously argue that there was any significant direct connection between Chaco and the Sinagua, but the parallels are interesting for both the similarities and the differences that they reveal. I don’t have any clear thoughts about the implications of those comparisons, but they certainly merit further study.
Aftermath: Sinagua
February 12, 2009 by teofilo
Peñasco Blanco Framing Huerfano Mesa
One piece of data that sometimes gets mentioned in support of more hierarchical models of Chacoan social organization is the diversity of sizes found among Chacoan great houses both inside and outside the canyon. The idea behind this argument is that the great houses fall into a few rough groups based on size, with the number of great houses increasing as the size decreases, which suggests that they were all organized into a coherent, hierarchical system with the largest ones (mostly in the canyon) at the top and the others playing subordinate roles. One conclusion that follows from this interpretation is that the entire Chacoan system was a single highly organized polity with a central leadership at Chaco. Given this type of organization, it is natural to further conclude that that central leadership was composed of a socioeconomic elite with political power over the other people in the system.
While I’m by no means opposed in principle to the idea of a hierarchical Chaco, I’ve never found this particular argument for it very convincing. A hierarchical social system is certainly one possible source for a hierarchical settlement pattern, but it’s by no means the only one; I can think of several other possible ways such a pattern could emerge just off the top of my head. Recent scholarship on Chaco, in fact, has largely turned away from the idea of Chaco as a single, centralized polity, with the idea of a collection of loosely connected separate polities being more popular now and supported by a variety of lines of evidence (some more convincing than others). Even within this trend toward decentralized interpretations there are varying opinions about social hierarchy, which is actually a separate issue that is often conflated with centralization. I’ll have more to say on that in later posts. Here, my main concern is with the idea that settlement hierarchies serve as evidence for social stratification and regional integration.
Casa Chiquita
Chaco is not the only part of the ancient southwest where this argument has been used. Another, the subject of Peter Pilles’s chapter 5 of The Prehistoric Pueblo World, is the Sinagua, who occupied the area that is now north-central Arizona around the modern towns of Flagstaff, Sedona, and Camp Verde. While Pilles stops short of actually endorsing the argument that Sinagua settlement patterns indicate social hierarchy, he does discuss it at the end of the chapter. First, however, he gives a useful overview of Sinagua settlement patterns, focusing on the period that is the main focus of the book as a whole, the “Pueblo III” period from approximately 1150 through 1350.
As Pilles points out at the beginning of the chapter, however, Sinagua archaeology tends to use a different system of chronology from the Pecos system in which “Pueblo III” covers this period. Sinagua archaeology is distinctive in several ways from the traditional approach used in the Anasazi area, both because of clear cultural differences between the Sinagua and the Anasazi and because of the pivotal role played by the Museum of Northern Arizona in early research on the Sinagua. (MNA was, and remains, active in Anasazi research as well, particularly in the Kayenta area, but other institutions have always been prominent in Anasazi studies as well and it never played the dominant role there that it has for the Sinagua.) As a result, Sinagua chronology is based on a system of “phases” which correspond only roughly to the “periods” of the Pecos system.
Vent at Hungo Pavi
To make things even more complicated, there are actually two series of Sinagua phases, one for each of the major regional areas of Sinagua settlement. The northern area, encompassing the Flagstaff, Wupatki, and Anderson Mesa subareas, has one series of phases, while the rather different southern area, basically the Verde Valley and the nearby uplands and tributaries of the Verde River, has another. The northern Elden and Turkey Hill phases correspond roughly to Pueblo III, as does the southern Honanki phase.
In addition, chronology in the Sinagua region is considerably cruder than in the various Anasazi regions. The main reasons for this are a relatively small amount of excavation, resulting in few tree-ring dates, and the inconvenient fact that Sinagua pottery shows little variation over time, meaning that, unlike in the Anasazi case, pottery assemblages are of limited usefulness in making chronological placements of unexcavated sites. The main tool for such placement is, therefore, Anasazi pottery imported into Sinagua sites. Since this is not always present in large enough numbers for reliable sampling, Sinagua sites cannot always be dated at all, and even when they can be the chronological control is pretty crude by Anasazi standards. This leads to some problems, as we will see when we return below to the settlement hierarchy question.
Drainage Path over Slickrock
The name “Sinagua” comes from the Spanish for “without water,” originally applied to the San Francisco Peaks, which the early Spanish explorers found surprisingly dry for such large mountains. This is indeed a dry area, so water sources were always a key factor in settlement patterns. In the northern Sinagua area, the main water sources were isolated springs, while in the south the permanently flowing Verde River was the main source. This resulted in very different patterns of settlement locations in the two areas. In general, northern sites (or clusters of sites) were more isolated from each other, while southern sites were lined up in a row along the river, though the specifics varied over time.
The main reason for that variation also seems to have been water-related. The amount of moisture available varied over time, and in wetter times people expanded into areas that had been too unproductive to farm during dry years, only to retreat back to better-watered areas when the dry years returned. This pattern is visible all over the southwest over the course of the centuries, although from the way Pilles tells it the Sinagua area seems to have been oddly out of sync with other regions. In most of the southwest the wettest time was the Pueblo II period, from roughly 900 through 1150, and this is when most of the Anasazi regions saw their greatest extension (most notably, but by no means only, the Chaco Phenomenon). For the Sinagua, however, this seems to have been a relatively dry period and a time of settlement locations in areas with more reliable water supplies. In the north, this meant the higher elevations near the Peaks, while in the south it meant lowland locations closer to the river. A pattern of small sites surrounding a larger site seems to be present at this time in both areas, and these apparent communities often had either a large communal pithouse or a Hohokam-style ballcourt, either of which would have presumably served to integrate the community. Although there was some masonry construction at this time, the older pithouse form was still predominant, with northern (and southern upland) sites having large pithouses with ramp entry and southern lowland sites having more of a variety of designs, with some similar to Hohokam pithouses. There was clearly a certain amount of Hohokam cultural influence during this period, but Pilles argues against previous interpretations that saw cultural changes as being due mostly to Hohokam immigration.
It is during the following Elden and Honanki phases, after 1150, that the Sinagua reached their greatest geographic extent and cultural florescence. Pilles attributes the substantial growth during this time to favorable climatic change, which is an interesting and potentially important contrast to the deteriorating climate and resulting cultural changes in the Anasazi region at the same time. With the wetter conditions they experienced, the Sinagua expanded into lower elevations in the north and higher elevations in the south. There were a wide variety of site types, ranging from very common small pueblos to larger habitation sites with various layouts. None of these, however, were very large compared to Anasazi sites, especially at this time, though some of them grew considerably larger in subsequent phases after 1300. Almost all of the larger sites before 1300 are in the Flagstaff and Wupatki areas rather than the south.
Fajada Butte from Una Vida
Pilles identifies four types of large sites, although the numbers for some are so small that I’m a little dubious about some of these assignments. In any case, they are:
Massed room block pueblos: by far the most common; basically just large blocks of rooms that generally seem to have grown gradually, with rooms being added on as necessity dictated.
Plaza-oriented pueblos: roomblocks arranged around a central plaza; these are not very common and are found mainly on the fringes of the Sinagua area, near the neighboring Anasazi and Salado regions where these layouts are more common.
Courtyard-oriented pueblos: also rare, but these are distinctively Sinagua and seem to have played some sort of important role regionally; they have courtyards defined by walls, generally two of them with room blocks inside the inner one.
Clustered room block pueblos: basically just multiple room blocks in close proximity; only three of these, two of which are in the Verde Valley.
In addition to the various types of masonry structures, pithouses and cave dwellings known as “cavates” were also common at this time. These are sometimes clustered into apparent communities that would have held populations comparable to those of the larger masonry pueblos.
After reviewing these site types, Pilles concludes that the preferred type of habitation at this time was a small masonry pueblo of 5 to 20 rooms. Smaller and larger sites are present as well, but they seem to have served special purposes which remain somewhat obscure. These are all much smaller than typical Anasazi sites in room count, but it is important to note that Sinagua rooms are typically significantly larger than Anasazi rooms, probably because the Sinagua, unlike the Anasazi, rarely had separate rooms for storage. Large numbers of storage jars are often found in excavated Sinagua habitation rooms. Still, even when this is taken into account, Sinagua sites are generally much smaller than contemporaneous Anasazi sites.
As for the patterns of these sites and their locations at this point, Pilles notes that overall there seems to be a mix of isolated large sites, isolated small sites, and clustered small sites. This is clearer in the north than in the Verde Valley, where sites are strung out along the river and larger sites are sometimes in close proximity to each other. Still, throughout the region there seems to be a mix of dispersed and aggregated settlements.
This is… odd. It’s much more typical to find the same type of settlement distribution across a region, particularly a small one like this. Pilles suggests two main possibilities for explaining this distribution.
Petroglyph Panel Showing What Appears to Be a Mountain Lion
The first is that the dispersed and aggregated communities aren’t really contemporary. As I mentioned above, temporal control for Sinagua sites, especially those known only through survey (which is almost all of them), is considerably weaker than for Anasazi sites, so what we may be looking at here is a process of rapid aggregation, with the dispersed small sites having been occupied for only a short time before the communities aggregated into large pueblos. The time frame under discussion here is somewhere in the range of 100 to 200 years, so a process of aggregation like this would have been very rapid, but when compared with the better-dated Ansazi sites of this period, many of which do indeed show clear evidence of very rapid aggregation apparently in response to increased warfare, it seems pretty plausible. Pilles stops short of endorsing this interpretation, which is understandable given the limited data, but he does present it favorably.
The second possibility, which Pilles also considers at length without ultimately passing judgment on, is that the different site types and distributions indicate a hierarchical regional system. (And here we get back to the issue we started with.) The idea here is that the large aggregated pueblos existed at the same time as the small dispersed pueblos, which were in some sort of subordinate relationship to them. If this was the case, the different sizes of sites could reflect different levels of a hierarchical society. The different site layouts could also reflect this, although since most of them are only present in a very small number of large sites and some seem to reflect outside influence this piece of evidence is considerably weaker than the size differences. Pilles also mentions burial data that has been interpreted as showing a change during the early Elden phase from a “limited stratified society” to a hierarchical chiefdom.
Within a postulated regional hierarchy, the courtyard pueblos seem to be the best candidates for regional centers. Pilles lists a whole series of characteristics that suggest this: locations on prominent hilltops or ridges along probable trade routes, greater numbers of luxury and trade goods, associated public architecture such as large pithouses and ballcourts, and the courtyards themselves. Not all of the courtyard sites have all of these attributes, however, and since there are so few of them the relevance of the list of attributes seems just a little questionable.
Burial data known from the courtyard sites also suggest some form of stratification. The most famous example is the “magician” burial at Ridge Ruin, which had a surprisingly extensive collection of valuable grave goods associated with an older man. To try to understand this rich burial at what seemed like a fairly small and unimpressive site, the excavators consulted some Hopis, who concluded from the evidence that the man had been a high-ranking member of a society, effectively a war chief. Since the Sinagua were one of the many groups that eventually immigrated to Hopi and contributed to the developing society there, the Hopis’ interpretation carries particular weight in this context. Pilles mentions other rich burials as well, and notes that they are generally of older men, which he contrasts with the Anasazi tendency for the richest burials to be of older women. I’m not sure where he got that last part, since the richest Anasazi burials I know of, at Pueblo Bonito, are definitely of older men. Something to look into, certainly.
Kiva A at Pueblo Bonito from Above
Pilles also mentions the presence of community integrative architecture and the persistence of community locations over time as evidence for stratification, which I don’t really see. It’s quite possible for egalitarian societies to stay in one place for centuries and build communal buildings. Pilles doesn’t offer any additional reasons to believe it suggests hierarchy in this particular case.
Of all this evidence offered for hierarchy, I think the burial data is the most convincing, although the general lack of excavation means that it is rather more limited than would be preferable. It’s clear that something interesting was going on in the Sinagua area, which seems to have been something of a frontier zone where influences from various directions met and combined in ways that we now have trouble understanding. I’m not really convinced that social hierarchy was a major aspect of the resulting mix, but I’m not convinced that it wasn’t either. I do, however, find the “rapid aggregation” theory more plausible than the “social hierarchy” theory for explaining the narrow matter of the mixed settlement pattern.
Few (though not quite no) archaeologists seriously argue that there was any significant direct connection between Chaco and the Sinagua, but the parallels are interesting for both the similarities and the differences that they reveal. I don’t have any clear thoughts about the implications of those comparisons, but they certainly merit further study.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Recording of Petroglyph Park
WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2008
UCR gets grant to fund high-tech methods of classifying ancient artifacts
3:53 p.m. July 28, 2008
UCR gets grant to fund high-tech methods of classifying ancient artifacts
3:53 p.m. July 28, 2008
RIVERSIDE – Developing high-tech methods of recognizing and classifying ancient Native American artifacts will be the focus of a UC Riverside project financed by a National Science Foundation grant, it was announced Monday.
The NSF awarded the university $805,000 to cover three years of expenses connected with the project, officially titled “Tools to Mine and Index Trajectories of Physical Artifacts,” according to UCR.
UCR anthropology professor Sang Hee-Lee and UCR computer science and engineering professor Eamon Keogh will lead a team of researchers tasked with creating a program capable of quickly recognizing Indian artifacts by shape and quality.
University officials said the goal will be archiving data from one place to the next and seeing how it all compares.
“By taking advantage of recent advances in data-mining and indexing, a massive amount of useful information can potentially be extracted from the anthropological resources that abound in North America,” said Keogh.
Among the first challenges is documenting UCR's own collection of more than one million arrowheads, officials said. The roughly 20,000 petroglyphs in New Mexico's Petroglyph Park will also be recorded, according to UCR.
Keogh said building databases of early Native American images, beads and tools might yield clues about the development and spread of different cultural practices.
He cited the use of “spatiotemporal predicates” to solve unanswered questions, such as whether the curved style of an arrowhead found in Oklahoma indicates that the tool originated with the Caddo Indian Tribe and was later adopted by tribes farther south – 6,000 to 9,000 years ago.
The grant-funded research could also address some contemporary concerns, according to UCR. By archiving graffiti styles, law enforcement could use the UCR program to track the propagation of certain street gang “tags,” officials said.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/riverside/20080728-1553-ucrgrant.html
Nine Mile Canyon Temporarily Saved
This is very good news. As I understand it, the proposed drilling around National Parks and other proposed areas contained little, if any, protection for Archaeological assets.
Hold on
Judge puts brakes on land plans
Tribune Editorial
Updated: 01/23/2009 06:15:08 PM MST
Hold on
Judge puts brakes on land plans
Tribune Editorial
Updated: 01/23/2009 06:15:08 PM MST
To paraphrase an old adage, "Act in haste, repent at your leisure."
The Bureau of Land Management under former President George Bush acted quickly to sell drilling leases on some of Utah's most scenic and culturally precious lands before the administration left office Tuesday. In its haste to make a gift of the leases to extraction companies, the agency even ignored a warning from the Environmental Protection Agency.
But a court appears about to force the BLM to repent of its blatant disregard for its mission to protect Americans' special and irreplaceable lands.
A U.S. District Court judge just days before Bush's departure acted prudently to halt the controversial sale of leases on 77 parcels near Arches and Canyonlands national parks, at Desolation Canyon, Dinosaur National Monument, the ancient art "gallery" of Nine Mile Canyon and other wilderness-quality lands. U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina issued a temporary restraining order to block the sale until he rules on a lawsuit brought by conservation groups arguing that drilling in the disputed lands would do permanent environmental damage, fouling the air and scenic vistas and destroying the rock art.
The unusual weekend ruling, coming just days before President Barack Obama took the oath of office, will probably keep these parcels off the auction block for the foreseeable future and could have even more widespread consequences.
In granting the restraining order,
Urbina stated that the BLM had failed to properly consider how drilling could affect air quality on more than 103,000 acres of sensitive public lands.
The EPA had advised the BLM to analyze the potential impacts of oil and gas drilling on the 77 parcels in order to meet federal clean-air laws. But the BLM didn't have time for that. Its mandate from the Bush administration was to open as many acres of the West as possible to drilling before Jan. 20.
But now the BLM regional management plans released last year covering nearly all the public lands the agency manages in Utah are in question. The processes and analyses used to designate the disputed parcels are the same as those used to designate all-terrain-vehicle routes and areas for drilling in all six plans.
If Urbina ultimately rules this BLM lease sale illegal, the management plans may be next. The Obama administration could then redo the plans to better protect Utah's public lands.
Cold weather - Could it have affected the Anasazi?
Very interesting article concerning the Anasazi Migration.
An explanation for recent cold weather
Posted: Thursday, Jan 8th, 2009
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SAN LUIS VALLEY — While Al Gore and other like-minded politicians and environmentalists continued to warn the world that global warming is threatening to end civilization as we know it, winters in the Valley grew colder. And summer temperatures this year were below normal in many places, not just the Valley.
So what’s up?
A fierce debate among the scientific community has now resulted in some scientists questioning the global warming theory. In a recent article written Dec. 30 in Investor’s Business Daily, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.
Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models.
Imagine that. The experts predict an increase in temperature and instead we see a decrease.
The cause? Sunspot activity, which has steadily declined since 2000, according to scientific observation. While a new sunspot cycle began last year, and the beginning of each cycle usually is marked by an increase in sunspot activity, 2008 was “eerily quiet,” observers say. In August no sunspot activity was noted at all, something that has not happened since 1913. When the sunspot cycle is active, it is not unusual to see 100 sunspots per month.
Rather than warming, could earth actually be entering a cooling cycle? From studies of cyclic weather patterns in the past, a good number of scientists say this is exactly what is happening. They cite data gathered on “the Little Ice Age,” which records seem to indicate lasted from 1250 A.D. to about 1850 A.D.
Could this explain the sudden exodus of the Anasazi (Ancient Ones) from
The Little Ice Age significantly cooled climates in most parts of the world. Temperatures were the coldest in the 16th and 17th centuries, then began to rise in 1850. NOAA statistics show limited solar activity during the Little Ice Age, but a notable in activity in recent times.
During the Little Ice Age, temperatures averaged form 1-1.5 degrees cooler, Celsius, (2-3 degrees Fahrenheit), than temperatures experienced only a few years ago. Decreased solar activity accounted for some of the cooling, but large volcanic eruptions also accounted for the cooling
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