ASU Research E-Magazine: Digging for Clues to the Past

Science writer Chris Kahn is a graduate student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunication. He spent three weeks on location at dig sites in New Mexico with ASU archaeologists.

The daily winds which usually push across the 350,000-acre Ladder Ranch in eastern New Mexico are gone for the moment. It is 4:30 a.m. The only thing awake is a lonesome buffalo, which stands quietly munching the grass around base camp.

The sun is not up, but the day is about to start.

With a sudden flurry of zips, groggy archaeology students pull themselves out of their sleeping bags, then shuffle into the kitchen for breakfast. They eat quickly. By 5:30 a.m., they hop aboard trucks and rumble off to various research sites.

The students have been working the sites for three weeks, meticulously scraping back the hard packed dirt, deposited by hundreds of years of wind and rain. They dig toward the room’s floor, saving almost everything as they go.

Archaeological research is a time consuming, labor intensive process. It is a process that many archaeology professors, like ASU’s Margaret Nelson and Michelle Hegmon, expedite by offering a field school. In exchange for college credit and hands-on experience, the researchers can get archaeology students to help dig at the sites.

ASU field school students will live and work at the camp for five weeks during the summer. Although they have dealt with water shortages, brushfires, and persistent little gnats, most come away with a rich experience that they could never get in the classroom.

“It’s cool, I like it,” says Mark Bollack, an ASU undergraduate. “The most interesting thing is trying to piece together how these people (the Mimbres) lived. It kind of makes (the research) come alive.”

Fast forward to 10 a.m. At Avilas Canyon Village, field staffer Gavin McCullough and students Eric Cox and Greg Wolf chop chunks of sun-dried earth with pickaxes. They search intermittently for a slight change in the soil’s colorÐand indication of the room’s floor.

“We’re not sure if this is the actual floor,” Cox says between swings. “We haven’t seen a hearth yet, and there probably should be one around here.”

In a connecting room, Tiffany Clark has found her floor. Behind the site director, remnants of the room’s center post, hearth, and vent lay on the ground, left behind by someone more than 800 years before.

Melissa Paugh, a Penn State undergraduate, looks over Clark’s shoulder and spots a discoloration in the soil. Clark stabs at it with her trowel, cutting into what was once a small hole in the floor. Just above it, they make a discovery. From the alignment of wall stones, they notice that it could have supported a door between the rooms.

By 2 p.m., the diggers have returned to camp, bringing with them hundreds of artifacts. Sitting in circles, the students use old toothbrushes and pails of water to scrub the dirt off of chipped stone and pottery sherds.

They measure the size and shape of each pottery sherd. From its particular style, they will be able to tell when each piece was made, and where it came from. Chipped stone will be examined to find out what kind of tools the inhabitants used. Charcoal from burnt roofs will be analyzed with carbon 14 dating to determine when the room was abandoned. Flotation samples of the soil in the rooms will show what plant matter is present. Such information helps researchers determine what the inhabitants were eating.

Another day of research ends as the sun goes down. The infamous eastern Mimbres winds once again push across the hillside, bending the tents into precarious shapes as the students climb back into their sleeping bags. Tomorrow morning will come early.—Chris Kahn