Bill Lipe - Before Lake Powell / Memories of Glen Canyon

without further delay I'd like to present dr. William light well thanks very much for the invitation and thanks to all of you for showing up you know I'll start by can you hear me all right I have a really loud voice so I'm not sure I'm not sure how much of that amplification I need I can't hear very well but I'm still really loud maybe they go together well I'll start by putting in a plug for a new book by my colleague and friend Don Fowler this is the Glen Canyon country a personal memoir this is a 1958 field crew at the loper ruined in in the canyon this is me I just turned 23 years old I had two field seasons under my belt which was one more than anybody else in that group so I was a crew chief so that was my first really responsible job in archaeology this is dawn Fowler here in the white t-shirt so dawn was kind of he was still an undergraduate but he had some experience he was kind of second-in-command so I had the I had the big boat and four guys and we did the excavations and Don had the little boat and one guy and he would do the survey so anyway that's that's that first field career I worked for summers down there and this as was pointed out I wrote some several monographs out and then went back to graduate school in the fall of 1960 and finished up my dissertation based on Glen Canyon data so this is really all that what the canyon was like what the Glen Canyon country was like before the lake went in a little bit of the history of the lake itself formation of a lake and some of its consequences and then the archeology the the slides here are most almost all the slides are from the collections of pictures we made on the University Utah of Utah section of the Glen Canyon project the huge area the University of Utah had about 3/4 of the area to cover and the Museum of northern Arizona had about a quarter I worked for the the University of Utah portion and was able to get digitized versions of slides some of them I took some of them other people on my crew took some of them for other crews but mostly they're from the area I worked in they were similar sometimes some seasons there were several crews out so the slides are some of them are faded changed color they didn't get digitized in time so and I'm not a I'm not a Photoshop kind of guy you know so they're not they're not real good quality in some cases but they're the real thing you know these were the pictures we took while we were down there on the on the Glen Canyon project there's also a couple of video clips which have even deteriorated even more but I think you can see you can see you know what was going on there clips film taken 1959 and narrated by by Jesse Jennings by the way is is Gus Scott Beatty chance of this audience or Katie Lee Katie's over in Jerome Gus's and Prescott they're their real pioneers in the Glen Canyon they were down there in the early 50s I didn't get there till the late 50s is what well that's too bad it would have enjoyed seeing her and Gus Gus's took a lot of pictures down there and his pictures are a lot better than mine but these were these are archeology pictures so you know what do you expect there's a Glen Canyon Dam under construction about probably about 1960 and there's the river still flowing through a little bit of the history it's a controversial project the Sierra Club which was a very small organization at that time David Brower was the new executive director they were prime they were kind of a gentleman's outing club in California and some extent involved in environmental issues but nothing like they became as a result of the Colorado River controversies John Muir the founder of the club had been really hurt by the flooding of Hetch Hetchy up into Yosemite National Park and one of the principles of the Sierra Club was that they would fight the intrusion of dams and lakes into the national park system so there had been a proposal to build a dam up at on the Green River or yapen Green Echo Park that would flood part of Dinosaur National Monument so they fought that one pretty hard and evidently Brower who was and the Sierra Club leadership was concerned about Glen Canyon they didn't know too much about it and they didn't think they could do you know both things at once they didn't have the clout really to take on both of them so they essentially said if you don't flood water if you don't as long as the lake doesn't back up under Rainbow Bridge which it would at maximum a full pool we won't fight the Glen Canyon but we'll fight echo dam the Echo Park Dam and that was not built this is David Brower later years having second thoughts about the about the Glen Canyon Dam but that was the that was the that was the Battle of the day well Lake Powell is 186 miles long a 1900 mile shoreline I think that pending on how you measure it I you know the way my mind works if you if you measure it around each grain of sand there'd be a lot longer than that but they must have some general rule of thumb about what they measure but here's why here's Navajo Mountain here's the Escalante River here's the compare what's Plateau the waterpocket fold area and of course here's the San Juan River and Page Arizona is right down here at the at the dam site backs water all the way up to height really all the way up to the end of cataract Canyon so it's basically a water system project to stabilize the to level out the ups and downs of flow which are enormous and they call it our river system to store it for the lean years and let it flow in the in the heavy years supply some hydroelectric power plus there's a coal-fired generating station there at page as I'm sure most of you know that gets gets coal from over on Black Mesa which is thrown over there on a little train from from the area of Black Mesa anyway this was a really the most remote area in the lower 48 at the time it really had had some roads have been put in during the uranium exploration boom of the 1940s and 1950s but it was really a rugged hard to access remote area with very few people living there but now we have almost 2 million annual visit so it's changed the characters the quote from Ken sleight the old river Runner the heart of the whole Canyon country took the heart out of the whole thing because he like like many opposed the dam but of course it had it has lots of supporters as well including the people who get water and power and recreation up there of course the lake is named for John Wesley Powell one-armed Civil War veteran and a brilliant scientist and historian this is a illustration from later version publication of his journals so these are wooden boats they went down the whole length of the Colorado system with Powell sitting on a wooden chair on one of those boats if you can imagine you don't see the Grand Canyon on something like that but they made it several other people got discouraged and and climbed out of the Grand Canyon and were never we're never seen again but Powell and most of his crew made it all the way through Powell is the one who named the Glen Canyon you know he was going through a series of canyons so he had just come out of cataract Canyon into Glen and then marble canyon and then the Grand Canyon cataract was has enormous Rapids if you've been through cataract you're aware of that Glen is relatively calm you know no serious rapids on the on the whole stretch of the Glen Canyon then the rapids pick up again and marble canyon on the Grande in 1869 Powell his party were relieved to get out of cataract Canyon and kind of have a break where they were didn't have to fear for their lives so he writes past these towering monuments past these mounded billows of orange sandstone past these oak set Glen's past these firm decked alcoves past these mural curves we glide hour after hour here's a picture of a great big shelter on the river just after a storm with the water pouring over the lip Powell August 1869 so we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features carved walls royal arches Glen's alcove gulches mounds and monuments from which of these features shall we select a name we decide to call it Glen Canyon and that name has stuck so it's Lake Powell in Glen Canyon but people are still aware of of Glen Canyon Glen Canyon is surrounded by a true bald Rock wilderness this is the surface of the Navajo Sandstone which was laid down in the Mesozoic in a you know as a series of dune fields sand dunes and those are now being eroded out and you can see the hummocky character of it really owes some of its its characteristic to the to the dunes you have all kinds of cross beddings and slanted beds and so forth which is what you'd find if you cut into a sand dune today so that platform is below 4,000 feet in in many places so it's very it's about five inches of precip a year and it's relatively low vegetation that's the Henry mountains in the background those are on the west side of the upper part of the Glen over near Hanksville Utah there's several stages of down cutting that are shown in the topography of the canyon there's kind of an outer canyon that represents an earlier stage where the river was sort of flowing at at that level so as benches and so forth and then cliffs set fairly well back from the river and then there's an inner Canyon that during the last few million years come at a plateau was uplifted some more and the river cut its way down through it so the inner canyons narrow and some of the slot canyons that you see especially in the lower Glen below the San Juan represent tributaries that still haven't adjusted to that they still haven't broadened the lower parts of their drainage they're still very very narrow and very very steep and then you get above that the valleys open out we'll see some of that when we talk about forgotten Canyon close to the rivers I indicated both side canyons are very narrow and very deeply entrenched and there's a lot of water down there this is a tributary of Moki Canyon up near holes crossing if you've been out there there's a marina there here's a horse and a tree for scale and some alluvium but it's a very very deep highly entrenched very narrow canyon and Moki you get above that it broadens out quite a bit they indicated quite a bit of water the Navajo and Wingate formations at least in the main part of the Glen Canyon are the cliff formers and they are good aquifers so lots of Springs so this is mostly spring flow then of course after rains lots lots of water channels down those those narrow canyons but this is mostly spring flow here this is a waterfall at Lake Canyon where we took the occasional impromptu shower that's spring water you know so it's it's really nice really nice water out of the out of the Navajo some of the side canyons had deep deposits of recently in place silt that is recently over the last few thousand years alluvium water laid deposits that periodically build up and they get you know they steep in the gradient and then the stream cuts its way down the last cycle of Arroyo cutting was probably promoted by livestock coming into this country in the late 1890s early early 1900s this cutting took place about 1914 I think after a big storm but the in the prehistoric period the Pueblo people were farming on the the when the valley floor was at this level and there wasn't an Arroyo and there was a high groundwater and fairly favorable farming conditions very narrow shoestring patches of land but a lot of water and pretty good soil the 1950s you know people had you know there was mining in the canyons and the Gold Rush in the 1890s people cattlemen were down there now were coming in from the southeast portion of the area but in 1950s recreational ventures started in the Glen that's a great area for for people boating you know because it's there are any serious Rapids particularly after the Korean War the big pontoons became available and of course a lot of people did it on their own either in small rafts or in in wooden boats but you start to get entrepreneurs like this case Georgie white the famous River River person this raft says owner you can make it out says Georgie she would take several of these rafts with many people down the river and would take really would lash several his big pontoons together and take it down the ground so she was really a pioneer in in commercial river running and as I indicated lots of private parties as well some of the early river people who were out there in the early 50s this is boatman Frank Wright who worked with us a little bit Katie Lee whose author and songwriter who has a book called all my rivers are gone and she was down there in the early 50s and this is tad Nichols who's a photographer and I think he and he and he and Katie had gone to high school together and in Tucson something like that here's Georgie white who was the entrepreneur I ran the the big the big pontoons and this is Harry Allison I ran did long is owned and ran really did took really took small groups as a river guy and kind of an adventure and interesting guy and where's Ken sleight well Ken sleight was seldom seen in those days I don't know whether you get the illusion or not but he's thought to be the the model for seldom-seen Smith's and the monkey wrench gang he's still around in the in the Moab area couldn't find a picture of him from that period well lots of lots of small archaeological sites the area was really pretty unknown archaeologically there'd been a number of groups that had gone in there but they never produced much in the way of publications or reports so you know archaeological salvage was a response today we'd call it cultural resource management but this was this was before the legislation was passed that made it mandatory for federal agencies to pay attention to archaeological and historical and cultural sites so it's pretty much you had to negotiate these on your you know one at a time so this really required a salvage project really required agreement between the Bureau of Reclamation which was billing the dam the Park Service which was sort of administering the project and then Congress that had to come up with the money so several years on the project it was a real cliffhanger as to whether Congress was going to come up with the money so it's a it's a different and it was after everything had already been planned so we the the archaeology started at the same time the dam started so today project like this would start during the planning stage and there'd be money built into the project to take care of archaeological surveys and if necessary some excavations and so forth Jesse Jennings directed the project he was a professor at the University of Utah and quite a prominent figure in American archaeology at the time vindicated Museum of northern Arizona was involved field work 57 to 63 published the survey and excavation reports were promptly published between 57 and 66 and the museum collections and the field data continue to be used for research and education the collections are a good shape the Utah collections are at the Utah Museum of Natural History is indicated I went there and you know got copies of some of the slides and the collections are available for research and use and displays and so forth same thing at the Museum of northern Arizona so this will continue to be a resource for archaeology and education for for the near future the foreseeable future here's that photo again these were the days of guys in the field girls in the lab you know this is the 1950s that was that was probably the four women wanting to do archaeology that was probably the low point in the history it was it was harder for a woman to get a job running a field project at least in the southwest in the 1950s and it had been in the 1920s so explicitly Jennings only hired men boys really for for this project and I think he was probably he and he had worked where he had had female students on other projects they had run and in the Great Basin in the southwest I think he was probably probably correctly saw that if there had been a bad accident that involved a you know tender damsel you know a fragile young thing down there that the the media in in Salt Lake would have crucified him and the University of Utah and plus the idea of of sending young women down to live in tents with you know guys like this some of them even had beards you know I mean that befell that was that was pretty pretty scary so I think he just backed off and and really just didn't want to deal with it but it's it changed that changed very rapidly in the in the late 1960s so the field is has gained a substantial amount of gender balance since that time well logistics they'll talk a little bit about that this was a remote area it was hard to get to took a long time to get in there many cases by by by Jeep by boat and by foot occasionally used the horses so the crews I worked with eight 1958-1959 we worked in the main river canyon the lower parts of the side canyons anyway this is our trusty Jeep cab and our to Arkansas traveler flat-bottomed boats here's one of the access roads called the blue knots road here you can see a little bit of it winning its way down toward the river Cook went down to the mouth of red canyon came up from what's now highway 95 up over the top at Frey Canyon and down a number of miles to the river put in by uranium prospectors the blue knots road then from there we took our boats on down the river then Kenya didn't have any Rapids but lots of sand and gravel bars you see up in northern Arizona actually hired J Frank Wright who was an experienced boatman to run boats for him but Jenni's thought you know that it would be it would be a lot cheaper just to bias a bunch of propellers and shear pins you know so we went through a lot of we had a lot of sand bars and gravel bars and replaced a lot of propellers and shear pins this is this is yours truly here replacing a propeller on one of our one of our out boards we had we got out some lessons from Frank about reading the channel and trying to avoid the sandbars but we needed the quite a few more than we got there's a field camp Jennings also thought that it didn't hardly ever rain down there so really didn't need everybody to have a temp it was hot we could sleep out so we had a tip for the kitchen the food and another tent for the notes and the artifacts we went in a town every two weeks and resupplied for food and we would take our artifacts and notes copies of notes in and send them off to the back to the University of Utah he was very concerned that those materials get out of the field as soon as possible and in case we got all got swept away by a flash flood or something and I get back to the you know and so the lab could get started processing got started process and our goal was to try to get a report written over the winter and have it done by the time the next field season went around of course in those days it was thought that you're going to have an archaeological project it was going to be done by an academic institution and students were going to do most of the work and therefore it need to be done in the summer so today you know project like this would be done probably by an environmental consulting firm they would definitely not do most of their field work in the middle of the summer when it's a hundred and ten degrees every day down there but we were there in the summer because we were working on the academic schedule 60 of 61 we worked some of these canyons that were going to be flooded we're pretty long and so so for a couple summers we worked in a couple of the longer canyons coming in from the upper parts this is looking down into Moki Canyon which winds its way on down here this is probably the waterpocket fold on the other side of the river you see a few trees down there but it's actually with some agriculture going on down there prehistorically I'll show you a few shots there falling sand dunes here sand blowing across this bald rock platform and the dunes tumbling into the canyon that was our access in and out down falling up and down a falling sand dune this is those two years to move equipment a camp the artifacts notes everything moves stuff around we hired a packer from Blandings as Brigham Stevens from Blanding this is a trail up the falling sand dune that was in and out of upper Moki Canyon and then we would move our camp on downstream and Moki from there crew would we did not we did not ride horses we walk but the horses were available for moving bulky stuff this is uh you know didn't have television down there in those days or cell phones or anything so whatever into entertainment so I was watching occasional flash floods you know go past the camp this is in our camp right up on this right up on this bench right here so this in the late summer occasionally you get a thunderstorm and these these candidates have huge drainage basins so they catch whatever falls are very little vegetation to slow it down so that can funnel a lot of water into the canyon pretty pretty quickly well finally getting to the archeology here with a lot to do a lot of small sites some we we did a better job on than others but it was a pretty good project as of the standards of the day it would be a much more intensity project today so this is a site on a bench above a canyon and mochi some rock art here and there were some structures pueblo structures on this top of this tailless here dryness preserved one of the one of the unique one of the interesting features of the glen was it was they got very little rainfall a lot of the sites in the canyons were in shelter and situations so they were there quite a few artifacts preserved by the dry conditions that you ordinarily wouldn't encounter of course you know as you know archaeologists 99.9 percent of what you deal with as an archaeologist is you know broken pieces apart and stone flakes and and that kind of thing you sell them fine complete artifacts but some of the video clips later on focus on a couple of complete artifacts but of course that's that's not the norm but there were some interesting dry artifacts there's just a few of them a a sickle that was used probably in the archaic period create your cultural period to made a mountain sheep horn to harvest grass seeds that you know help not grass seeds off into a basket and they were collecting very small seeds but in a big good patch of them large quantities here's one of the things they were doing down in the Glen was growing cotton it's warm it's hot enough down there to grow cotton and on the river bottom there's fairly high ground water so cotton needs a lot of heat and a lot of water you can't grow cotton up at Mesa Verde or in the high part of the of the surrounding areas where most of the Pueblo farmers live so one of the things these guys had I think is a little specialty is growing cotton and weaving cotton we found fairly substantial evidence of that they were weaving cotton cloth in the late period in ten hundreds eleven or twelve hundreds at some of these site yucca leaf sandals these are present throughout in various styles just made out of of twisted yucca leaves here's a knife handle the the blade of a knife has broken off but you can see the nice wood haft and this is set in a slot the knife blade stone knife blade is set in a flaw twith opinion pitch or some some adhesive it's an interesting cache here this dates probably from these probably both date from the prevalent as early as the ten hundred this one this is probably pueblo three from the twelve hundreds but this is a cache people were traveling through this area and they sometimes would hide things in caves and then you know either forget to come back for them or something to them for the cash this is a jar a style made west of the river it was full of flakes of salt the bowl on top of it and then a several bundles of basketry splints split sumac twigs that were used for basket trees so somebody was carrying that through the area and cashed it in a cave and never came back for it but the salt is interesting I have a colleague who's trying to assemble do chemical analyses of archaeological salt deposits from around the southwest to try to identify places where it came from and what the trade routes might have been some of the sites had levels dating as much as several thousand years BC back to the early archaic this is a site that had some late material some Pueblo period material toward the top and that's where that cache of jar that salt cache came from but also a very deep stratified deposit it's a little shelter here I think people were coming probably coming down we found other evidence that people were coming we're cooking we're roasting the the hearts of yucca plants I think they were coming down here in the spring when things were had turned green were growing earlier and when times were run out of food in the high country and they could get a little bit of sugar and sustenance by roasting the heart of yucca plan and getting the the tissue at the base of the leaves so we found several roasting pits of that sort but it was a dusty kind of a dusty site here's another one that we didn't do a very good job on this is a site that right on the river where the the shelter had been there been a seep in the back and a shelter had that had supported a heavy growth of vegetation oak brush and a rabbit brush of oak brush and sumac and so forth and a heavy man of vegetation had covered the the part of the archaeological deposit but we found on clearing that away that there was a living floor there when a retaining wall that clearly dated to the Pueblo period I think our estimated dates from the pottery were in the ten hundreds that you call Pueblo - period but then down below that was a stratified deposit and we you know we excavated it but unfortunately and we made collections from the lower deposit but unfortunately the project never spent any money on radiocarbon dating which is still a fairly new technique in the late 50s but it was already well known it you know radiocarbon dating became available about 1950 and this was 1958 so people were beginning to use it but if we'd done some radiocarbon of some of these lower levels we would realize we had an archaic deposit there we didn't find any distinctive projectile points or anything and we collected quite a bit of stuff and later an archaeologist named field guide who's a terrifically good archaeologist worked for the Park Service and we analyzed some of those old museum collection them dated some of it and found that in fact we had a significant early archaic occupation there before agriculture not a heavy occupation but people were definitely down there and we didn't we didn't do a very good job of that part of the record we did a little better with the early agricultural basket-maker to about 500 dates about probably a few hundred years BC to a few hundred years AD these guys don't have pottery they're still using darts and atlatl they don't have bow and arrow they don't have beans but they're growing a lot of corn and so it's a it's a early agricultural pre pottery occupation this is a site called bernheimer cave after a wealthy New York industrialist who used to take packed trips out here in the 1920s and dug a little bit and basically was just an explorer so we worked in that site and found a good basket-maker component as well as a later pueblo component some rock art that baits this these are classic basket maker rock art style figures here's another sort of faded bab and pictures but this is another basket maker to period site this is just a storage site it wasn't a living site it looked as if bernheimer people had actually lived here and there were some basket maker burials there and so forth but this was just a storage site where they they had a hard pan floor in the cave kind of a semi consolidated silt leftover from very early alluvium probably thousands of years ago and they dug these these cysts or holes there and stored things in them some of the cysts were pretty good-sized some of them were small there was still some of the stone covers that were there some of these were big enough to actually get into remember JD Dobbins was clearing out one of those he was down in it and he came across a about a 4-inch scorpion and came it was like missile silo he came up right right up out of there no no question yeah then he had we had we after that we had to make him sleep apart from the rest of the crew because he kept having nightmares about that welcome but anyway unfortunately for us probably fortunately for the vascular people they had taken whatever corn or other things they had stored there out before they left so there wasn't a lot there most of the sites were the from the Pueblo two and three periods this is the occupation out there was extremely sporadic people would be out there in substantial numbers for a few hundred years and then gone largely gone for hundreds of years so it's a very sporadic occupation but the Pueblo period was probably the heaviest period of occupation of course is later navajo some later navajo occupation and some historic gold mining and ranching and so focusing on the ancestral Pueblo sequence but this is not a blow two or three site this is bird lopers cabin this is that the Burt loper was a kind of a hermit did some farming at the mouth of red canyon and was a very early river runner who died later running the Grand Canyon and is in his 70s I think so he really followed through I don't think that's going to happen to me though so here's a site quite Club Pueblo site with some standing masonry quite close to Burt lopers cabin and naturally we called it Loper ruin so that's where the name comes from this is me working on a on a map this is Floyd sherek here clearing the floor you can see where the fill inside this little Pueblo it's a little Pueblo site several rooms the Kiva it's kind of a rock shelter below with some with some rooms in it you can see where the fill line was so that's been excavated I think there were two floors here the upper floor at a lower floor had been remodeled or something sent a couple of fire pits here's a big depression I think you can see it in that which we also trenched and you know as a Kiva big subterranean room that was a place that represents the emergence of Pueblo people from the underworld at this time it was part of the house whole complex I'm sure people cooked and lived there as well as worship there but it also had some ritual features but Powell and his journals recognize that as a probable Kiva his guys stopped there and they got their shovels out dug a little bit and says from what we know of the people and the problems of to see on that's the Hopi area we conclude that this was a Kiva which is quite a good observation at this time the people were calling these things as stupas you know like sweat baths and all kinds of stuff and did not make the connection with pueblos Kiva's but but powell had spent a lot of time on Hopi and you know recognize that right away it's alluvium I talked about earlier had buried some sites this stuff could build up quite rapidly as these floods came down the canyons in some cases that had built up people had built on a on a essentially on a floodplain which typically pebble people don't do but they built on a low bench something and then it had been swamped by the build-up of Aliyev's this was still building up at the time that that or shortly after people were living there and then it the Arroyo cut out again so here we're this is the top of the alluvium we're taking us down in steps getting close to this Kiva which we had spotted eroding out of the Arroyo wall so this is a top looking down onto the onto the Kiva and here's the here's the bottom of the canyon so all that alluvium had been cut out by the Arroyo exposing a little bit of this Kiva and of course exposing the fact that the alluvium had continued to come in after people had had built that thing and had lived there one of the things we found that in the more populous areas like lake canyon the communities were not real pueblos that is they were not compact settlements with lots of rooms built together people lived out along the canyon close to their fields this is one of the better farming areas up and down lake canyon they lived out close to their fields and real small very small settlements but they had community facilities this is a big gathering place a big walled area here with a fire pit in the center this is a one-room at one end of that but it wasn't they wasn't a residence it looks like a big Plaza and also at the same time this is probably in the 1200 there's a community storage place where a great many of these corrugated jars with sandstone lids and some big sunken storage cysts or pits masonry lined pits these are interesting interesting features this may indicate some type of seasonal use where they were storing things for when they came back in the spring and planted out there there's a defensive site that lacked habitation rooms also been used for drying squash it's just a wall of course in the 1200s warfare was rampant in the northern four corners area you guys have been involved in in mapping some defensive sites as well down in this area but even though the populations were very small out here they were they were scared of undoubtedly other Pueblo people we but we don't know whether they were their neighbors or bands that were coming in from outside the area but evidence of warfare here's an interesting site that's an irrigation site based on a tapping of spring you know place called the little red cone we call it the creeping dune site like a trench along here this is excavations in process here and you see the Henry mountains in the back these are not power lines those are scratches on the old slide this is a big tank masonry lying tank there's just a little spring there that they this is dry now but you can see from a few cottonwood trees that there was a seat there at the base of the cliffs running water down into this thing they had a drain here that they could plug somebody presumably effort filled up they'd send you know some young person down to pull the plug on that thing and let the water out and then they'd run water out into ditches in this sand well it's hard to keep water flowing down a ditch made in sin but they had a clever device they put sand stone slabs crosswise in the ditch with notches in them so instead of going around the side the water would run through the knotch and keep the keep the water flowing where they wanted it to so it was a very interesting thing there are lots of little cliff dwellings again this is 80 12 hundreds people are obviously scared I was scared too when I went up to if they were scared of they were scared of warfare people coming in rating and the the smaller the population in the canyon if there's only a couple of couple of families living in the canyon they those are the places you found the highest most defensible location so they're only a few site in this short little canyon and they're really in defensible location here's a couple of the robes up there one with still fragments of a roof and we found evidence that they were weaving cotton cloth up their loom anchors in the floor loom shown up on the beams now I've got a couple of film clips here that were made in 1959 and then digitized much later after the old film had started to deteriorate they're narrated by Jesse Jennings and Jennings in the film talks about that the Glen Canyon crew was the first where we were probably the first to visit this site defiance House some of you may have been there you can get to it from the river now the lake comes up under it we were probably the first there since the Indians had left we were there when we did our work there we were aware that somebody had been there there had been a note and I thought that Jessica Jennings had been told that but definitely haven't it hadn't but we didn't know who it was we didn't recognize the names but later on it became clear that some of these early River people Nate 1952 dick sprang duty Thomas and Harry Allison had been there and they were making systematic surveys of some of these canyons and taking you know a lot of time to do it they'd camped on the river for several weeks and just explore these came they called this three warrior ruling because a three of these figures up there I thought that defiance house was a better fit and a little more dramatic so defiance house it's been since then so let's see if the clips will show in forgotten Canyon lies defiance house a concern of the moment here is the NAP of forgotten Canyon so Jenny's this idea of speak to the public speak very slowly this the camp established at the mouth of the canyon starting the long five mile walk the crew moves at sunup upstream to defiance house defiance was very unusual in being entirely unmolested by white or other visitors since the Indians abandoned it we're on our way to Melissa it was protected both by its distance from the river and by the presence of two very steep narrow constrictions forming actual waterfalls in the floor of the canyon these obstruct travel toward the site alongside the first falls are some Aboriginal hand and toe steps which the archaeologists used as a bypass I'm usually the guy carrying the map on beyond the falls there is a long walk on the slick rock then come the second Falls which must be bypassed on a narrow ledge on the canyon wall it was also pop there was another way to go which involved going through a slot below and going through a little pool of water but I think at least I was more afraid of the water that I was of the height so we went the upper row of the four pool limit of Lake Powell it is hoped that defiance can be developed as a tourist attraction on the lake fills these little figures brandishing weapons and holding shields give the site its name defiance house this is the steep slope steepest just below the ruined but defiant pictographs the major portion of the site is in this household there are several well-preserved buildings as well as some collapsed structures to the south of the major alcove in what the boys called the annex there are a few no rooms at the center of the picture two men scale a steep slope into the alcove defiance house was exciting because no white man had apparently been there before us there were pottery vessels whole and broken and other objects lying around on the surface of the ground many buildings were intact this was a cache of two balls just a few inches below the sand sand which had blown in after the bowls were hidden behind the stone slab until they were needed again you can begin to see the first bowl now because work is the dark round shape before it is removed a black-and-white photograph is taken for record purposes then as usual before an object is removed from its original position a detailed map or sketch is made of the relationship of the specimen to the natural and man-made features of the site it is the first vessel a fire blackened saggy orange wear Bowl on the inside the stains of its last contents a girl or much of some sort find on the surface broken but with all the pieces still there another pot was saved to be restored later it is nowadays very unusual to find the site so little molested as this one this Bureau emphasizes a difference in masonry construction between the big room and the better made smaller one this is one of the sacred Kiva's at the site a circular subterranean room with roof almost intact to the west of it was its ventilator kept with this round stone still protruding from the roof was the ladder by means of which entry into the Kiva was made here the lashings of the lattice bottom rung at the pottery cache another ball has been uncovered almost exactly okay that's that's the end of that how many have you been to Defiance house you know it's and the lake is high enough you can boat right underneath it but at that time it was more difficult to get to Jenning so keep referring I'm molesting to say I don't know what he thought we were doing funny use of term here's the here's Oh some photos I found of the the original group who had visited there in 1952 and they have been extremely careful in all the exploring they did not to take things or to alter the sites in any way they really were very preservation oriented this is Duty Thomas dick sprang and here's Harry Ellison ill River met dick sprang it turns out was an artist for Batman comics so this is a he was like what's called a pencil er he his name didn't get on the published strip but he did a lot of the drawing so here's his signature and also on that in that nineteen fifty two the other members of the party were the dog part and the cat Mickey so I kind of just kind of disperses the sort of macho haze developed as a result of the earlier episode with the archaeologist out there Harry Allison is his journal talks about Mickey that Mickey duties supremely tough gray and white short-haired Tomcat he was built like a buffalo had the heart of a lion and walked the canyons waiting water by the tiger stride this is Mickey Defiant's house those guys made their way up there I think partly through the that slot canyon but they took their time and you know they were there their journals and so forth are available in several libraries I'm gonna skip past that one and get to the end here the contributions of the project included discovery of the early archaic period occupation at this time that pre-agricultural occupation was very poorly recognized in the in the southwest in the four corners and particularly in the southwest so this was a was a contribution even though we didn't document it as well as we could have if we'd run more radiocarbon date you documented the vascular to occupation pretty well we found that the canyon was OP aside occupied episodically responding to regional climates slight regional climatic shifts and to population size in adjacent areas we've got a new understanding of the Pueblo occupation that these were largely dispersed communities not real aggregated pueblos of mobile households who would easily move around if their fields played out or social conditions didn't suit them they had community facilities but not all together in one place I mentioned the cotton growing addition to corn beans and squash and this was kind of a frontier area at different times with people coming in from the chaotic area to the south in for Northeast Arizona the Mesa Verde area from the east and the Fremont areas to the northwest there were also a number of historical ecological geological and ethno historical studies that were conducted that I haven't tried to work into this talk over 2,000 archaeological and historical sites recorded about 7% excavated or tested and some of these were outside a number of these were outside the actual full pool area over thirty-five book length reports published plus many shorter articles reports if you're interested I have an article coming out kind of a look back at the Glen Canyon project coming out in archaeological Society of New Mexico annual publication dedicated to Carol Conde who was an editor on the Glen Canyon project who actually helped me learn to write but it's kind of my personal evaluation the Colorado River dams including Glen played a big role in the emergence of the invert of the modern environmental movement the reason we have Earth Day and the reason the Sierra Club is still an influential organization and so forth Elliott Porter's book the place no one knew published 1963 the year the lake began to fill was a very influential book and making people aware of what was being flooded and you know long legal legal battle went on over Rainbow Bridge finally Congress failed to refuse to appropriate the money to build a protective another protective dam downstream from it and it's had several episodes where water has backed up under it but anyway the Sierra Club whether by mental organizations grew the dams proposed that had been proposed for the Grand Canyon were defeated and a number of environmental laws were passed it's just a listing I don't want to read these but most of the environmental laws we have today were passed in about a 10-year period after the Glen Canyon after Lake Powell began to fill and the publicity over the Grand Canyon dams and the uproar over it contributed to that this again is another book 1964 about the Grand Canyon still viable possibility that dams would later 64 that they were with build dams there what's the future of Lake Powell it's vulnerable to prolonged drought and increase downstream demand from Las Vegas and the irrigation systems in Southern California currently at 64% capacity but we haven't received the spring runoff yet so it'll it'll definitely go up as a spring runoff yet however it's fluctuated a lot the last time it was full was the early 1980s and February 19 in February 2005 it was at 33% and 145 feet below full pool and there's a substantial bathtub ring there now although it's come back up quite a lot Lake Mead is currently at 55 percent and hit a record low in the fall of 2010 so you know if we get really prolonged droughts of the sort that have happened in the Four Corners country in the distant past and we have good trimming records of it and if global warming kicks in and in certain ways you know we will we'll see some definite effects here on Colorado River system the future will probably continue to be environmental conflict continue to be an economic engine for the Four Corners area can important part of the western water supply a playground for recreationists a setting for backcountry adventures places spiritual importance for Native Americans and others barometer of climate change and I think a source of new archaeological discoveries and understandings work done by the Park Service since we pulled out of the field in 1963 has added enormous ly to our understanding of the archaeology of that area and it undoubtedly will continue so thanks very much sure I'll be glad to you know people need to leave feel free we've gone on for more than an hour my hearing is not very good so if you have a question if you could you know speak speak up pretty slowly yes it looked like it was square was it square or round the very first time you you had oh they're mostly they're mostly round mostly round it's a Mesa Verde style in the K the area about this time they were switching to square Kiva's okay cuz I think we had a couple of very late cliff dwellings that no this was an area that in the 1200 was kind of a meeting ground for people coming in from Northeast Arizona and people coming in from that Mesa Verde region to the east so there's some attributes of both it's a little bit of a mixed culturally mix there of your 2000 sites how many of our underwater you know that's a good question and I don't have an answer to that the way this project was set up is very different for the way of be set up today the the Park Service that was administering it said we want you to really understand this region you know we understand the region and the idea at the time was that Pueblo you know they were trouble sites their Pueblo people lived in Pueblo that is a big apartment houses and because the sites down here were small there was an idea that those were probably seasonal occupation and some of it may have been but a lot of it was you know year round for sure so there was a lot of work done back from the lake itself partly because we knew there would be impacts from visitation and that's definitely the case if you've been up a number of those side canyons it definitely impacts from visitation but some of it was just to understand the sort of cultural ecology of the region so my guess is about half the sites were directly flooded and about half weren't but that's just a guess but it ought to be somebody ought to work that out and probably could do it the maps well I haven't done it yes hi thanks for your wonderful talk what did you find texts house you find spindles to spin the fragments fragments of textiles and in the early era there were some remarkable textiles taken out by collectors or cowboys and so forth some of which are in museums but they definitely were weaving cotton there and I think that's one of the things my guess is they also had could offer you know Big Horn hides and maybe dried Big Horn meat because there are lots of bighorn sheep the population there was very low and this is bighorn sheep country and bighorn sheep was not abundant in the more heavily populated areas to the east so I think they had some things they could offer to other people perhaps in exchange for you know a place to stay when they bailed out of there maybe even occasional help with was additional corn or something yes no they were not a great many burials we were not primarily trying to we were focusing on the architecture documenting the the sights the housing and so forth there were not a great many burials that we encountered in some cases a few but I don't recall that the analysis which was done by Eric Reid found evidence of violence but I could be you know that type of analysis was not very well developed not very forensic analysis without very well-developed at that time Eric Reid had been trained in the 40s and you know in the 30s and 40s and I'm not sure he was more into typology and how they you know populations related to each other but I don't recall any clear episode evidence of physical violence on the skeleton but there's evidence from the defensive locations and you saw the picture graphs and so forth yes I'm wondering how do they get water up the excuse me how does they get water up there you know these guys were the late period in the canyons water the water is much more available drinking water is much more available in the canyons than it was up in the more populated farming areas where people might have to walk a mile or so to get to a spring there's plenty of water in the sense tone canyon so all they had to do was just go down into the canyon same as we were we were walking you know when we were working in the canyons we were walking water a lot so just you know climb up to the site from the bottom of the canyon they used we found several yucca simple yucca leaf netting they would just tie yucca leaves together make a nice net made it a lot easier to carry a pod or whatever so I think we're just Plus these folks said they just you know they were active and they knew how to get around and areas like that yes in the back I think in one year 1959 there were three crews out from the University of Utah and then the museum in northern Arizona had a crew several years my crew was the only one 1960 and 1961 so there were several crews some years and only one other years there was also some affiliated projects that were funded by other sources Bob Lister of the University Colorado did excavations at the Coombs site near Boulder Utah which is now a state park that was not that was affiliated with the project was not funded by the project Jim Gunnarsson did a survey on the Khepera West Plateau probably 1958 or 59 at the same time there was a a river crew and an upland crew and I was funded by the National Science Foundation so max County Museum and all Arizona probably for one or two years and that other years just just one from each institution so it would be it was not as you know staffed as heavily as would be the case today yes the what oh the green truck that's probably going down toward height you know going down I don't know good question I don't know no I was not Cottonwood Canyon no I don't know where reflection Canyon in it was on me if it was there's south of the San Juan and east of the Glen it was the Museum of Northern Arizona Territory and they have some excellent reports and they did some very good work but we were working north of the San Juan and everything north of the San Juan and west of the plant of the main Canyon that's probably about right yeah most of our most of our we the 58 we worked from San Juan down to the dam site 59 from from Red Canyon down to the San Juan and then we moved up country any expectations what happens at the end of the life of that dam is what any expectations what happens at the end of the life of that dam I have no idea you know they all have oh they all have a finite use life but you know have no idea you know if you know eventually will silt will fill up with silt but then someone will have to do something about it but I you know I have not I don't think there's any anybody has really has a very clear scenario of how it's going to play out it's a long way from a long time from now now that the water level is as low as that has been for the last several years as that exposed some of these sites yes a couple of things happened discovery of new sites as the lake rose you know our surveys dawn Fowler did a lot of surveys in the canyons but you know there's very complex topography lots of ledges and so he was May he was hitting the obvious places today and probably be like a really good reconnaissance I mean he did pretty good work but we were under time pressure and you know he covered a lot of ground so as the lake rose additional surveys were done and furthermore people began to find things and bring them in you know pots cached under ledges so the Park Service has accumulated things that people have reported or brought in and I mentioned fill guide who wrote a very good monograph University of Utah series called Glen Canyon revisited which he reworked some of the collections that we had made and summarizes some of the later research that the Park Service had funded so the Park Service has done quite a bit and then as the lake has gone down I think they've tried to look at some of the sites that you know like in 2005 I think they try to look at some of those sites that had been reexpose but I don't know I haven't seen reports on that so I can't report on that I can't really say how they handled that this is Jenny's summary that was 1966 so he pulled that together at the end of the very end of the project and it focuses pretty heavily on the University of Utah that's supposed to cover what the museum in northern Arizona did he was really interested in the big sort of cultural ecological patterns and I don't think he gave a lot of attention to rock art but one of the things I didn't have good slides for when I made my selection was rock art and as you know particularly the main stem of the Glen was a gallery of rock art there's some sites here there that were visited over and over and over as people came through that area so one of the efficiencies in my talk and one of the efficiencies in Jennings book is a lack of treatment of rock art but also the rock art studies have improved enormously over the last 40 or 50 years particularly in the last 30 years and people are doing a lot more analysis of rock art Christy Turner who you mentioned worked for the Museum of northern Arizona and did a pioneering study of rock art but a lot of archaeologists didn't really know what to do with it you know they didn't pay much attention to it we documented it took pictures but we didn't really do much analysis of it so it's one of those things that if you're doing you're gonna do it again you'd do it differently but that's you can say that of a lot of a lot of things 50 years on you know the center in a society want to thank all of you for coming tonight I hope everyone enjoyed it I hope we get your continued support by joining the center and the Verde Valley archaeology Society thank you very much

Channel: Verde Valley Archaeology Center

Views: 44,290

Keywords: Bill, Lipe, William, Glen, Canyon, Arizona, Southwest, Lake, Powell, Archaeological, Society, Verde, Valley, Archaeology, Center, scalelabs, scalelab network, scalelab, scalelabnetwork

Id: 0b3xj-4gcLk

Length: 73min 59sec (4439 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2012