Dave Dove "Update on Excavations at Champagne Spring Ruins" Dove Creek, Colorado

Thank You Jill hi it's good to see a nice crowd here today such a beautiful such beautiful weather out there folks my name is Dave dove and I'm I live in Cortez Colorado and as Jim said we've been involved in this project out here Champaign Springs for well actually it started in 2002 we had some folks with the university of eastern illinois and university of southern illinois that had worked with us out of champ mitchell springs on some remote sensing work out there and they had a great relationship with another company that created these really intricate instruments that can measure things under the ground and they were being encouraged to find projects to put their equipment to work and so Mitchell Springs was the start of it and 2002 and 2003 I believe it was they came out and they completely mapped this site this this site is named from the spring that is oh probably a quarter mile from the site the site itself is made up of two hilltops and these it's a very large site and it's what's known as a community center up in Pueblo land up there a community center by definition is essentially large sites that have great Kiva's or can be like a choco and great house or some sort of a public facility that brings in large people from large distances in some cases the interesting thing about this site is is that up in that part of the world and in southwest Colorado it was darn near depopulated after the late 800 people just left the Klein it was getting colder it was much more difficult to farm a lot of the places they'd been to and there were some other dynamics going on but lots of immigrant groups were going up there until that time and then it started to Peter out about the middle of the 800s latter part of the eight hundreds there was actually some very large sites people were coming together congregating rather than spreading apart in through time you'll see that this is a pattern that repeats itself people just breaking apart into small groups which is a different cultural pattern and then people coming together and living in large groups which as you might assume that comes with problems of its own and there's issues with decisions that have to be made in these large sites there's some parts of the site's themselves that tend to be highly focused on ceremony and ritual we know that at least on the North Hill site and I'm going to show you a little bit more about it here in just a moment at least on the North Hill site we have an area that we've mapped and then we've started testing the structures around the great Kiva on the North Hill and what we're what we're finding is some interesting things and I'll go over a little bit of that for you here our site here Champaign this is where we work this is the border with Utah right here it's four corners of course here Mitchell Springs site where I live is right here on the mackelmore Creek that's about I think it's 50 kilometers apart as I said it the entire during the eight the nine hundreds up until there almost ten fifty the place was so deep populated that there were very few large sites in fact there's only at this point champagne spring is one of the well it is the largest site during of the period and as far as community centers the only ones that I'm aware of that exist here at Mitchell spring and possibly some up here and Mesa Verde that there after the tape and five burned they went back and resurveyed found a there was a significant population during the nine hundreds up there but it they again the structure of the sites and the way they settled the land was far different than what we see here they were dispersed up there but they were in large dispersed groups now this is looking down I'm an aerial view of the of the two hills over here is Canyon coming through here and some of you may have heard of that this is a tributary of and this is the North Hill and this dark area is the North Hill sites South wealth sites this runs about 250 closer to 300 meters long and it's a close to a hundred meters wide so you can imagine that's a lot of a lot of structures after doing some of the remote sensing work we got a better idea of what we were looking at so the history of of how this study at Champaign Spring got started really sort of was driven by these folks here that worked with us at Mitchell Springs and this company here who needed somebody to try their equipment out and so it's been a it's been a really a good partnership for us and they've been very helpful okay so this is a EIU out there sitting up there total station this is a research partner of mine and we're involved in a an interesting project to source red ware pottery right now involves a lot of ICP work and if some of the archaeologists in here know a little bit about that but it's the elemental analysis of pottery and what we've done is collected a bunch of sources of red producing pottery clays from Southeast Utah where this pottery is thought to have been made and so what we're doing with it is and it's sort of like finding a needle in a haystack but we're looking at these traded pottery that's coming in to Mitchell Springs and coming into Champaign spring knowing that it came from southeast Utah and we run these ITIC P tests it's an acronym for an inductive coupled plasma some other stuff ms and but what it does is it gives you an elemental analysis of what the clays were made up of so what we've done is we've got 70 samples of clay from southeast Utah that we know produced red pottery you have to have a high iron content to get red pottery and and it's a different firing regime as well but and then we're taking these shirts off of the floor of this site and Mitchell Springs and hopefully with Tom's help and Bruce Bradley's help over at that sticks and leaves pueblo was a large village there as well trying to find out if we can source any of these potteries to the clay sources that we've we've tested so it's it's really a fascinating how are you doing fascinating the project and we hope that it's gonna reveal some good information when they were done what we were able to produce is some really nice maps this is a he's got excuse me this the elevation here is depicted here and that's the line what's interesting is and I've said this before but this is apparently were a group of folks that apparently controlled the most important ceremonies were based on the North Hill and the the structure of the village over there is far different than the structure of the village on this it's just a completely different pattern leading some folks including myself to suggest that perhaps at a time of out migration or out migration there were these folks that were coming together in just a few places but they were immigrant groups and I'm I'm curious about whether or not this is as far as their ethnic ethnic allottee or ethnic ethnicity as they found in the Dolores archaeological project were they found different groups living side-by-side in the same place and places in Arizona and some of these Pablos it's been known that's happened forever but this may be a very good example of that and what we have here is they're sort of a little land bridge here there's a prehistoric trail that goes across there and along this Ridge right here is a depression that runs across here and a very very interesting building along that depression able to get the the site map to this level we took a total station out there and every one of these is a shot that we took with prisms in a total station and my request from EIU to EIU was is that on these this hill and this hill that we we take a lot more than we would normally take so that we could tighten up the contour interval and look at areas of the site that maybe you can't see with the naked eye but if you if you have enough of these prism points out there you can see some things that you can't see with the naked eye and by doing that I've actually discovered a lot of the structures under the ground that I didn't even know existed just by micro typography if you will this is Harvey he's from Southern Illinois is in the geophysics Department this was the most most successful tool that we found that we ran for different types of remote sensing including ground-penetrating radar we had some electro conductivity or something I'm sorry I can't remember some of these things but this is just one of those things I don't remember well but this here this cesium Grady ometer was by far the best for predicting structures and features under the ground it it was able to create a map sort of like this and what you see here is these blue spots surrounded by these red are typically kiba's so you can see a lot of cavas out at this site where we're working right now this is the great Kiva here structure 34 we're gonna talk about he's here structure 35 this is Jim's big structure here structure 46 which burned our J's structure this is the signature that you've got in the burn one this is structure 37 and we're gonna look at these two as well so this structure right here I'm sorry I'd mixed that up we do have a 1025 cutting date off of the burned roof of that structure so it is also the latest structure in this group so we have a baseline now we know how these things developed up until ten twenty five and maybe ten or fifteen years after that we can see the pottery that was used at that period of time and then I'm doing some really interesting things with Siri Siri ation and pottery but just this is about what it would look like if you if you put something to designate a Kiva in all of the places that appeared to be Kiva's there's roughly thirty on the North Hill twenty on the on the South Hill in about two hundred and fifty surface rooms on this site this is the North Hill and when I was talking about the difference in the South Hill what what I'm talking there's a large aggregated room block that goes across here down there and it's got ears that come off here Kiva's out in front of them the midden or the cemetery is out along here so it's got a big huge or midden ringing this this pueblo and it just looks like everything is focused on this area and this is the what I call the the plaza area you could imagine what it would be like standing over the top of the big depressed plaza overseeing ceremonies going on on top of these structures people standing on roofs you could accommodate hundreds of people and that could view these things going on you can see this the where our work is being conducted right now we're working across here in that structure we we did excavate this this west half of this building here just a little section of this where we have that 10 25 date you know where this is our start of our season last year Tom and I got our shirts finally after two years of waiting and Diane is keeping all of our records out there it's really worked out excellent for for me because before I was having to track all this stuff myself and it's just she's very organized and it's been a tremendous tremendous help for us okay that's right she is a great coach no doubt there's sandy and Jean in there this is some of our early work in the great Kiva you can see that the bench over here is an earthen bench it stands about that far off the floor this was the southwest ours there's four main roof supports that hold up that the roof of this structure and if you could imagine a thousand years ago trying to build a roof over something that spans over 30 feet well that's a pretty big task but there were four main posts that held this this roof up you can see as this they disassembled the roof and salvaged the roof of this structure and started throwing garbage in here and they came back and built some sort of a feature there in the fill check out the stratigraphy I like the strict a grafite ELLs you so much about these sites and how materials were deposited into them after abandonment this I interpret as wind laid deposits not water water you'll see a little bit more settlement settling on the bottoms of these Stratus where you could split just like water and the heavy materials will settle at the bottom and every part of this Kiva that we tested the great Kiva you have a different sort of depositional process going on in it so it was a very complex filling episode in there but in general a lot of garbage was in there check out the this compared to what we were just looking at this is over on the the the southern end of the and we had a dividing wall just like the early pit structures where they had sort of a wing wall and these things separating a place where people would grind corn from the other parts other duties that were going on inside the Kiva I've never seen one of these inside a great Kiva before so it's it's sort of an interesting set of features for me all right there's the our new work going inside the great Kiva and not a lot to that we can say about this same same thing some of the folks that were in there is that Charlotte in there in the back looks like maybe okay this is on the north side and there's Terry and a gal from Exeter University came out she's in her is she getting her is she doing her dissertation okay right now so this was her chance to do something a little bit different she'd been working for months and the plains and was used to getting excited about finding a little tiny rock with a chip out of it so when she was finding hundreds of pieces of pottery it was it was great for her what we see out there is in the surface rooms that surround the great Kiva just multiple episodes of building this was an early event when they abandoned this there was deposition up here they came back later and built other structures on top of it and this is what we see every place we look inside the the surface mound we've seen the same sort of thing so there were multiple events of it does not to me look like there it was a always just the same size site it had it grew it shrunk it grew it shrunk but it looked like there was in for the most part there was a presence there for the entire time and so you this is probably 50 to 60 years of time that built up before they came back and built that structure up above this is one of the latest structures on the site you just look at the style of masonry that we see that's a certain 10 1100 AD about 1100 AD and that's some of the nicest architecture in the entire site actually so this is the one structure that we looked at in this area that I call the ceremonial square what's interesting about this is these structures that they put in surrounding this great Kiva they are they're not the normal what there was a transition in pit structures tequilas somewhere around 900 950 AD and what happened is is these subterranean buildings were places where people didn't just do their rituals and performances but they they ground corn in these things they they would make tools they would carry on life down there and about 900 and 950 the domestic usage that was going on in these structures stopped and they became ritual type structures and that's when a full Kiva becomes a Kiva somewhere in that time well because there was so little at aa queue patient up there in that part of the world it's a fuzzy area for archaeologists I mean we know what happened in in essence but we don't know the details on how it transitioned this is a perfect example of transitioning pit houses tequila's that we'll see here this is structure 34 the report that that Tom had back there and some of you who've got it deals with this structure and the reason why we're really excited about this structure is what I was trying to find out with our excavations in the area around the great Kiva is what exactly are these structures what was the purpose of having them were they were and what went on inside them and if there were normal household Kiva's they were related to a group of surface structures that would be to the north of them so an extended family would live in seven eight rooms maybe and they would share with another extended family that might be attached on either side they would share the pet house or the key but what became the Kiva with them but these structures were different these were not like normal Kiva's or normal structures at all they appeared to represent something different we're not sure what it is but there's some very strange things going on inside of them and we'll we'll talk about that but we excavated the western half of this structure it's it is rare to find what's called these floor vaults central floorball --tz-- inside structures that are not large community structures this structure is no it's about four and a quarter meters from north to south it's about the size of a normal family calif so it's unusual to find these vaults in these structures it's not that they haven't been they just don't find them that much and what they were thought to be used as is they would put a plank of wood or planks of wood or stretched hide around some sort of a wood apparatus that they could pound on and have drumming in there in this building so they were foot drums now there's some debate on that not everyone believes that's what they were historically if you read up a little bit about it there's been death no graphic reports of these things in by I think Mindel have actually mentioned it a little bit white and some other folks that looked at some of these structures in the the the late I guess it was probably be the early 900s and they were seeing some of these features they called them eventually they became roofs see pop whose is what they're called and they didn't have these things in every structure where they would find them as in were the most important ceremonies went to where they occurred they would find these structures so they're inherently related to ritual these floor vaults and you'll see them in a north-south axis like this so we have a vent where the air came in from above down inside an ash pit a divider between the ash pit and the hearth and then you'll find these these appear to be they're not loom anchor holes they're they're believed to be altar holes so they'd have an altar that they would set up in these things during these ceremonies so it was quite unusual features in this structure this is the vault you can see where in this area where the stuff was put in there and sat inside of that in it so it would be a floor level pounding surface when we got down in there this is when we started finding these buried animals which was you know fairly rare occurence we we've only found a couple of those over in Mitchell Springs so to find them here was a little bit of a surprise in this structure that you just saw a picture of we ended up when there was all said and done there was something like 20 adult turkeys 15 baby turkeys there were three dogs a bunny rabbit and a beheaded rattlesnake on the floor of this structure so started us to thinking what it what didn't heck is this well after doing some study it turns out that it's it's happened it happens pan Anasazi basically you'll see this it's rare but you see it and and it's believed to be something that was done in a ritual form to close these structures off after years of using them they would decommission them and they would do something special and certain ones we're not sure what what but from my study it appears these features that you find on these surfaces could be related to this phenomenon so we started we found the dog and then there it's another dog and they put these rocks around these animals there's a picture of the rattlesnake bones Larry over here's our bone guy and he he took that to two or three different experts and snakes and they definitely identified it as the Prairie rattlesnake and it had no head which to me makes a lot of sense if you're gonna handle these things so I guess they figured that out here's the dog that's kind of looking up like this you can see the bottom jaw I was there what was fascinating about this is they created little crypts around these animals where they stack up these rocks and actually even use shims to support the rocks and then when they finished with the structure they actually dismantled the roof and reset the roof on top of these stones that were housing these animals so it was really an interesting interesting little ritual that they had there and obviously these animals they didn't just have a lot of dead animals laying around but they didn't know what to do it so I figured always throw them in here you know these were sacrificed animals here's a good photograph of one of our two meter by 2 meter units and you can see how they would set them yes I'm sorry you can see where they would set some of these on top of rocks like this is a large I think this was a male Turkey if I'm not mistaken you could see some Spurs here but they would set these on rocks and then in some cases they would actually set rocks over the top of them that they none of the time did they set these on in such a way that they would damage the bones so they were very careful about how they did this they lowered it down on top yes so they didn't span the entire sir and you'll see it here in the in a picture of a showing a picture of this straight I don't know I'm having a mental block here but I'll point it out to you after the animals were removed this what this the stones look like and it looks like almost some sort of a pattern starts to develop the more you look at it this is not a good picture to show it but the the beams were would have been right above this straighter right here so they filled it with door soil up to there and then they reset the beams on top of that soil this is what it looked like when it was done and you can see I've named the the features this is prior to a fully developed bench although it had a bench they did not have pilasters what it used for pilasters are the posts so the posts eventually transitioned to masonry pilasters in later Kiva's this dates to somewhere around nine seventy five to ten hundred as far as the ceramics ago we've submitted hundreds of samples to the U of A tree ring lab but we we don't have all of our dates back yet unfortunately hopefully within another lifetime I'll get them so here's this strata that I was talking about that the profile is the word I was like the the beams apparently were in this area right here and this is the fill that they used over the animals and here would be that's straight up with the animals the floor right here okay getting into some of our field trip this is the structure next to a structure thirty-five is a weir again we're looking at these structures individually and saying do they are they doing the same things in these well in these structures when you get to a certain size building you don't need it to be any bigger to house a family so when you get to these really large structures they're clearly designed for large groups of people and inside these structures different activities take place this is a large structure it's a somewhere around seven meters across not as big as the great Kiva which was closer to 11 meters but this has a that's some some very interesting things in it that we're gonna talk about I wanted to show you in these structures we've been finding these gaming pieces that thought to be part of a game that was played in the pub low world and and they'll they'll look like this with these carving things inside of them and they'll also look like this this is a jet one made out of jet and this was part of a little set that was in our J's structure 46 that had burned and there also this shape there's another jet one and the jet ones are really uncommon so you don't see them very often they're more you're more apt to find them and made out of bone as that one is getting back to structure 36 35 this is a good example of the process in how slow it you can't really tell the speed wise but this takes a long time to do this kind of dirt the way we work it's not it's not fast work at all this is the ventilator shaft that's starting to come out here it'll go down there apparently is going to be a fireplace here and over here you can see very unusual double set of floor vaults which I've only found one other case of this and both of those were set up as central vaults rather than side by side lateral vaults which are lateral vaults are always oriented in a north-south orientation these are but usually they'll be on either side of the fire pit these are behind in the location you would find a central vault so it's really an unusual situation and when we started we were really flummoxed by this we're this is the floor and what we were working with Keith can attest and Terry and Jim that it was very difficult to detect the floor in this structure because for most the biggest reason was that there were multiple floors in this structure so this structure had a long use life they didn't just use it once and toss it out whereas a lot of these subterranean buildings had a 10 to 15 year use life this was more apt to be a lot closer to a hundred which is a big difference well we're trying to figure out what's going on here and and I thought well shoot well maybe they could have covered over some pits that were beneath the floor so we started you know doing little tests so we could read the profiles and get a better idea of what was going on and we came upon these group of stones that were you can see as they we developed them that were actually filling in these two floor vaults so they set it up to where they could actually uncover it and and take out the rocks and put that back into commission quickly so I don't know if these were both in use at the very same time if they were they're different sizes so they may have produced two different sounds it's not certain what whether they were or not so here's what they look like when they're when they're excavated and they in some places you can see where they had places where they inserted these these coverings that went over them on the bottom was this knife now this you can't tell it from the picture but this is beautiful green material that we found out find out there it's in the Morrison Formation and it was adjacent to this carnivore some kind of a carnivore jaw in the back there so that was at the very bottom of the Sipapu which is sort of interesting um just tremendous quantities of arrow points out there I think this site was highly focused on hunting and we've got a lot of evidence to support that in just tremendous quantities of large mammal bones a lot of these sites it was it was actually believed that the Dolores area part of what was going on there by the late 800s they had pretty much hunted out the deer populations so what you see in the bones in these middens are are not large mammals anymore little rabbits in most cases which were pretty ubiquitous and pretty simple to catch with snares so and that about that time also is when they started taking turkeys from not eating turkeys to started to eat turkeys and when they started to eat turkeys they stopped burying turkeys which kind of makes sense and ya want to eat those things you know so this is a when we're near the bottom again these vaults are we're not quite done with them but there's Jim and Linda and Keith down there looking at their work they're admiring their work here I can see why they do such nice work okay over to structure 46 there's some like what is that Rosalie and can and RJ and this is the structure they worked on structure 46 very unusual this one actually did have pieces of furnishings that would appear to suggest there were domestic activities going on in this structure there very well could be for these large Matadi is in here and it's kind of funny that they actually built this little bin around it because the the style of Matadi was sort of developed to to make it to where those bins were no longer useful you didn't need them anymore so to find a trough Matadi open i'm going in like that in a bin is sort of unusual okay when it's all said and done the works not over when we get the dirt out of there there's our jade doing our sketching this structure is a really really fascinating structure I found I've talked to a lot of archaeologists trying to find other instances of the type of features that are in this structure I haven't found anybody that's seen them but then I ran across a report in the Dolores archaeological project where they were they had a search structure like this and it had these floor grooves in it and it was a big debate about what is these what are these things they thought they could be ritual related but they didn't know what they did and and I don't know what they did I thought they were we all thought they were rodent holes at first but I don't believe that's what they are any longer and you'll see why here see this is what they look like up close you can see this I mean you can even see the the marks of actually creating this groove so this is this is um something that they made and I'm not sure if there was some sort of a swinging apparatus as part of the altars that they set up in here I don't know yeah we're hoping to find out there's a good photo of it being done these are the grooves that I'm talking about there is some evidence that looks like this could be rodents but when you look in the profile of what goes underneath there you should be able to see Dave Wilcox I'm talking to him he said well you should be able to see the top of the rodent hole as well if it's a rodent hole well these don't have tops so unless these rodents all know how to make the same depth grooves and you know I don't know how they could have done it so this is a structure next to it structure 36 another unusual structure in that it had a long leash slight that appears to have burned down at least three different separate times and when it burned down the third time they still weren't ready to give up on it and they came in and they built this roasting pit inside of it and again in trying to find other instances of these types of features you get them down in Hohokam land we know probably get them in I know you get them in this in Iowa area for agave I guess right but it's not so common to find them up there and when you do they're usually small and they don't leave all the bones of the things that they cook inside of it with this what you're seeing starting develop is the time of this roasting pit what they did is after that it started to fill in this structure they came in they built this feature inside of it and lined it it was a dish shaped pit they lined it with stones and all of the stones are burned so we know they cooked with it and the fill inside of it is ashy black just literally loaded with deer bones and in talking to Larry what's unusual is and you you might you do see cases of this in the record from all around the world when you invite people in well when you invite people into your village you're not going to show them that you're bad hunters and show them some little scrawny deer you're gonna show them the biggest thing you've got and in this in the bones in this structure this this pit appear to be very large deer bones as if there were feasting things going on here and they were eating in large groups which is again you don't find records of that up there so it's sort of interesting now that's the work is getting underway you can see the ashy pit of the bottom near the bottom of this structure this is a well this is the some of the pottery that we see inside of there this dates to somewhere around 925 to 950 AD the predominant red ware pottery is bluff black on red and the predominant grey ware pottery that we find as far as what's diagnostic is what's called Mancos gray and toward the end of mangas gray you start seeing they start getting very creative with the fill it's that they build around the neck of these these things and they start using tools to manipulate the necks of them and as you get closer to them starting to build corrugated real corrugated pottery they're really getting created with the phillips of these these necks so i'm trying to devise a method that I can better date these things in case I don't get some good dendro dates back this is the fill of that that roasting pit and you can see little ear ears of corn in there there was lots and lots of corn and beans so they were they were really eating good and putting their stuff there debris inside this pit well but you made our newspaper as you know and you stayed in there for a long time so they must have thought you were handsome enough to leave on there and you're you're working in structure 36 in the upper fill here's some of the points that came out of there was just a lot of arrow points that came out of this structure and other really cool artifacts a couple gaming pieces we also have this this I believe this is a duck pendant I've told some of you folks I don't know what it's made out of yet it's it's not known it's not jet even though it looks sort of like Jack but the way they drilled this is very interesting if you put a string between it and you hold it up that thing will balance so they they wear knee lowered around your neck they didn't want it up this way or up that way they wanted it to balance like that clearly this is getting near the bottom of that structure this is where we left it so we have this area to work and this is going to be interesting because this again had three different forms this structure and it had burned down three times it had a wing wall and it had that people in general ethnographically at least it's believed that the women did the grinding and so there would have a station of Matadi x' and Manos back there they remodeled it and removed that wing wall and it became more like a late pit structure early Kiva some people call them proto Kiva's so I want to know is this structure here going to have central vault in it as well and I will not be surprised if it does it would be very unusual though here's our resident bone guy in attendance today Larry that structure 36 had four different floors in it this is the second to the last floor I had all these abrading stones all over the floor had some cutting tools that had an antler tool over here one of the things that we find in these structures which is really fascinating is apparently whenever they close these things up they have a habit of throwing animal heads in the south ends of these things so in every one of these structures we found animal skulls in the south ends of them so it's a kind of a weird thing that I don't know if it's just localized we had a little bit of it at Mitchell Springs but nothing like like we have here the very final or the most the early floor you can see where the wing wall went across here they had a wall they took it out and they floor it over it they actually have these depressed areas on both sides of the the fire hearth here this fire hearth you can clearly see had several remodels on it and it was at one time a much larger structure then they built an ash pit up here we've removed the ash pit at this point you can kind of see what's left this is the latest one that we're working on structure 37 another interesting structure in that area of the plaza that I'm talking about and what makes this interesting is that I thought for sure that this structure is a next generation later than the structure 34 where we had all those animal bear girls but it turns out and I have yet to verify this but it appears that it actually is a little bit earlier than the structure the other structure with all of the the animals what what happened here is and you can see the very beginning of it they did the same thing as far as this formalized Kiba closing once again with this structure is littered with the bodies of animals and they built a stone monument about this tall over the top of these animals they laid him out over the floor and they built this stone dome as what we call it and in this side of the dome was a hole at the top of it that went all the way down into a very rare feature for structures up there a sub floor ventilator shaft so it went down below the floor and then out the structure which is really quite unusual haven't found another something like that so here's the top of it it's starting to develop you see that we found turkey number one here there's this head and neck wing over here going down a little bit further and then we find another one these both are facing the same way looking east we've taken out some of that dome already and we're working our way down again there's a lot of work that goes into this and it's it's not something you shovel out these are picks and little tiny dental picks and little brushes and there's a lot of documentation that goes into this Robin Lyell who works for crow Canyon has done an excellent synopsis of these animal burials for structure 34 and she's working on four one for structure 37 she'll be talking at the Pecos conference and at the crow canyons biannual Big Mac conference and I'll be talking at that as well about Champaign but she's got a lot of really interesting information on these animals Washington State University picked up on it one of their PhD candidates who works with Bill Life and Brian Kemp who has his lab up there and RG Matson who's from University of British Columbia have teamed up and they've run all of our DNA on these turkeys in here and they've also run stable isotope analysis so they can tell exactly what these turkeys were eating and they're going to be giving just because I had the site and provided the bones they're gonna put me on there too so I'm gonna be a co-author of this and it's going to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences coming up here shortly so it's a really an excellent paper that they've created and they've really found some interesting things with these two different happily lines of of DNA of these turkeys and what they're trying to do with Tim koehlers bill is as part of the village dynamics project is they're trying to because they can't get human DNA very easily anymore they're trying to use turkey DNA and watch how turkeys moved across the land which is kind of an interesting idea I don't know if they're gonna be able to make it work but it's it's quite interesting what they did find though these turkeys were provisioned different than turkeys that you would eat these these turkeys were eating somewhere around 90 percent of their diet was corn that was they they did not get their protein like normal turkeys that would force forage for bugs so bugs for a turkey is its protein they weren't feeding these things bugs they were they were corn so they were special special birds for some reason but to give up that many birds when it was all said and done in this structure we well we're not said and done but so far we found over 40 baby turkeys in this one somewhere around 20 adult turkeys two dogs and a and a big crow that were killed and put on the floor so another one of these Kiva closing since and that structure had a really nice bone needle that we found on the surface that came out some you may remember that this is not a square around Kiva as you would find and fully developed Kiva this one is sort of rounded and square and another we we haven't excavated these areas but we know that the top of another turkey is over here so we don't know if there's gonna be more animals here or not but it wouldn't surprise me this is looking at it and when we were this is extraordinarily slow work trying to remove and document these things it's sketch them as you go if you can photographing it I've taken literally hundreds of photographs every few minutes just to be able to put it back together again but you can see what's left of this dome type thing and they actually laid these things in a a pattern how they stacked at this thing around and the hole that went through there was somewhere around in here I think going down to that sub floor ventilator here's Tom I mean just see what kind of a mess we've got here just bones everywhere it's extraordinarily painstaking work I like this photograph because it gives you an idea how many birds we've got in here there's a this is a male Turkey it's gonna have a spur coming out of there this is ahead of another turkey not related to this turkey and here the feet of another turkey that comes over here so this is 25 centimeters and we have that many animals in such a small area so they this was something that was well planned out what they had in mind here they they didn't just decide one morning that's what they're gonna do apparently this is an interesting stratigraphy here this roof was treated different than a lot of the roofs you have different patterns that we notice in the way they dispose of these structures they either let the things rot in place and a lot of times that they're living nearby they'll throw their garbage into them they'll become mittens a lot of times they'll burn these structures just completely like structure 46 that you saw earlier the roof was completely intact a lot of times what they'll do is they'll burn these structures but only after they've salvaged the beams that they want the good beams and that's the case here this was partially salvaged but not before they actually had put all of this fill inside but look how high the roof falls straight it is up here it's it's all the way up here so they've deliberately filled this up they salvaged the beams they wanted and then they burned what was left and we've got some really good dendro samples tree ring samples I anticipate getting some dates from this is how these things were stacked and here's the hole so they were stacked around this thing and it just got bigger and bigger until it it came up to a dome up here again you get an idea of why this is so slow this work okay we're looking down on the floor this is kind of unusual they have a large slab like an abrading stone that they actually put into the floor it's at floor level we haven't seen that out there I've read about it before but it's it's not something that's all that normal looking at this these here's the ash pit here that turns into they have a deflector stone underneath the floor and so the air went underneath this and into the vent and at the same time it had an above floor vent as well which is really unusual this is the heart that's not been excavated we've got these bones and many other animals go out into this direction and here's that one that we turned up that we haven't excavated just kind of reorient you again of what we've been looking at once again we started looking at this structure then we went to this this one this one over here then that one and we're looking at that now the on the other hill the South Hill what you find is these the way they built that village over there is far different these people did not live attached to one another they had extended families living side-by-side but they were not physically attached so it's a village just of all these unit Pablo's with avenues between them and Kiva's out in front just like you should normally see as you see across here and the south side of the room block but I find the difference is very striking when you find people that lived at the same period of time but they live differently right in the same village with one another just a quick idea of some of the things that were what we're looking into just to recap our research out there so our excavations are focused on this plaza area because we thought that that would be the best place for us to find some tree-ring dates we wanted to date this conclusively to the 10th century in the early 11th century where if you look at if you go down and you ask University of Arizona let me see all of the tree-ring dates from all of the sequence that we have developed so far in southwest Colorado and they'll show you literally thousands of dates but in the period from 980 to 1025 they have 3 days so what does that mean it means there wasn't that many structures being built during that period of time so when you find a chance to to get some good data out of something that we don't know very much about we want to take advantage of that so we're looking at this Plaza we're looking at these structures around the plaza we're asking ourselves why are these not normal kiba's that you find to the south of a room block and we're not sure other than to say that it appears that there was a regular gatherings happening at this site and this plaza where people that were out there as few there were would come from distances and because it's there's only one other known great Kiva from this time period they've clearly had people coming in during that period of time and so we want to know what was that all about so we've we've we've determined that these structures are different they're not normal how so kiba's we've determined that there were ritual and ceremonies going on inside of these structures that apparently didn't go on and other structures and that they were very valuable to them the ethnographic reports of how Pueblo people view these Kiva's is they believe that them as humans are beings not necessarily humans but they have a life of their own so when they die they don't just in some cases don't just forget them and walk away they they have certain things that they do to close them the business is not done there and what we're looking at in these structures is while this is going on are they treating these repositories of of their material culture are they treating these any different than the mounds that surround the site the typical burial mounds that you find well one thing they're doing is they've changed their mortuary practices from the 800s they don't apparently bury their dead in these structures anymore so they've burying them into the in the mid ins so something's changing there and the other thing that I'm looking at is well what is this garbage look like that goes in there is that any different than the garbage that you find in a normal mid and there's some good evidence to suggest that this is different the type of garbage that's going into these structures is different one very high quantities of red ware pottery which has been linked to feasting behavior people from outside groups come in particularly being close to Utah they bring red ware pottery with them and it's left there and it's going into these structures some of these structures have more red ware pottery on them and in them then structures in southeast Utah where this pottery was made if you look at some of the some of these sites that have a lot of it they might have a 25% of all of their assemblages is red pottery we have it up to 35 and 40 percent in some cases so it's something very unusual happening with these large quantities of red ware pottery into this part of the village and to that end I'm working with Eastern Illinois on these ICP analysis of this red pottery we want to find out lots of things like could they make it there with the clay is available Clint Swank he's published a wonderful book on pottery if some of you may have seen is really a beautiful book and he's an expert and he says he's clays well they will fire red but maybe not as good a quality is what they would have wanted if that's true that means that all of these pots would have been imported to this this site and we're talking not just hundreds we're probably talking about thousands of pots well what do you get for thousands of pots do you just come and leave them there do you get anything in return yeah you can't look at these sites that make red ware pottery and see as a reciprocal behavior like they're getting their white ware pottery in return they're not they may be giving me they may be getting hides or something that's not easy to do to tell but they're certainly not exchanging it for pottery so what do they go there for why do they exchange this stuff this is not easy to make this pottery and there's no evidence that there were any specialists in southeast Utah that we're making more pottery than the household required so there's a lot of really interesting questions that that are part of this red ware project that I'm involved in and and this using this ICP technique and working with some of the folks Jim Allison from BYU is working with us a little bit on this he's providing pottery from some of the only to well the only two sites known to have been occupied during the same period of time in southeast Utah is in a BYU museum so they're trying to get us some pottery for that and then what I talked to you about is this DNA analysis and there's some talk that they want to do that with structure 37 to to get it to broaden their base of DNA for these turkeys and I think that was the last shirt and I hope you enjoyed it is there any any questions from anyone I'll hit that real quick they we have them down to the cat canis or canids canid level they we were almost certain that they're this small Indian dog basically what's been called a small Indian dog yes sir dr. Todd it appears that there are it appears that there are now because I have no tree rings to confirm that what I've had to do is try to devise a method that I could try to make smaller time windows with the ceramics that I've got and I believe with the method that I've devised which is pretty simple but yet it seems to be pretty revealing it appears that there's three separate periods where there were multiple structures going at the same time but there were three periods so when those were going they were the only ones going and when they closed those the the big structure that's being excavated by Jim was apparently going and and then they moved it over to that one that we have a 10:25 cutting date out of so it appears that they were they did have other structures going and probably started serving similar purposes to answer your question I have I've asked some mark I'll just that I know they'd know a little bit about that side of things bill life thinks there's a lot of evidence and so there's rich wills using for these being clan Kiva's or some site of society keyless where they could not put a lot of people in them but these societies were meeting at different times possibly in this same structure so multiple groups perhaps could have used them we did have a suggestion about structure 46 which i think is kind of interesting knowing that these structures are thought of as into living things that structure 46 is the only one so far that has any kind of grinding implements on the floor and it was suggested well could this be a female keyboard because we know that death no graphically they're linked to this and and I will say that it's fairly unusual to find that meant grinding stations in in these little structures especially one that small so that may have some merit to it not sure about that ma'am did you have a question I I will I'm trying to make that my last resort because it's it's an expensive process I'm I'm gonna be getting some grant monies coming through that carbon-14 is definitely going to be one of the ones that we're going to do particularly in structure 34 because I don't know that I'm going to get a tree ring date out of it that would be preferable to the carbon-14 because it's cheaper and it's it's going to give you that date that tree was cut if you get the right if you get the outside rings on it I think it's a good idea I haven't heard that no I to me that makes sense we've had this table since key from WSU as has suggested that it could be used because of the time of of the death of those animals he knows that those poles were killed in a certain month to be that size because they have I guess one brood or a year and it's always in the same time of year so they they know that these things were buried in the early late spring I think is what it was he thinks that perhaps is an offering for good crops that year and I would counter that I think there's a lot more evidence to suggest if it wasn't offering and I believe it could have been that it would be for good hunting because they were definitely doing a lot of hunting there but holding that down I mean that's an interesting idea because they're they're putting them down into in these you know the Sipapu the earth navel their place of origin the Kiva is almost a another realm of that because you go down into it just like you would go down into the ground where they came from down through the earth navel or the Sipapu yes ma'am I haven't even looked at that yet we're pretty early on in our excavations so I'm not sure there's enough for anyone to really study and in that regard yes sir that's a good question they they were facing those two were the last two that were put in there the first two that we encountered as we were going on going down they were facing the same direction and I thought we would find a pattern like that but what what ends up being the case is there's lots of different orientations for these animals one thing I can tell you though with the pulse they tuck them under the mother's wings apparently is what it looked like they're buried right in there these spots right here underneath the wings and and in underneath the very center of this dome that we've been talking about they laid it looks like maybe as many as six or seven adult turkeys and their feet went to the same so they're come in all different directions and their feet went to the same point this cluster a as we called it just littered with baby turkeys in and these adult legs coming into this center point which it's got to have some kind of meaning I'm thinking I just have idea what it could be and if anybody has any ideas I'm I'm open for suggestions yes sir no I was just talking to Keith about that a little while ago and there is some correlates with some work I guess in some places in Mesoamerica with animal sacrifice as far as working with them some of the this article that keep just Keith just gave me a copy of who talked about some Zuni myths as far as what was what this could have meant leaving that you're given an identity as an animal and when you're done with that animal you get the bones of the animal - so I don't know if you get to eat it as well but you get the bones now that did not deal with animal burials these are actual formal burials these were midden bones so I don't know that that is a good example what I can tell you is that this this doing this really started to Peter out by the end of the 900 early 1000s and if you look at sites in the eleven and twelve hundred some of these terminal pueblos on sites that we have up there very rarely do you find animal burial of any kind at all because they want to eat these things I guess rather than bury them anyone else wellthank yes ma'am the Clay's yeah that's correct it's it's there's two things that are coming from there one the diorite the diorite that comes off the Blue Mountains or the Abajo is everywhere in this red pottery that's one thing that and that actually you can trace that with ICP to two sources the other thing is is these these clays like I said they have to have higher iron content in them and there's just no clays in South southwestern Colorado that have been found yet that have that type of iron content I believe it was sort of like the the potlatch or the potluck type thing you bring a dish with you I believe that was part of it but again that begs the question what are you getting in return right very well could be theirs yeah I wouldn't unless I carried it in my pocket or something it would be a pain in the rear it would be a pain in the rear but those pots yes Todd yes ma'am yes yes yes screams well just those southern wing walls we'll find those but we've never seen them although I've seen postholes that would appear to to show some sort of a screen or near the the fire hearth like a crescent-shaped the row of post holes that's true so what are you suggesting that so you're you're thinking it possibly portable screens that's a good idea I put some thought into that so are you thinking full height type screens or really okay very interesting I'm thinking when we when we finished with that structure and finished with the floors of these other structures some of these questions might be a little a little more clear or some of the answers might be a little little more clear and I'm hoping that we'll find some other features similar to that that might be maybe we can do some Diagnostics between them but but I think that's a good idea I know the one in McPhee village was they even talked about it from all the way back then we had debates we didn't know what these things were but we believe they're related to some sort of ritual behavior what we thought about is is and I I tried it with my arm but it didn't quite work but taking a piece of string and going from hole and doing an arc to see if the there was something that was actually swinging and you would expect to find some sort of a pattern to it but that didn't happen either didn't pair to be used for anything like that so well folks do you've been a great audience thanks for coming out I appreciate it you you

Channel: Verde Valley Archaeology Center

Views: 12,540

Rating: 4.9523811 out of 5

Keywords: Dave Dave, Dove Creek, Colorado, Champagne Spring Ruins, Anasazi, Pueblo 1, Archaeology, Anthropology, Excavations, Excavation, Arizona, Camp Verde, Sedona, Cortez Colorado, Ruins, scalelabs, scalelab network, scalelab, scalelabnetwork

Id: AJ-E4zzPgNw

Length: 69min 50sec (4190 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2013