Paul Lindberg - Geologic Features of Archaeological Sites in Northern Arizona & the Colorado Plateau

without any other innovations goodbye okay thank you jim yeah uh being a geologist i see things a little different than probably many people that are involved with archaeology may see when they look at a ruin or an archaeological site typically i look for things that are a little out of the ordinary for instance if you find a quartzite boulder that is in an area of verde lake beds where all the rocks are soft it clearly makes a difference it came from somewhere it was brought there so tonight i'll talk a little bit about some geological aspects that we find in our backyard going up onto the colorado plateau a bit first i'd like to acknowledge my partner of 57 years here phyllis very supportive of what what i keep doing anyway uh we're going to get the lights up there's a number of features that i think you'll find uh fascinating here hopefully is in the four corners area where the four states of colorado new mexico utah and arizona come together it's sort of the focus of of some of this talk and prior to 1971 uh we visited like any other tourist uh visited all the national parks mesa verde and so on but since 1971 uh when i was transferred to work in the jerome area we began to get more and more involved with uh archaeological sites and in the area we live in is a simple geologic map this is the state map of arizona the sedona verde valley area at the lower part san francisco peaks in the middle in the grand canyon at the top in general as you're going in these rocks you're going from older rocks down where you see the brown color on the bottom pre-cambrian rocks that are almost 2 billion years old you move up onto the to the plateau the blue colored rocks would be paleozoic rocks that would be up as young as 250 million years old and then things like the san francisco peaks are literally born yesterday the sunset crater erupted about the time that the battle of hastings was fought less than two thousand years ago so we have a quite a variety and when we look at the traditional concepts of how natives got into north and south america as the waning stages of the last ice age you had both a a corridor between the coeur d'alerin ice age and the big laurentide ice sheet that extends clear up into greenland today and it probably also had routes along the coast where people traveled by boat down but certainly by something like 12 000 years ago uh natives have had gone clear to tierra del fuego in in the southern part of south america so the the people moved around and they moved rather rapidly when we look at some of these ancient projectile points uh this is at a time when this is about all that's left we don't have much in the way of any hard building sites they had temporary shelters but the clovis and folsom points have been found in mastodon and bison kills if you were here as recently as 15 000 to maybe 11 000 years ago this might have been a scene here in the verde valley the megafauna that you see in this picture are now entirely extinct if you go to the la brea tar pits in downtown los angeles you'll see remains of macedon giant bear the giant swath the camel even the horse was here they all went extinct it wasn't until the spaniards lost horses and the indians took up the challenge and began to breed their own horses that we have horses back in north america mastodons were more common in the lower 48 states and they're smaller than the main mammoth which is found typically further north and the dentition is quite different so if you see the grinding tooth of the mammoth you can see that it's a very flat tooth whereas the mastodon tooth which would have been in this area here you see that there's a lot more of a dentition sticking up in vernal utah if you ever get up there you want to see the reconstruction of a mastodon that's me trying to get out of the way and in our own verde valley here there are mastodon tracks plus uh other tracks that are some kind of ambulate the late harvey nininger the meteorologist or the meteorite expert back in the 30s excavated some lion tracks right up in here lion tracks that had five to six inch pads so these were very large animals to photograph them we put in a little water to show you the depression and if you go up above montezuma castle you can see more of these tracks in a in soft travertine now this is my field of expertise is in in mining geology i've worked all over north america alaska canada some in south america and a little bit in australia and so on but jerome is a particular interest and what's particularly fascinating about this is that as you look down into where the the open pit is on the united verde mine that was a site that native americans had had quarried pigments both iron oxide and copper oxide pigments and uh off in a distance you can see the san francisco peaks sedona would be over in here the verde valley in between we'll be talking a little bit more about that but the reason for showing you this picture is that the spanish explorers came here because they had heard about the the hopi mines so-called and they were searching for their eldorado and their cities of gold and they came to where the discovery site is where you see the star on may 8 1585. it's a long time back so this is one of the first incursions of the spaniards into this part of the world they came specifically looking for gold all they found was worthless copper so they left the next day but this is an example of some of the things that you find in the oxidized cap rock of jerome the green is is malachite uh the blue is azurite azure blue this is native copper with a patina of malachite on it and you see iron oxide in the bottom here which is uh can can be anywhere from yellow to orange to red and so on when i was mapping early on in jerome we did a lot of field work down below jerome about a mile down i found in the tepeet sandstone just above the great unconformity where the base of the paleozoic rocks i found these two rakhmatates one was exposed this is the other one right here i later dug that out and checked it out and right up in this region right in here were bits and pieces of malachite and azurite that had been ground or were being ground by the native americans but what fascinated me is that sitting there if you imagine two hands grinding in in these in these rakhmatates the center line aims right at twosiegoot monument so this is a very special little place quick look at the geology of this area we've got the pre-cambrian rocks down below the great unconformity that's about separating about a one and a quarter billion years between the older rocks and the younger rocks of the paleozoic era the rocks on the left are what you would find in the grand canyon the rocks that we see above sedona would be these rocks here and because of the tilt of the land we see these rocks over on the jerome side of the valley so if you add jerome to sedona it's basically the same thing as grand canyon there are slight differences and what's happening is that during this entire time of deposition the land is subsiding very much like new orleans as today and so all of the blue colorations are indicating limestone formed in shallow water when these rocks were being laid down on the tepee sandstone we were way south of the equator as as where as north america is drifting northward during the time of the redwall limestone a very important aquifer in the sedona area we were sitting at the equator by the time at the end of the paleozoic era when the great mass extinction took place 250 million years ago we were well north of the equator so we've been on the move for a long time here in uptown sedona this is a stratigraphic column showing some of the rock types we have in town town of sedona is built on the hermit formation this is a soft unit as you'll soon see and we have hard rocks up above it that are cliff forming rocks and if you go up by where midgeley bridge is located you're on solid rock again so when you view west sedona you can see this big flat bench upon which the city is built and that's built on the hermit formation and it's a it's a very relatively soft rock with cliffs up above it it's a very unique setting for a town and when you look at the hermit formation in a road cut this is a road cut near where the present-day sedona high school would be when they first widened the road back in the 70s they had to blast this and a year later it's all falling apart so the herm information would not make a good uh structural material for building a a wall in an archaeological site but you get up in into the cliff forming rocks and you see a big massive sandstones the schnebly hill formation and coconut sandstone and so on they're very durable rocks a typical ruin in the sedona area and all through the american southwest you'll have these these strange undercuts where the indians built their dwellings and if you see this white zone through here that's what we call caliche it's it's calcium carbonate it's what makes water hard if you want an experiment in your local drinking water take a tumbler of a glass tumbler from your kitchen fill it with ice cubes let the ice cubes melt and you'll see a little film of white on the bottom there's that much dissolved calcium in the water that's coming through and so when you have water that is freezing and thawing freezing and thawing freezing and thawing it tends to spall out these undercuts and that's what makes that little kind of a weeping zone where water is coming out make it more common a lot of things you'll see are not man-made these are our natural arcuate fractures we've a conquital fracture up on west twin buttes looking off toward the chapel area this picture was taken back in the 70s late 70s it's all chock-a-block full of houses now you're looking off at cathedral rock here's jerome in the distance in between is a big verde valley filled with young lake beds and to show you a little bit of the history of this when the land was first raised up here back about 70 75 million years ago during what we call the laramide oraginate north america was sliding westward the east pacific rise was moving eastward they too collided and raised the landscape so this would be the site of where jerome would be this would be the site of where sedona would be here's here's oak creek fault anyway during this time the land was uplifted and if you continue over to the left of this toward prescott prescott would have been much higher than modern-day flagstaff and for the next 50 million years you eroded this landscape off with streams heading toward the plateau they were later covered with 10 to 15 million year old basalt lava flows that are shown in grey and underneath that is gravel channels that are carrying material from the prescott area onto the modern day colorado plateau about 10 million years ago the crust of the earth in western north america was beginning to migrate eastward and we have what's called the basin and range extension so all the way from uptown sedona clear to the foothills of the sierra nevada mountains in california the land has been pulled apart and dropped and stretched so we in the process of making this depression we call this a graben or a rift valley and it's filled in with lake beds a montezuma castle and montezuma well would be built in these lake beds that were once at this level here so we have the rocks the precambrian rocks over in the jerome side they're well underneath the sedona area so that monocline that you see there is what makes the the rocks the younger rocks preserved in the sedona area and exposed in the in the in the jerome area looking down at the verde lake beds this was a from a hot air balloon you can see the verde lake beds all freshwater limestones if you will there's so much lime that is being eroded out of the cliffs this is uh verde lake beds up close in wiki up canyon just east of camp verde in the southern part of around camp verde you had both gypsum beds and evaporite salt just like table salt so this is a very common trade item to the native americans salt was worth its weight in gold and they could they could transport that all over as a trade item one of the recent things that is of interest to me is this a model that the oak creek uh watershed council has made this shows the the outline of the oak creek watershed coming down from flagstaff down through sedona to its outlet where it joins the verde river and the reason for talking about water is that water is key in this area we've got a lot of dry valleys we do have oak creek of course coming down through sedona and coming down but all of the blue arrows are our water that are passing through the subsurface in caves in the red wall limestone and they don't pop through until you're down by page springs down here where you have spring creek lola my springs bubbling springs page springs and what is interesting is that that water is coming out of even though it is is coming through as artesian water at this point in space it's oxygen isotope tells us that it was born at elevations of 6 800 feet or higher which means that this is water being transported from the san francisco peaks and so what happens is that on the plateau we're recharging both as snow and rainfall if you look at the cliffs around us today after our heavy rains you'll see where the water is just glistening on the banks this is a big storage basin sandstones are very porous and they hold a lot of water so water is infiltrating and moving through these these cave systems in the in the red wall limestone and popping through as artesian springs on a big grab and fault over here near near the page springs area bubbling springs is is a very big outlet and the reason for showing these is that this was site of a lot of indian ruins they had ready access to water they could irrigate crops lola mice and a lot of when the anglos came they occupied places that are off limits to a lot of archaeologists today so there's a lot of sites along the uh these springs where there were probably a lot more sites than we're aware of we'll take a quick look at some of the archaeological sites on the colorado plateau uh some of the more famous ones mesa verde and the cliff palace area the beautiful tower with with the round uh outline uh go to keith seal uh i don't know how many in this audience have been to keat seal it's a long hike in but it's it's well worth it if you ever had the chance we went in many years ago and camped here and you'll notice again these these undercut areas where there's a soft layer that creates the cavity just like you see over here there's a softer spot and so you begin forming these arches that work their way back and you get freeze-thaw freestyle every night in the wintertime and helps these things to spall a little out of focus but betonic and ruin is a classic one of these huge alcoves years ago i was flying in an airplane over this part of the world at about 40 000 feet in a commercial airliner and this stood out as like a sore thumb you could see it very very plainly choco canyon is a neat place what is interesting is that in the back wall of this cliff here the native americans had recognized that a big chunk was ready to come down and so they built uh stone pillars underneath there to try to reinforce it the park service back then was hurting for money just like it is now and the recommendations were to stabilize that before it fell in but in january 1941 it collapsed and buried this part of the ruin looking down at choco canyon or pueblo bonito you can see the choco wash out into beyond many archaeologists claim that because the wash deepened and and the water table dropped that that's the reason for abandonment i just don't buy that people who were skilled enough to make these engineering wonders uh were skilled enough to make a simple dam here uh i don't believe that's the reason i think there are other reasons uh non-geological that created the collapse of an abandonment of of uh choco canyon one of the things that you see here i lost a series of photographs a few years back and this is the only one i could i could resurrect but you'll see very unusual places where the walls have caved in some of them defy logic in some places it's obvious that stream erosion undercut the bank and they rebuilt the walls so the walls were tipping over and then they rebuilt it go to canyon to shade you can see the white house ruined a very small ruin in the alcove there's the plane of weakness and these are manganese stains that are coming down you'll see down in the canyon bottom a larger pueblo so most of the people were living in the bottom it's probably quite likely that the elite were living up in the more pristine location hole in the rock near wapatki is a is a fascinating place you can see in the lower left picture you're on a monocline there's a monocline is a one-sided fold and if you look at the top picture these holes in the wall it's hard to know when they reconstruct the the walls whether these are actually true to the initial wall but that's at the end of that wall right there these were probably archaeological astronomical sites we happened to be there when the moon full moon came up and you're looking out through one of the doorways looking off to the east there are all kinds of uh nearby petroglyphs that are that must have something to do with with astronomical sightings uh maybe ken can can enlighten us on this a little bit later up near comb wash utah there's some again right along a cliff face there's a stream bed underneath here some of this is sand dune deposits but again the preference is to build under these alcoves just north of bluff utah you can see uh sandstone cliffs uh alternating hard and soft usually there's clay layers in these soft spots a little harder sandstone alternating hard and soft and then a big cap of hard sandstone but if you look close you can see a ruin here we visited this site several years back great place to get away from it all in the grand canyon where they probably didn't have to worry about any enemies coming at them uh here's the colorado river coming down through unkar rapids this is unkar creek coming down and on the delta that's a giant indian ruin this is the largest indian settlement in the bottom of the grand canyon now we look locally at some of our sites and again you get into the coconito sandstone at walnut canyon and not only did they take advantage of these undercut areas but by building the walls up they're actually strengthening the top to prevent it from collapsing so it serves a dual purpose uh montezuma castle of course built on verde lake beds these are very soft but as long as protected by a little bit harder layer on the top these undercut areas have a nice south-facing view and it's very likely that some of that soft rock was was cut out excavated by human hands the the ruin is not very deep but it's it's multi-storied one of your field trips coming up will go to the middle of cavetts now this is down in the soft verde lake beds and again you have a harder layer up here which is protecting this bank the cavetts are all along here they're just probably hundreds of them and these are combinations of both natural and human doug i was fascinated with this view of one of the undercuts because you can see the natural opening here and there's a soft layer that is that is weathering out kind of just falling apart we have a word for this in geology everything decrepitates with time it's something we can all relate to but if you look carefully up and when you're at middle of caves look up at these at the back you're looking up at the base of a stream bed those are cobbles of you can see them up in here at the base of a stream bed of tearing up harder parts of the verde lake beds freshwater limestone so you're looking at the bottom of an old river channel cut into the lake beds tuesday wood of course has been totally rebuilt but they add the sense of building on the mound and using the flat land for agricultural purposes unlike modern real estate developers you go to palatki and you see the cliff dwellings on the south facing slope but if you look carefully beyond some of the ruins you'll see another one of these zones that helps to create an undercut and as water moves outward it again it freezes freezes and thaws so if you think of our weather up in this part of the world just about every night for many months in the wintertime it'll freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw you'll keep spalling that off whereas you have harder rock above and harder rock below so given enough time it'll make that alcove in which you have a ruin build sacred mountain is sitting on lake beds those are birdie lake beds on top of schnebly hill formation which is just popping out in a little bit of outcrop in inside of montezuma well you can see the ruins on the far wall when when montezuma well was first built none of this collapse had taken place water was issuing out on the top surface and if you've ever been to havasu canyon i don't have a picture of havasu but right up here where you stand to look into the into the dwelling you'll see little arcuate places where the travertine is building up water was issuing from the very top of this surface up here and and spilling out as a dome this is a travertine dome built of calcium carbonate so where where we were looking was at this rim of that dome the bigger dome is about a mile across and many people don't even realize it exists but it's it's uh far bigger and so the original dome was was centered pretty much where the the modern well is located but as the well is beginning to eat out the lower part it collapsed and again just like uh at page springs you've got caves down in the red wall limestone and when they meet a uh grab and fault they emerge the water table is is right up here so under under pressure it's coming down from high on the plateau and popping up as a artesian spring just south of where we live we live over in broken arrow and the cathedral of the holy cross is just on this side of west twin buttes right up here is a ruined site jim graceffa helped me several years back we mapped this site up on top of the mountain there was seven contiguous rooms here and one isolated room and a little plaza these were sighting points they had to be built for special hilltop site purposes and i was always puzzled as to exactly what was going on here so as you'll see a little bit later i visited this site on june 21st of one year to see if it had any astronomical significance when you go up into the upper part of the verde river you see an entirely different kind of a dwelling site there was a historic ranch down in the bottom of the valley where they had water and there you can go up there and you can find pot chards all over the place and devotage of chipped church and so on there were obviously native americans living down in the valley bottom but they must have had enemies because up on the hillside here's part of a wall you see these rather crude buildings both at the mali g and morgan sites here you can see the wall built there's hardly any rooms inside see these were probably refuges so when they had enemies come in they could they could quickly go from the valley bottom up to these refuge sites but in this particular one there were a few rooms and if you see these uh rhyolite boulder or rhyolite slabs they came from sullivan buttes up here they were carried a long way all of the rest of the wall is built of local basalt flow so this was a special site this may have been for a chief or somebody somebody special things like this are intriguing to me because they're out of place they're not local there were things that were brought in from a great distance to make something very special south of camp verde is another called brown springs it's a ruin and you can see some of the club members up on top this again is a big travertine dome and this was was uh it would have been a site very much like montezuma well before it collapsed so it leaves you to wonder you know if some of these sites such as this may have been occupied when it collapsed so there's a lot of a lot of unknowns that we we we just don't know all the answers to now some archaeological sites are very very distinctive and are clearly related to some kind of a geologic feature or sacred location and among them are sinkholes and blowholes possibly portals to the underworld which is heavy in the native american myths up at wapotki you can see the classic pueblo up on high ground but if you move off to this to the north you can see a plaza must be a elder hostel class or somebody here and then down below is a as one of the furthest north ball courts but where the arrow is pointing is a blowhole and a blowhole is it gets its name from the fact that you have a cave underneath in the uh in the in this case the kaibab limestone uh a lot of air space so the ground this would be a cross section here's the surface this is at depth water table would be down in here somewhere even though these were carved by running water the water table progressively dropped down and it's now filled with air cavity so when you have a high pressure coming in air will will enter into the underground chamber when you have a low pressure coming in air will blow out and these had to be important to the native americans as as key connections to the underworld uh at the time this picture was taken there was a high pressure and air was going down a few years back i had the chance to bring a bunch of texas students they were all grade school students and it was a low pressure area moving in this was roaring out of there like a jet engine and picture about about 12 12 year old girls standing around with their hair standing straight up in the air this big outblast of air coming out near wapatki is called the citadel and again you see both the local sandstone and up on this lava remains up in here is a large pueblo if you go up there you you you see these crude ruins a combination of both basalt lava and sandstone uh nothing too sophisticated like you see in charcoal canyon but a clear view of san francisco peaks which was sacred and if you look to the south you see this big sinkhole this is probably a collapse of another one of those large underground caves down in in kaibab limestone that's just below the level here i've never hiked down into the hole but i i wouldn't doubt that there isn't in some kind of a of a blowhole somewhere in this system and you wonder if if indeed all of this was here when they when the indians occupied the site or whether part of this is constantly moving anyway it's it's a site that i think the native americans must have been intrigued with i've done a particular study and this is something that if anybody wishes to download off of the arizona geological survey if you go to this website azgs.az.gov you can download this report on sinkholes in the sedona area and sinkholes in archaeology are intriguing to me because some of them were here when when the indians occupied this area some of them are brand new devil's kitchen for instance right north of sedona this is uptown sedona uptown sedona here this is west sedona the devil's kitchen first collapsed in the 1880s and again in 1989 and again in 1995 we have a whole series and there's seven of them around the town uh every one of these sinkholes is located on fracture zones that are trending to the to the northwest and this is out near this is uh out beyond 525 heading up toward palatki uh this has now got a name of dolan wash turkey tank sinkhole there's some ruins near here and in between is a is a a site near a rv park where some of the pavement collapsed a few years back and the owner in this infinite wisdom filled it in what happens is that with the water table at about this point the red wall caverns are building up they're dissolving limestone and when they get the caves get too big to support the roof they collapse upward and they break through devil's kitchen broke through in historic time this is a 1983 picture of the north wall of devil's kitchen notice the tree roots up here and the caliche this indicates that the rocks have come out of this not too far ahead of 1983. if you go to 1989 after the northern third collapsed that's the edge of the picture you just saw right there on the far wall that's one of these northwest trending joints if you get up in an airplane look down at the country you'll see all these joints going through the country that help shape the land it's entirely covered with with caliche this calcium carbonate you could see this from airport mesa and it looked like a white building off in the distance back in 1995 that's the white wall you saw this big chunk landed in behind this one pivoted out from from this surface right here so now you see rainwater is removing material now at devil's kitchen i see no sign whatsoever of an archaeological site so this is not known to the native americans and devil's kitchen if you when i mapped it in 1990 you can see arcuate fractures coming out clear out to here so ultimately this whole thing will be a hole and all of the jeeps used to park right here until we made the recommendation as they park up here you go up to to palatki that's the visitor center that's the ruins up in the north end of the of the alcove just over this little bank is this giant sinkhole again i think the native americans were very cognizant of this feature this is a map of the surface what is fascinating to me is that red canyon is draining down here and it used to flow out here and come out near the parking lot that you park in when you visit palatki uh a natural flood built a a small levee here water now comes in right into the sinkhole right up to a drain and and the water just disappears right down right down this hole right there and right up in here is a blowhole so you look at a longitudinal section and a cross section uh the longitudinal section you can see where water is coming in and draining if you look at the cross section you can see all of these these vertical joints that are helping to control a a limestone cavern at depth that is dissolving away that's phyllis standing near the sinkhole hopefully that she didn't lose her down the drain but uh when when we have a quick melt water and a heavy storm water will come in and it'll it'll go down that drain like water going down a bathtub you can hear it dropping down in the rocks notice the pictographs now there's a ledge they were probably standing here when those pictographs were made so it could have been that this was the level of the bottom of the sinkhole at the time that pictographs were made also straight above the uh the drain point are these very curious markings that must have been man-made we saw the same things above v-bar b and i have no idea i cannot explain them based on any known geological reason why these would be built like this these grooves but the fact that we see the same thing above v bar v makes me think that there's something special going on that we don't yet understand over the blow hole here are some pictographs and above above the blowhole is one of the most amazing pictographs i've ever seen anywhere there's a rock ledge here and an archer with a drawn bow waiting in ambush for the deer that are coming and just off the picture over here is another hunter chasing the deer this is the furthest east or yeah furthest west sinkhole a bunch of us went down inside and uh i showed them around this is a about a mile west of of high rode 525 heading up to pilate and in the bottom of that we found some cordage that clearly indicated that this was occupied by native americans there's another small blowhole again it has no archaeological sites this is brand new this is a new sinkhole just beginning to form now where does some of this stuff come from this picture you saw earlier and a lot of points these old points have been found all over north america but according to peter pillis the ones that have been found locally are made of local stone they're not imported from the east one of the common sources of chert is coming out of the kaibab limestone some of them have sponge fossils inside of them this is a chert concretion about six inches in diameter and as the limestone weathers away this is a chunk found up in mark's draw on the east side of sedona you can see the the chert concretion here with a sponge fossil in it and a chunk of limestone that has not yet dissolved away cross-section of a modern uh modern sponge on the left and the sponge fossil on the right between the palatki and honanki sites jerry earhart and crew were were checking out some of these small sites and uh above it you see some of the uh obsidian that's brought in from the plateau probably as young as a million years or eight million years old uh you find shirts from both the perkinsville area and and the kaibab limestone and some of the solicified sponge fossils on the jerome side of the valley all of the chart is coming out of the devonian martin dolomite it looks quite different you may have heard of the perkinsville church this is on the perkins hill road up south of the verde river and this is again a variation of the martin dolomite where iron oxide is penetrating upward leaving behind these colored shirts red yellow orange and so on and even on the plateau you may find some rare projectile points made of petrified wood north of chino valley is uh about a foot thick seam of of pipestone it's a rather poor quality it takes a lot of digging to get in anything solid those little white spots you see in here are flecks of mica pipestone is also called catlinite and it's a decomposed volcanic ash with an iron oxide flavoring some obsidian sites basalt obsidian is typically black while rhinolite obsidian is typically more gray several years ago ron krug and a crew of us took this trip up off of route 66 and came up to partridge creek presley wash and black tank obsidian sites and these are examples and i'll i'll give these samples to the the center so you have them for permanent display but it shows the different kinds of obsidian coming from different areas uh from government mountain north of i-40 this is a that classic conquital fracture in the black obsidian it's uh almost can see through it in places now stone tools when you find a piece of quartzite out into verde valley where the rocks are soft that was brought here at a considerable distance uh similarly up near uh bluff utah naturally eroded stream cobbles can be hafted by man to make a an axe head so a lot of times it isn't just all done uh manufactured out of a block of rock they did use things that were were available just at the old camp verde ranger station that's uh sharon olsen holding a diabase salt pick and that came from a pre-cambrian source area way to the west of the soft rocks that you find near the salt mine just show you a few petroglyphs you go up into the san juan area totally different from what we have locally they defy logic some of them make sense they look like birds like a stork-like animal but what these represent is anybody's guess but one of the things that you see that is quite neat are the the the re-digging or re-cutting of of old panels you can see the old petroglyphs here when you have a horse this is the time of the uh the time of the spanish horse introduced into the north america even to some graffiti up here ae so these are built one on top the other over a long period of time look at some of our local petroglyph sites and you see probably some of the oldest that may go back 10 000 years or so typically these scratch marks that peter pillis talks about and hand prints where you put your hand up and blow pigment against the hand to leave that impression one of my favorites in this secret spot up to the north is these ancient bearpaw petroglyphs that are almost obliterated by erosion beyond sacred mountain that you see in the distance is a site called the bigfoot site the bigfoot got its name from this large footprint and somebody had told me that since they went back here that this has now gone missing been stolen i i can't verify that but that's what i'm told but when you look on a vertical face and you see these manganese patinas manganese oxide has that kind of a shiny blue black color when you dig through that you see the true color of the stone underneath and some of the petroglyphs on flat surfaces are being weathered so rapidly you see some footprints over here you see petroglyphs that are that are decomposing this rock is spalling and you're into enigmatic things you you can't really tell whether that's a true one or not and clearly some of the sites have old repatinated petroglyphs and you also find rock mutates nearby pilate has all kinds of different ages of pictographs to charcoal overlays on top that are probably navajo that are quite late comers red tank draw is a very key area famous for its its petroglyphs and some of them are almost so obscure that you have to be very observant to see them you have a lot of lichen covered surfaces the wampus kitty that is famous you see it on the logo the shirts here it's kind of enigmatic as to what it was a mountain lion or whatever but one of the things that intrigues me about that wampus kitty and whoever named it i don't know but if you go uh 46 miles to the northwest in in basalt rock you see something with similar kind of feet it's almost like a look-alike you can see how these petroglyphs up in here are still preserved it looks like there was a whole bunch in here that are disappearing here we look at here's bud looking at some of the petroglyphs near badger springs carved in granite these are all pre-cambrian granites very very very hard not like the sandstones now we'll talk about a little bit about the solstice sites and i don't want to upstage ken here but this is the famous site of course at vbrv where we had a chance to put up that scaffold and look at these up close if you look at that site these are one meter grids centered on that particular we just took that as a random point to measure from but you can see that this big arcuate fracture is uh causing that block to move outward and in the process these stones here which were part of the bedrock have moved outward as you'll see here in a moment this is the the center of our grid spacing but if you look at the grazing light coming through this uh saddle to the south you can see these what we call slicken sides vertical grooves this was a fault surface that made that vertical wall and so it's difficult to tell which side went up and which went down but ken thinks that some of the stones that were put in here had significant part to play when the sun came through and casts light on the face of the petroglyph panel this is the scaffold that was put up in 2011. uh it's todd bostwick uh looking at the nomens these are the two called nomens g n uh o m o n uh they cast the shadow down onto the face of the petroglyph panel and these are natural stones that have moved outward but instead of falling to the ground this is rotated outward and and sticks out now in in front of that uniform face that's a planned view looking down at it this is a a side view looking at the face of the cliff and it's these two stones that make the gnomons that cast the shadow but when we got up on the scaffold you could see that there was stones placed in uh hard quartzites that you don't find in this area jammed in there to to keep those rocks from falling and they've been there for for a very very long time and they've done their job we couldn't see these things from below there's the two the two shadows coming down that ken will talk about when you go up to visit you can see this big natural fracture and if you look at this piece right in here that's a very special piece because that was flaked by human hands a side view of it shows a profile of what ken thinks to be the profile of the san francisco peaks like you would see it from homology or somewhere off to the east and you'll notice that the you've got manganese patina on both sides this has been chipped away and you can see the percussion point right here where that face was was purposely manipulated by human hands there's ken talking about his some of the solstice markings when you go up in the headwaters of the verde river this is another site that is quite fascinating if you look in the distance you can see one of the sullivan buttes this is a rhyolite plug that sticks up and when the sun rises it rises against this face as viewed from a panel over on this side of the cliff right up on the edge of the cliff is a petroglyph panel this is a view in the summertime uh exactly what those all signify i'm not sure but when you go there on december 21st in a cold morning and you look off and wait for the sun to come up there it is rising tangentially right up that slope so this is a sunwashing site another one that ken has worked on these are cut in basalt the panel is up in here again with these concentric circles and ken has pictures of this i believe in his book where the sun rock up above casts a shadow through here on certain solstice days on top of i showed you this before the ruin on top of west twin buttes i climbed up here one morning on june 21st to see if there was any anything of archaeological uh astronomical significance and to my surprise looking off the pinnacle that i'm on is this is the shadow of west twin buttes here but the shadow of east twin buttes lands right in the in the uh notch of cathedral rocks so the next morning phyllis and i went to the saddle climbed up when the sun is coming up over the horizon and uh it lines right up like a giant sundial and so going up on mun's mountain looking back you can see here's here's west wind buttes this is eastern buttes you can see we're looking in the direction of the sun right through that notch so i'm convinced in my own mind that this was something that the indians would have recognized so hopefully it gives you a little insight in in some of our local archaeology related to some geological features anybody has any questions i'll try to answer them of the north american mega five uh jared diamond and the minority of others uh hold the position that the extinction was a result of uh early man actually uh performing their degradations if you will on the megaphone do you have any views about that i'm not sure i understood all of the questions but well the but jared diamond the university of california suggests that the early megafauna the ground sloths and others and mastodons and mammoths particularly in mastodons became extinct because of the depredations of early man in north america others don't hold that view he seems to have the minority opinion that that is the case do you have any thoughts about that yeah i think man had had something to do with it you have to remember there was some dramatic climatic changes at that time we went from the ice age into modern time when uh you had a major change of weather very rather quickly we went to uh from a cool climate tempered climate into a not quite a desert climate like we have today but quite quite a change rapidly all of the giant megafauna that was here require long gestation periods and any animal that is hunted even peripherally when you when you kill off a certain number and reduce the population to a certain point it just catastrophically crashes i'm convinced in my own mind that man had had played a good big role in this because there was so many animals went extinct animals like the sabletooth tiger that preyed on these bigger animals if the bigger animal went down they did too it's it's a question that cannot be fully answered one of the things that has been found in recent years is that if you've if you've heard of the so-called hobbit people in indonesia diminutive people that they thought may be a different kind of a race when you isolate certain populations on islands or isolated locations they tend to diminish in size and one of the holdouts of the mammoth was on an island off of uh siberian coast and they think that they lived up until about 4 000 years ago maybe even younger and they were diminutive they were smaller so and they were away from hunting pressure i don't know if i can fully answer the question but it's i feel that was a combination of both man and perhaps diseases and a radical change of climate that helped push him over the cliff the test will come next thank everyone for coming you

Channel: Verde Valley Archaeology Center

Views: 67,160

Rating: 4.8290076 out of 5

Keywords: Colorado Plateau (Location), Northern Arizona (Location), Arizona, Verde Valley, Archaeology, scalelabs, scalelab network, scalelab, scalelabnetwork

Id: xD8MxOt4vJI

Length: 64min 50sec (3890 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2013