PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF A MULTISCALAR ANALYSIS OF TURQUOISE PROCUREMENT PATTERNS ACROSS THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

Sharon Hull

Department of Geological Sciences, University of Manitoba
7:30 P.M. Tuesday, January 17, 2011
Albuquerque Museum of Art and History
2000 Mountain Road NW

Based on characterization of turquoise provenance regions in the western United States and the analysis of a small sample set of turquoise artifacts from Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites, it is clear that the movement of turquoise involved complex relationships between these early inhabitants. Examining these data through a multiscalar framework enhances our understanding of turquoise procurement and trade networks through time and space. For example, results of our dataset show that: 1) on a large macro-regional scale, turquoise is procured from several different provenance regions across the American West, 2) on a regional scale, turquoise procurement patterns of three major great houses show differences in their procurement strategies, and 3) at the local scale, within Chaco Canyon, differences in turquoise procurement patterns between Pueblo Bonito and small sites in Marcia’s Rincon are noted. These turquoise procurement patterns support the assumption that more than one lineage group lived in Ancestral Pueblo settlements, including Chaco Canyon during its florescence.

Sharon Hull received her B.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a double major in Anthropology and Geography, with honors in Anthropology. She received her M.A. in Anthropology from Eastern New Mexico University. While at ENMU she reconstructed a mammoth mandible and set up an exhibit at Blackwater Draw Museum. She has participated in a number of excavations that include the Bluff great house in southwestern Utah and the Pinnacle site in central New Mexico. She has also worked at Moon House for the Bureau of Land Management during a summer internship. During her M.A. research, working with Mostafa Fayek and F. Joan Mathien, she developed a new method to “fingerprint” turquoise sources and a tested it to determine its efficacy when applied to turquoise artifacts. For her dissertation at the University of Manitoba, she continues to refine this method and has investigated the turquoise procurement and exchange patterns between small sites in Chaco Canyon and three great houses (Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, and Salmon Ruin and Aztec West in the San Juan drainage) thought to be regional centers of the Chaco World from the eighth through thirteenth centuries.

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Note: Dues for 2012 are now payable. Please download and fill out the attached renewal form and mail it with your check, or bring both to the January meeting. Note that by vote of the membership last April, dues for individual and family members were raised by $5 in each category.

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MINUTES OF THE ALBUQUERQUE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY

December 13, 2011

President Ann Carson convened the meeting at 7:30 p.m.

The minutes of the November meeting were approved as published.

COMMITTEE REPORTS :

Archiving : Karen Armstrong announced that the sessions will resume in January after a holiday hiatus.

ELECTION: The Nominating Committee’s slate of officers for 2012, Marc Thompson, President; Gretchen Obenauf and Carol Condie, Vice Presidents; Laurie Dudasik, Secretary; Ray Shortridge, Treasurer, Helen Crotty, Director at Large, and Ann Carson, Director as Past President, was elected by acclamation.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: Gretchen Obenauf announced thatin the absence of Treasurer Ray Shortridge, she would collect dues. The amounts for 2012 were raised to $25 for electronic newsletters and $30 for printed newsletters or $35 and $30 for sustaining memberships. Student and Institutional membership dues remain the same at $10.

SPEAKER S: Gretchen Obenauf introduced the speakers, Laurie Dudasik and Carol Condie, who provided the summaries below.

Respectfully submitted,

---- Laurie Dudasik, Secretary

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Digging Fort Massachusetts by Laurie Dudasik

Fort Massachusetts was established in 1852 in Colorado’s San Luis Valley to control Native American raids on local Hispanic settlements, but it was relocated six miles to the south in 1858 and renamed Fort Garland. The archaeology program of Adams State College conducted its first field school at the Fort Massachusetts site in 2011. Goals of this year's work included locating the fort's walls, determining what type of equipment the soldiers utilized, and what fort life was like for the troops stationed there. The field school was able to confirm the exact location of the fort and will continue the project in the summer of 2012.

Two Archaeological Conservancy Tours—Carol J. Condie

The 2011 weekend tour of western New York included a stop at Old Fort Niagara, on the eastern bank of the Niagara, near Youngstown. The original fort built by the French in 1678, was later replaced and expanded to its present size in 1755, when tensions between the French and the British increased. It fell to the British in 1759, but was ceded to the U.S. after the Revolutionary War and again returned after its recapture by the British in the War of 1812. We also stopped at the sites of two Seneca villages that are now Archaeological Conservancy preserves, one occupied in the 1500s, the other in the 1600s. They appeared to be merely mown meadows. Unlike most sites in the Southwest, sites like these are discovered only when the ground is disturbed by plowing or for development. The final stop was at the Ganondagon State Historic Site, 10 or 15 miles southeast of Rochester. Ganondagon was the largest Seneca village after 1670 and supposedly contained 150 long houses. An actual long house, complete with interior details and artifacts, was constructed several years ago by modern Senecas using techniques handed down from generation to generation and is now a field trip destination for local school kids and tourists. [Bonnie Bishop-Dudasik, Laurie’s mother, grew up in this area and was told by Seneca friends that if a woman’s mother and sisters, all of whom lived together in the long house, disapproved of a husband, they instructed their daughter and sister to divorce him. She usually complied.)

The 10-day Chesapeake Bay Area tour in 2007 visited a number of historic sites, starting with the Shirley Plantation on the north bank of the James River between Richmond and Williamsburg. The Shirley is the oldest active plantation in Virginia and is one of the oldest family-owned businesses in the US. Construction of the residence was begun in 1638. The family still lives on the upper floors of the mansions and operates the plantation. The next stop was Jamestown, settled in 1607 by 214 “business people” on the James. Under Captain John Smith they built a fort and several other buildings and began raising tobacco, which they sold to England and, surprisingly, to the Indians. The winter of 1609 was so severe that all but 60 of the colonists died.

Next was the Rosewell Plantation, on the York River in Gloucester County, Virginia, construction of which began in 1725. The mansion, said to be the “largest and finest of American houses of the Colonial period” was three stories high, with a large wine cellar. The house burned in 1916 and is now an elegant skeleton of two massive chimneys and the remnants of high walls, some still showing patches of the original plaster.

The tour also took in Colonial Williamsburg, capital of Virginia from 1705 to 1780. The crumbling city was saved when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was persuaded to undertake financing of the project in 1926. Only 88 buildings then survived, but excavations from 1928 to 1958 located the foundations of 300 more, which were then reconstructed. In 1958 Ivor Noel Hume, a British archeologist and an expert on 17 th and 18 th century wine bottles, was hired. Hume made historic archeology into a full-fledged endeavor collecting, recording, cataloging and studying all of the artifacts that were retrieved as opposed to selecting only a few outstanding pieces for exhibit and tossing the rest. He used the artifacts and their context in relation to features in the sites to gain insights into the social and economic lifeways they represented.

Finally, Mt. Vernon, which is of major importance not only as George Washington’s home, but also because of the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association, which essentially invented historic preservation in the US. In 1853, when Ann Pamela Cunningham learned of the deteriorating condition of the estate, she founded the Association and began a national fundraising campaign. They raised $200,000 from all over the country in five years and bought the mansion, outbuildings, and 200 acres from the then owner, George Washington’s great-grandnephew . The mansion and outbuildings were stabilized and restored. The 1772 grist mill was reconstructed in the 1930s. Excavations later revealed the footprint of the 1798 distillery built by a reluctant George Washington at the urging of his Scots farm manager. In 1799 the distillery produced 11,000 gallons, a roaring success. Washington died the same year, and the building later fell into disrepair and burned to the ground in 1814. A replica was completed in March 2007, and the new distillery is allowed to produce and sell 5000 gallons a year.

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NEWS AND NOTES FROM HERE AND THERE

University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research Presents Evidence for Multi-Decade Drought in the Second Century A.D. Almost nine hundred years ago, in the mid-12th century, the southwestern U.S. was in the middle of a multi-decade megadrought. It was the most recent extended period of severe drought known for this region. But it was not the first. The second century A.D. saw an extended dry period of more than 100 years characterized by a multi-decade drought lasting nearly 50 years, says a new study from scientists at the University of Arizona. U.A. geoscientists Cody Routson, Connie Woodhouse and Jonathan Overpeck conducted a study of the southern San Juan Mountains in south central Colorado. The region serves as a primary drainage site for the Rio Grande and San Juan rivers. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-11/uoa-usf110411.php [From Archaeology Today, a service of the Center for Desert Archaeology.]

Ancient Dry Spells Offer Clues About the Future of Drought. As parts of Central America and the U.S. Southwest endure some of the worst droughts to hit those areas in decades, scientists have unearthed new evidence about ancient dry spells that suggest the future could bring even more serious water shortages. Three researchers speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Dec. 5, 2011, presented new findings about the past and future of drought. php [From Archaeology Today]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111205181917.htm

Research on Sunset Crater Indicates that Volcanic Eruptions are not Always Catastrophic. For many, the story of Pompeii defines what happens when a volcano erupts: It destroys everything in its path and kills everyone who cannot escape. But nearly a millennium ago, a very different scenario played out just north of the modern-day city of Flagstaff in the Arizona desert. Here, the local Sinagua peoples survived the eruption of the powerful Sunset Crater volcano and adapted to a changed landscape to forge a more complex society and higher standard of living. ”They were much better evolved to deal with the volcano than we are,” said archaeologist Mark Elson of Desert Archaeology, a Tucson firm that helps preserve ancient sites. By studying how the Sinagua adapted, Elson thinks we could learn better ways to cope with such massive catastrophes as Hurricane Katrina and the Great Plains floods. [From Archaeology Today] http://azdailysun.com/news/science/total-destruction-not-always-the-result-when-volcanoes-erupt/article_c4aeb4ed-f7a4-5c60-99c6-9f311cdd2bb4.html php

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Calendar Check: Upcoming Conference

Southwest Symposium “Causation and Explanation: Demography, Movement, Historical Ecology” January 14-15, 2012, UNM Student Union Ballrooms A and B.
See unm.edu/~swsympos/index.html.