An Excursion to Water Canyon

A tardy post.

Several weeks back I, along with David Kilby, was fortunate to be asked to come help with an excavation in  central New Mexico. The project was the brainchild of Robert Dello-Russo from the New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies.  Since funding is always an issue with this type of research, this was very much a volunteer-based project, bringing in archaeological professionals and skilled avocationals  from around the state.

A feeder arroyo in water canyon looking west.

The project area is west of Socorro, New Mexico between two mountain ranges.  There is a surprising amount of energetic water that comes from the mountains to the west, moving enormous amounts of sediment, and sometimes very large cobbles and pebbles.  This has created a sort of fan that covers the very old Paleoindian and paleontological deposits and is overlaid with several meters of fine silt.

The Black Mat as visible in the arroyo.

Evidence of a much wetter environment abounds in the arroyo cuts where black mats are revealed in the profiles.  The area has produced Paleoindian tools, projectiles, and bone in the previous two seasons of work.

How to move 500 cu m of dirt in 3 days (Chris Merriman (L) and Ethan Ortega (R)).

Overburden removed to expose the Black Mat and associated bonebed.

With only a couple weeks to remove 3.5-4 meters of overburden, a heavy excavator and backhoe were required to uncover the site.  This was done quickly and with remarkable precision as seen below.

Excavation units begin to expose the bonebed.

Once the black mat was reached (or nearly so), mechanical excavation ceased and 1 x 1 meter hand units were begun.

Stacey Bennett and Chris Merriman starting to uncover the bison innominate in Unit 5-1.

Bone was soon reached in the later Paleoindian level and intensive mapping began.

Old bonebeds are notoriously slow and difficult to excavate but remarkable progress was made over the short two-week window.

A common problem with bison kills is proving that they are, in fact, kills.  To do this, something has to point toward human intervention.  Luckily this occurred, in the form of a projectile point, visible in the above photo near the left edge of the above excavation photo.

Above is a close-up field photo of the fine Eden Point it turned out to be.  Fortunately, it even fits the expected dates for the strata where it was found.

I was glad to be part of this exciting investigation and hope to make it back to this remarkable site in the near future.  More information can be found HERE
http://www.nmarchaeology.org/water-canyon.html.

(Look for more photos to follow as my co-conspirators pass them on.)

New Mexico Archaeological Council Newsletter

The most recent New Mexico Archaeological Council newsletter is out.  this issue focuses on Paleoindian archaeology and includes a short article of recent activities at the Clovis site.  Click here to download.  If you are a New Mexican, or have an interest in the archaeology of our fine state, consider joining NMAC.

2013-2
Paleoindian Archaeology in New Mexico
Contents:
In Memorium: Patrick Culbert
Introduction
Current Research and Investigations at Blackwater Draw, NM
Recent Research at the Mockingbird Gap Clovis Site
New Finds at the Water Canyon Paleoindian Site
Recent Paleoindian Studies at Spaceport America
Interpreting the Paleoindian Signature of Southeast New Mexico
Late Paleoindian Projectile Point Technology

Bone Tools from the Broken Mammoth Site

Annalisa is a blogging archaeologist and artist living in Alaska.  This is a reblog of her SAA poster from this year.  Check out her Tumblr which contains many good archaeology bits as well as other interests from her life.

Towards the Origin of America’s First Settlers

Interesting news from the genetics world.  We’re slowly building a clearer picture of early Americans.

“A new genetic study of South American natives, published on the journal PLOS Genetics, provides scientific evidence to reformulate the traditional model and define new theories of human settlement of the Americas” from a new article by Professor Daniel Turbón, from the Department of Animal Biology of the University of Barcelona.

“This new research is based on the analysis of male Y-chromosomal genetic markers in about one thousand individuals, representing 50 tribal South American native populations.”

Read more about it here.

Clovis Well receives a surprise visit

The Clovis age hand-dug well located within the South Bank area of the Blackwater site got an unexpected visit from its original excavator this summer.  Shirley East, pictured above standing in the well, was a regular face around the Blackwater site between 1962 and 1969.  Shirley was a crew member for many of the excavations at the site and actively involved with the Paleo-Indian Institute of Eastern New Mexico University.

Shirley and her husband visited the museum and site in early August while in town for business.  Shirley’s last visit to the site was in 1993 when she was summoned to help locate the long-backfilled well as part of a mapping project with ENMU and the Smithsonian Institute.  Shirley located the well in no time happily stating, “well its just right there!”.

Shirley shared many stories from those early days and even offered to share her knowledge of those excavations of yesteryear.  The Blackwater site was certainly honored to receive the visit, and I am personally thankful for her extended hand of help.

As an added bonus, I learned that Shirley was the artist who painted the Pleistocene animals on display at the Blackwater museum and worked diligently to prepare displays for its Grand Opening in 1969.  The Blackwater Draw Museum was first opened to the public primarily to display artifacts discovered at the Blackwater Locality.

Mammoth Butchered By Lions Then Seized By Humans

The Yuka Mammoth.  A very interesting and important find from Siberia tells us some harsh facts about its demise.  Investigators believe it was taken by a large predator, possibly a lion, then stolen away by humans.  ”Even more interesting, there are hints that humans may have taken over the kill at an early stage.”

Tusk and tooth analysis indicate that the mammoth was about two and a half years old when it died.  I haven’t seen an academic publication yet but hope to read more about it soon.  The dates discussed are tentatively about 10,000 years old, placing the find near the end of our Paleoindian period.  Healed wounds on the hide suggest that the young mammoth survived an earlier attack but fresh wounds were likely related to the cause of death.  Later cuts on the hide and bones, with the subsequent removal of the skull, ribs, and pelvis are believed to be caused by humans.  Hopefully, further investigations with clarify the human interaction.

Soft tissue preservation is rare and will add greatly to our general knowledge of this extinct species.  Read the story here.

Below is a great link to learn more about Eurasian mammoths, brought to you by the BBC.

Messing About With PhotoShop

I am very visual and like to see things on a large-scale so I recently re-scaled and stitched together a portion of our work on the South Bank bone bed.  If this image is to be used for publication, it will need a lot of work.  There is really nowhere to stand and it is currently unfeasible to create a scaffold or walkway over this excavation.  Because of this, all the photos were taken “blind”, holding the camera as high as possible with the auto focus turned on.  There is, of course, distortion at the edges and the vignette around each individual image.  This will need to be removed to color/light merge them into a smooth transition.  Although it is much easier than it used to be, it all takes a lot of time.  Hopefully there will be some payoff in the end if for no other reason than it really expresses the complexity of bonebed excavation.

The image is very large and I hope it doesn’t cause too much trouble with people’s browsers.  Click the photo to see a much larger version.

Clovis Eye Candy

Happy Vernal Equinox.

We’re working on some new imagery for the Clovis site.  Everybody loves the points.  To think that this was probably stuck in the mammoth it was found with over 12,000 years ago.

Where Does the Time Go?

Too much data, not enough time.  The story of archaeological research.

I began a mapping project of the bonebed excavations in our Interpretive Center about two-and-a-half years ago.  It has been on hold more than it has been an active project.  Because it is protected from the weather, it is relatively safe from the elements.  However, bad things can happen to fragile deposits including attacks from insects, rodents, temperature swings, and vandals.  After some relatively minor animal damage and one case of vandalism, finishing the photo-documentation and illustrated maps became a priority for me.  Fortunately, we had virtually all the information necessary to repair the work that was so quickly undone during those incidents but I am still hoping for more.  We have illustrations of every bone exposed in the excavation and have begun the photo-mosaic preliminary to making the information available electronically.

A processing area of heads and scapulae on the west edge of the paleo-arroyo.

It is only a few thousand bones exposed so far but even that much data can become unmanageable in a hurry.  As these bonebeds are kept relatively in situ for display, much of the analysis will proceed from the imaging, not the actual bones.  Counts, such as NISP, and MNI have been made in the past but more elements are uncovered with every cleaning of the deposit.  Also, these studies need to move forward to publication to add the available data of bison kills.

Bison bones, while intact and in situ, have undergone serious post depositional damage from burrowing rodents, most likely prairie dogs.

I don’t want to overlook or downplay the importance of excavation but often that part of archaeology is just the beginning.  Archaeological sites are not just a collection of individual artifacts to be shaken out of the sediment, then housed in a museum or collection.  They are complex conglomerations of clues about human behavior that need to be teased out of the ground like a long-forgotten crime scene.

A portion of the lower South Bank bonebed. Unlike the later, Archaic deposits, this bonebed indicates some post depositional movement of the deposits by water passing down the outflow channel.

This work takes time and money.  Without these resources data will be lost just as it has been and always will be.  In the current political and economic climate we can only trudge along and do what we can while trying to avoid the inevitable distractions of politics, unethical behavior, and lack of public support.  Despite not having the resources to keep the Clovis site open daily throughout the year, we have almost daily visitors hoping to have a look at this mecca of American Prehistory and the site that tracks the history of American Archaeology.

Blade Cache

A little lithic eye-candy for tool-users out there.  These are some quick photos I shot while making an examination of some blades for the ongoing tool analysis here at Blackwater Locality 1 (LA3324).  Excuse the poor quality of the photos but look forward to seeing them in full all-color glossy glory in the future.

In 1990 a tool cache, including four blades and a large, unifacial flake knife, was unearthed along the western margin of the prehistoric pond on the Clovis site by Joanne Dickenson.  Many blades are known from the site and are fairly typical of the Clovis tool-kit, being used as knives, scrapers, and preforms for other tools.

All of these tools were made from extremely high quality Edwards Plateau chert from Texas, although not from the same core.  This material hints at the vast distances traveled by early hunter-gatherers on the high plains.