First Days at Pueblo Bonito

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Greetings from Chaco Canyon!  We began excavations in Room 28 at Pueblo Bonito on Monday, June 3, 2013.  The NPS wanted to keep the excavations secure by constructing a tent over the entire room.  The wonderful stabilization crew, under the supervision of Archaeologist Dabney Ford, had designed a clever way to cover the room.  By 10:00 AM, they had built a portable “garage” over the excavations.  With the addition of a few tarps and sandbags, the structure provides shade during the hot days, protection from rain, and security for the dig at night. 

After photographing the room, searching for surface artifacts, and taking depth measurements, we put our first shovel in the room at about 10:30.  The material in the room is what archaeologists call “backfill”—that is, dirt, rocks, and other material that is put in an excavation after it is finished in order to keep the space from collapsing AND to protect people and animals from falling into the excavated area.  So someone had backfilled Room 28—probably the Hyde Exploring Expedition archaeologists George Pepper and Richard Wetherill.  Our Ground Penetrating Radar analysis of the room (see poster from earlier posting) had shown some anomalies that suggested rocks and burned beams, but we really had no way to know what we would encounter in Pepper’s backdirt.

The first layer was fine sand with almost no artifacts, as the photograph shows.  But just below this layer we began to encounter charred wooden beams—large and well preserved.  While we do not know where they came from, they certainly came from Pueblo Bonito somewhere, so we are collecting the best preserved for tree-ring dating and species identification.  Pepper had noted that both Room 28 and adjacent Room 55 burned.  Since Room 55 was excavated later than Room 28, it is possible that Pepper used the dirt he excavated from Room 28 to fill in Room 28.  It is much less likely that he used the dirt from Room 28 to backfill the room.  Because the lower level of Rooms 28 and 55 were once part of a single long room, if the beams indeed came from Room 55, they might actually help date Room 28 as well.  The dates may help us figure out where the beams came from.

Other than burned beams, we are finding few artifacts in the first layers of Room 28—only an average of one piece of broken pottery in each bucket, a few scattered pieces of animal bone, and a couple of fragments of chipped stone.  We are still at least one meter (about one yard) above the surface on which Pepper found the cylinder jars in Room 28.  At our present rate, it will take about two weeks to reach that level.