A Piece of Cake

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Our work in Room 28 is winding down.  We reached the level George Pepper and Richard Wetherill reached, found features that they did not expose, reopened areas that they dug beneath the floor, and took a small portion of the room to sterile soil.  We have spent the last week mostly recording the features, mapping, and taking samples.  There remain two beams in place that we still need to pull, more pollen samples to take, and a couple of pieces of ground stone incorporated into the architecture that we will also remove.  What did we find?  Pepper and Wetherill took many wonderful photographs and drew a schematic of the room, but they did not provide a complete description of the room and apparently did not uncover all of the walls and features.  We found and documented 27 postholes.  There probably were more that had been destroyed by their excavations.  We found a small thermal feature and ashpits.  We found a large pit dug by Wetherill and Pepper just outside Room 32, apparently to enlarge the space for working in that room.  We marveled that none of their crew was injured by falling walls (that we know of), when it took five sets of scaffolds to hold the walls in place for our excavations.  The artifactual finds will be described in the future.

Friday morning the student crew left Chaco and we began the LiDAR mapping of Room 28.  We continued mapping Saturday with rooms around Room 28 for context. Dr. Wetherbee Dorshow, President and Grand Poobah of Earth Analytic, Inc., Jed Frechette of Lidar Guys, and Scott Dillon of the Division for Historic Preservation in Vermont, collected over one-half billion data points that are accurate to less than a centimeter.  From these data, they will create a 3-D model of the room and surrounding area.   

At a going-away reception, Susan and Meredith, the campground hosts, made an incredible replica of the excavation in CAKE, with tiny cylinder jars and even a backdirt pile.  This was an entirely different 3D model of the excavation/room, and tasted better than the half billion data points.  Our thanks to them for their kindness and creativity!  And GB’s ice cream is the best version of chocolate ever consumed in Chaco. 

Our crew did a lot of work in a short period of time (23 work days!) with good humor.  As with all archaeological projects, we developed jokes, songs, and language that we all understood, but that folks outside the crew would probably find baffling and not as funny as we did.  The Park particularly asked us to limit our discussion of what we were finding—and in Chaco, where voices carry so far, to keep as quiet as possible.  This was both to keep from altering the Chaco experience by making noise and to avoid attracting vandalism.  So we often spoke in code.  The following list is for the crew, for the record, and everyone else may want to skip reading:

Welcome

on the radio: This is Pueblo Bonito

8 foot tall men

Screw-jacks
Candy canes of terror

Code Blue

Code White

Code Scott

Code 8

Code Chip

Code tree-ring sample

Dauby

daubaceous
a bat, a snake, and a packrat walk into a bar

Mr. Bucket

the Annex ("if I gave you a portapotty, would you drink more water?")

Won’t you screen my bucket?

That girl really works hard

Sheep corral

you need to take pictures of the sites you can't find

Schmonkeys

Look! it’s an MGM mock-up of an archaeological dig

this dirt is like buttah

Buck-o-matic

Bucket launcher

Chaco trivia contest

big hats

the bob-dog

the bob-lion

bobcat spray

PhD school

Bob, the OSHA guy

primate vocalizations

HEE hole

I feel like Cinderella

the Pepperill Project

Elvis has left the building

I’ll add blog entries as the project analysis is underway.  Once we have backfilled, it will be possible to discuss the results in more detail.  In the meantime,

UNM clear