Finally!

Note: This post was written last night, but the Chaco wifi went down and I couldn't post it until today.

Today, July 2, 2013, we finally reached the surface to which Pepper and Wetherill excavated in 1896!  It was our thirteenth 20 cm level, meaning that we have excavated about 2.6 meters below the present ground surface—a long way to go in only 14 days of excavating.  The surface was fairly easy to find: a thick layer of powdered daub and chunks of daub covered the western half of the room and clearly represented the material Pepper described in his volume on Pueblo Bonito.  As we troweled this matrix away, we reached a stratum with no burned material at all, and we discovered all of the postholes that Pepper drew on his map of the room.  It was so strange to use photographs to help excavate a Pueblo room!  There is no question about this being the surface they excavated to—it is just deeper than anticipated.  Part of the problem in estimating how deep the Hyde Expedition excavated in Room 28 is that their photographs of the entire room only show the upper layers of the cache, while the photographs of the 2^nd-5^th layers are close-ups—so there is no way to evaluate how deep he excavated to reach these layers.  Now we know.  The doors in the room remained blocked, so they were not helpful in estimating the depth.  At any rate, it was very exciting to reach our first goal.  Now we just need to figure out a way to view the original stratigraphic profile safely.  The UNM OSHA Engineer, Bob Dunnington, will visit us this week to help determine how and if we can safely cut back the profile.  Using the backfill profile has actually been quite helpful these past weeks in evaluating how Pepper/Wetherill backfilled and where we might be in the room fill.

Patricia Crown and Jacque Kocer compare stratigraphic features to a photograph from the 1896 excavation of Room 28. 

We’ve had a visitor the past two nights.  Some critter (some of us are betting bobcat, others badger) has been spraying in the room at night.  It provides a pungent atmosphere for excavation.  The OSHA safety form I’m required to fill out every day asks about exposure to a hazardous atmosphere—and we think this might be exactly the condition they had in mind.  The Chaco Chief of Natural Resources, Jim von Haden has set up a camera to try to catch our new friend in the act, so we’ll see what tomorrow morning brings.

We have a lot of work yet to do to document the room and its features, to pull posts for tree-ring dating, and search for the floor, but we are very happy to have reached the level Pepper did 117 years ago.  We have been working ten hour days in the field in 90-100 degree heat followed by evening lab sessions, so the extraordinary crew is tired—but pleased to have accomplished so much to date.  

Room 28 at surface excavated by Pepper and Wetherill.  The scaffolding is ours. 

 

We continue to have a lot of visitors: yesterday brought a group (staff and students) from Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, including Kari Schleher, Karen Adams (the project macrobotanical expert), Randy McGuire and the CCAC interns.  Today we had a large group of tourists from Slovenia, all of whom spoke excellent English.  AND I forgot to mention in this blog on our work last Friday that we had excellent help that day from Brenda Shears of Arizona State University—she worked tirelessly with the crew on a day when we were particularly in need of extra hands.