Room 28: The Movie

If Room 28 ever becomes the subject of a movie, the trailer would go something like this (and please read with a really deep voice):

In a World made of sandstone, nothing is what it seems.  Only the rough survive. 

Anyone who has worked in Chaco can verify that sandstone aspires to be anything but a rock.  It tries hard to look like broken pottery, chipped stone, and even shell.  It was the most common stone used for groundstone artifacts, such as manos and metates, in Chaco, and yet most of the time sandstone is just sandstone.  Sometimes it was shaped for use as masonry or for features (hearths, hatches).  And sometimes it was actually used as a groundstone artifact.  Figuring out which pieces of sandstone are actual artifacts takes some time and experience.  We have now removed at least six wagonloads of non-artifactual sandstone from Room 28 and it is clear that there is still much to remove.  Pepper and Wetherill apparently preferred to throw lots of rocks in front of doors as they backfilled.  Part of the room is sandy loam and easy to excavate and the rest is a tangled mess of rocks.  We are getting closer to the floor, but still have about 20-40 cm to go before we reach the level where Pepper stopped digging.

One filled doorway collapsed yesterday, with rocks filling the upper part falling downward into the lower part as we cleared it.  We were clearing it to have one of the NPS crew members, Harold Suina, fill it with new masonry to keep it from collapsing.  And then part of it collapsed.  He is truly a master mason and did a beautiful job building a new filler for the door.  This will then be covered with yet another screwjack and plywood to hold the opposite wall in place.  The other two doorways in Room 28 are not faring much better. The doorway in the NE corner has a collapsed lintel, so we can’t work in that area at all—the entire wall above it might fall.  The doorway in the NW corner also has a fallen lintel—this time made of wood instead of stone, so we are carefully avoiding the area until we have excavated the rest of the room. 

Harold Suina fills the SE doorway of Room 28 to keep it from collapsing.

Level 10 completed for Room 28.  Large balk on right is to protect collapsed NE door to Room 28.  Smaller pedestal at northwest corner of room is to protect door into Room 32.  Burning is evident on south wall of room.  The stratigraphic profile clearly shows the backfill thrown against the south wall by the Hyde Expedition. 

We had a lot of visitors yesterday.  The UNM Department of Anthropology Staff visited: Jennifer George, JoNella Vasquez, Carla Sarracino, Ann Braswell, Matt Tuttle, and Joanne Kuestner visited the site, followed by a crew from the Office of Contract Archaeology led by Kevin Brown, then Cottonwood Gulch, then the Campfire Boys and Girls, and finally a group from the University of Georgia (led by John Kantner).