Category Archives: Archaeology

Nothing much has been happening the past couple of days, so here are some pictures I took in at Canyon de Chelly last Christmas (as always, click to embiggen):

This rock art panel was obviously painted after the Spanish arrived in the area. According to our guide, it depicts the military expedition of Antonio de Narbona in 1805, in which a large number of Navajos were killed or taken captive.

This should be immediately recognizable to any Southwestern archaeology geeks reading my blog. For the rest of you, it’s a picture of the well known White House Ruin, probably the most visually impressive ruin in Canyon de Chelly. It was built by a people known today as Anasazi or Ancestral Pueblo.

This is White House Ruin again, this time seen from the canyon rim. Construction of this pueblo began around AD 1050, and it seems to have been occupied for roughly 200 years. Why they left is still very much an open question in archaeology, although many of the current theories tie abandonment of this and other pueblos to changes in climate.

One of the most significant Hohokam sites in Arizona is going to be open to the public, perhaps as early as next February. Mesa Grande was a political center that helped control an extensive network of irrigation canals in the Phoenix area more than 500 years ago.

Whenever an important archaeological site is open to visitors there are always concerns about possible damage, and I sympathize with those who want sites like this one to be protected. But education in archaeology is as necessary as investigation. If the findings of archaeologists are available only in the professional literature and never discussed outside the academy, then it becomes hard to see the point of doing it at all. In addition, funding for archaeology is very heavily dependent upon public interest. If enough people lose interest in understanding and preserving the past, archaeology will largely disappear, and antiquities protection laws will no longer be enforced.

Also, speaking purely for myself, I’m looking forward to seeing the place.

I should have chosen this one. Now that’s what I call experimental archeology!

According to this press release, a carving of a mammoth was incised on a bone fragment discovered at an archaeological site in Florida. This is an exciting discovery, and the first such image found on a bone in the Americas. However it is a little extreme to claim, as the press release does, that this is the only known image of a proboscidean (aka animals with trunks – elephant relatives) found in the Americans. There are at least three petroglyphs in Utah that appear to depict mammoths or mastodons, one of which I blogged about a while back.

Still, Pleistocene-era art in the Americas is extremely rare, and this is a remarkable find.

The Anchorage Daily News has a surprisingly good story about archaeologists working at an important site in Alaska’s Brooks Range. The video, in particular, I think, helps explain why archaeologists put up with all the hardships: bugs, dirt, awful weather, dangerous animals, and everything else that sometimes makes like less than pleasant. In the words of physicist Richard Feynman, it’s for the pleasure of finding things out.

One very interesting finding mentioned in this story is that the one example of a fluted projectile point found at this site came from a level younger than similar points found elsewhere in North America. This suggests that fluted points were invented in more southern regions and then spread north. This agrees with the suggesting made in American Antiquity last year by Charlotte Beck and George T Jones that fluted points originated in either the Southeast or the southern plains at a time when the inhabitants of the Intermountain West were using a completely different style of point.