7 posts tagged “archaeology”

Yesterday, Strix and I went on a tour of Salmon Ruins, named after the family that owned the land that the ruins are found on in the late 1800's.  It's now a County Park, maintained by a non-profit organization.

They have a lot of educational presentations at the ruins, so they built this small amphitheater for that purpose.  The buildings in the forground are part of a park with reproductions of frontier-era buildings that are between the visitor's center and the ruins.

More pics of some of the reproduction buildings.

This is the north wall of the ruins.  It shows the typical banding style of Chacoan architecture.

A detail of the east wall of the ruins, which shows a more intricate banding.

The interior of one of the rooms.

A kiva is a round room, used for ceremonial purposes by Chacoan and Anasazi peoples, as well as modern Hopi.  Many of the kivas at the Salmon ruins site were added by the inhabitants after the fact, so they are square rooms that were built out into round rooms with additional roof support.  The cobbling visible in the foreground of the picture is from the newer wall, built after the Chacoans had already exhausted much of the good stone in the area that could be chipped into standard sizes, so they used larger, rounder stones whole.

This detail of the corner of the kiva shows the space that was created by building a round room within a square one.

A broader view of some of the ruins.

Another late-built kiva, built inside a standard cell.

Another broad shot of the ruins.

A couple shots down into the rooms.  Chacoan structures were like apartment buildings, with multiple rooms conjoined and access from one room to the next, even with multiple floors.  These ruins were originally two, possibly three stories.

A view of the visitor's center from the ruins.  It was built to resemble a stand-alone kiva.

This view of some of the excavated rooms shows holes in the adjoining wall where the roof/floor supports were for the second floor.

The position of this window in one of the first-story rooms, with its slanted sill, marked this room as an observatory.  It is positioned to align with the sun on the Summer Solstice, allowing the inhabitants to mark the changing of the seasons.  There is a great deal of archaeo-astronomy used in the study of Chacoan habitats.

Thsi wall was reconstructed to match the original style.  It's a good example of the small chinking between the larger stones.

Great Kivas are often stand-alone structures.  This one is a good fifty feet across.

Another top down view of the excavated rooms.

A tower kiva central to the ruins.

The outline of a floor pit can be seen on the left side of the image.  Kivas typically have two of these.  In modern Hopi rituals, these are used as foot drums.  Boards are put over the pits and when stomped upon they make a drum-like sound.  It has also been hypothesized that these were seed germination pits.

In this room, the flat wall was carved out, and the beginnings of a round wall was constructed.  Our archaeologist guide surmised that they had started to put a kiva in this room, and for some reason abandoned the project.

A couple more kiva shots.

It's hard to see, but the stone structure down in the kiva here is the remains of an upright deflector.  A fire would normally be burning in the center of the kiva, and the deflector was used to keep sparks from entering the primary air vent.

A couple more shots of the great kiva.

A view of the ruins from the edge of the great kiva.

Just a cactus I saw on the very steep walkway back to the visitor's center.

Strix and I went to a presentation tonight at the Salmon Ruins (named after the family that owned the site before it was made into a city park), by the author of a fictional novel set in Chaco Canyon during the height of the Anasazi population of the region.  Much of the presentation had to do with the astronomy of the Chaco Canyon ruins.

 

The Anasazi had a very advanced knowledge of astronomy.  Petroglyphs atop Fajada Butte are set in the rock in such a way that it marks exactly the date of the Summer and Winter Solstice, as well as the Spring and Autumnal Equinox.  The ruins themselves were oriented perfectly to catch the rays of the solstice and lined up with the minimal and maximum moon phases.

 

The book is a murder mystery, set at Pueblo Bonito, which was the largest living structure in North America from the time of its completion around 1100 A.D. until the 1800's, with over three hundred rooms.  We bought a couple copies of his book, Shadows of Chaco Canyon, and I look forward to reading it.

I also had to buy a couple copies because Strix and I were the only ones to show up, and I felt sorry for him.  But it was an interesting presentation.

Yesterday: Blue Mesa

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

This is a pull-off north of the Blue Mesa area in the park called Tepees.  There are no actual tepees here, but I guess someone thought that the badland formations here looked like tepees.  They are somewhat pyramid-like.  This is also a virtual geocache, so I took a pic of Strix standing in the foreground holding our GPS to prove we were there.

Our next stop was Puerco Pueblo, which is a small ruins area in the park.  No, I don't know why it's called Pig Village, though there is a Rio Puerco that runs through New Mexico and joins into the Colorado River, which of course runs through Arizona.  But then the question is why is the river called Pig River?  There are some questions we are not meant to answer.

The ruins site is not much to see after you've been to Chaco Canyon, but it's still interesting.

Petroglyphs found at the Puerco Pueblo site.

This is a detail of one of the pics above.  This has to be the most humorous petroglyph I've ever seen.  Strix calls this one, "I said put me down!"  Did the "artist" mean for it to be funny?  Was it a horror story about a thirty-foot tall bird that ate humans?  Is, in fact, this an attempt at perspective, and the man is actually supposed to be in the background?  We'll never know.

Tomorrow: Route 66 Monument

Yesterday: Rainbow Forest and Museum

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

If you park at the Rainbow Forest Museum and walk across the small bridge to the north, you come to the trailhead for the Agate House.  This trail connects with the Long Logs Trail, too, but we didn't have time to take that one, and opted to see the Agate House, which is a Native American archaeological site similar in construction to structures built by the Anasazi elsewhere in the Four Corners area, but made entirely out of petrified wood.

This trail is fully paved, making it an easy hike.

The Agate House.  While similar, the construction is different than you see in Anasazi ruins, particularly in that you don't see the layers of varied stone size, and there's a lot more mortar involved here.  Difference in materials is probably to blame.  The stone used at other sites is softer and easier to chip into different sizes, whereas the petrified wood is pretty hard stuff.

Just some whitish deposites I saw on the way back to the main road.  This whole area is all very interesting geologically.

Tomorrow: Crystal Forest

Originally posted on my old blog on February 22nd, 2006:

After lunch, we went west on highway 380, then south on 54 to Three Rivers, and from there to the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site.  This is short mountain which has over 21,000 glyphs drawn on what seems like every sizeable rock all the way up the to the peak.  These glyphs were drawn by the Jornada Mogollon over 600 years ago.

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

No glyphs here, but I liked the way this outcropping looked.  The rocks here are so black that they shine, which is probably why the site was chosen by the Mogollon for their canvas.

There are steps for the first half of the trail, with the steps at the bottom of the hike being much wider than near the halfway point where teh steps disappear entirely.  I don't know who laid these stones - whether they were arranged like this by the Mogollon or by explorers later on.

The rocks in the foreground have have the first glyphs that we saw on the hike.  In the background, you can see the parking area where we started.

Some of the petroglyphs at Three Rivers look very much like other New Mexico petroglyphs, but some of the Three Rivers glyphs are surprising.  The depiction of human faces are among those that look suprisingly modern.

The symbol in the second and third shots is one that is seen at a number of petroglyph sites.  According to the guide pamphlet at the Three Rivers site says that in Mesoamerica, the symbol is associated with Quetzalcoatl, but that other researchers suggest that the dots represent corn or a population count.  I doubt that the symbol represents a particular deity, since it is found in the glyphs of a number of different Native American cultures, but I believe it probably does have a religious significance.  If it was a population or harvest count, I'm not sure why the Mogollon would have painted it on a rock halfway up a mountain.

 

This face is enough to give a guy nightmares.

 

This is a marker on the trail telling the visitors about some of the landscape features.  The mountains beyond the marker are the Sacramentos, and the tallest peak is Sierra Blanca.

These are the "Godfrey Hills."  It says something about these terrain in New Mexico when a feature this large can be called "hills."

A view of the parking area from the location of the terrain markers.

Just a view of a lower hill from our high vantage point.

 

A rest area halfway up the trail.  According to the ranger we talked to at the parking area, most people turn around here and go back.  The trail gets rougher from here on up.

A view of the rest area from further up the trail.

 

A couple of pictures Stina took of me.  What you can't tell from the pics is that I was staring into winds of about 50 miles per hour.

Two concentric circles of rocks.  I find it unlikely that these were set this way by the Mogollon, but it was a nice touch.

These were the last glyphs I saw before heading back down.

The trail ended completely at the top of one ridge, but it still wasn't the top of the mountain.  There was another ridge beyond the end of the trail.

Yesterday: Geocaching at the Rock Pile

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

We used a quarter of a tank of gas looking for the road to get us to the next geocache, and were just about to give up when I saw a road next to the Interstate offramp and took it.  We knew we were looking for the road that would take us to the city golf course, and this wasn't the right road either, but when we got to the top of the hill we saw a sign on the Interestate telling us that to get to the golf course we had to take a certain exit from the Interstate.  Then it was a matter of getting back on the Interstate and taking that exit.

The exit takes you quit a way out of the city of Holbrook, but the property here is owned by the city.  It's a very winding road around the base of bluff, and then to get the petroglyph park you have to pass the golf course itself.

The geocache site is somewhere in the area circled in red in the northwest quadrant of this Google Earth screenshot.

Anyway, the roads are rough and poorly maintained, and you feel like you've gone too far just about the time you actually reach the "park."

This doesn't look much like a road to a city park, does it?

A small and easy-to-miss warning sign near the entrance to the park.  It says:

ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.
STAY ON THE PATH.
DO NOT TOUCH THE
PETROGLYPH'S [sic].
WATCH YOUR STEP.
THE PATH MAY HAVE
SOME LOOSE ROCKS.
PLEASE BE CAREFUL.

After the rest of the warning, is "please be careful" really necessary?

Yes, that is a large petrified wood stump next to the sign.

The area is also rangeland, so it was gated with a little wire twist being the only thing keeping the gate closed.  The sign on the gate just said to close the gate after you, so we figured it was okay to enter.

We found the cache pretty quickly, and then just explored a little and took pictures of the glyphs, which were pretty impressive.

There are quite a few petroglyphs at ground level here, but there are some very clear and interesting ones much higher up the crumbling bluff.  Strix wasn't quite adventurous enough to accompany me, but I climbed the steep rocks to get a closer look.  This shot is of Strix waiting for me below.

Some of the petroglyphs I was able to shoot from my higher vantage point.

Strix took these shots.  The one on the right shows me at the top of the climb.

The left is another shot of Strix from where I was.  The right is a shot out to the horizon.  The itty bitty blue dot in the center is Strix's PT Cruiser.

These rocks are as hard to climb as they look like they would be, which I'm guessing is why there was a warning sign advising me not to do so.  Don't try this at home.  The only part of the warning sign I followed was to not touch the petroglyphs (which of course, you should never do).

A wooden plank thrown across a dry arroyo.  This is state-of-the-art park engineering.  Of course, the purpose of the park is probably more to preserve the petroglyphs than to provide a nice place for people to hang out.

I just took these because I found the landscape interesting.  It amazes me to think that people actually lived here.

Here's a picnic area, in case you forgot that this is a park.  Oh, you'll have to machete your way through the tumbleweeds to get to it, but I'm sure it's worth it.

Where the early bird apparently hangs out later in the day.

And at the end of the adventure, Strix's Cruiser waits patiently for us, like a faithful steed prepared to carry us away.

Tomorrow: Rainbow Forest Museum and Rainbow Forest

Yesterday: The Painted Desert

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

Newspaper Rock is a petroglyph site in the PFNP, not to be confused with other petroglyph sites with the same name, such as the one at the Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument in Utah.