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Digging now rare at Indian locales |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Monday, 14 June 2004 |
June 14, 2004
By Electa Draper
Cortez - Archaeologists don't dig their work much anymore.
The massive excavations of ancient cultures that once defined archaeology are increasingly rare. Modern archaeology is not about keeping up with the Indiana Joneses.
It is a perpetual quest for facts, not intriguing buried objects.
"Digging is fun for archaeologists to do," says Gary Matlock, a former state archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management. "There is always the excitement of what might be found. But when you dig, you destroy. You must have a darn good academic reason to destroy."
In the Four Corners, home to the densest collection of prehistoric Indian sites in the country, big archaeological excavations seldom occur anymore. When they do, they are usually salvage missions triggered by big government construction projects, such as reservoirs, roads or natural gas pipelines.
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"Almost nobody is excavating whole big sites anymore," says William Lipe, an archaeology professor at Washington State University who has worked extensively in the Four Corners.
The reasons for the change are almost as plentiful as pottery shards are here, but perhaps the strongest agents of change were the ancient ones' own descendants.
By the 1980s Native Americans were amassing enough political clout to demand that the federal government keep archaeologists out of their burial sites. That culminated in the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and it has transformed American archaeology.
Most archaeologists had seen themselves as advocates or at least sympathizers with indigenous people, Matlock says. They were a bit stunned to learn that tribes considered them "the bad guys."
"It really put the kibosh on excavation," he says.
Research on public or Indian lands now entails long consultations between government agencies and tribes, sometimes dozens of tribes. The legal framework and political climate favor Indian preferences for leaving the ancestors alone.
Because any excavation work in much of the Four Corners carries a probability of finding burials, research is designed to disturb as little as possible.
But, surprisingly, fewer and smaller-scale excavations have not hurt archaeology's pursuit of knowledge of these ancient people, Lipe and other leading practitioners say.
The Ancestral Puebloans are still mysterious figures to scientists. For roughly 3,000 years these people, also known as the Anasazi, inhabited what is now called the Four Corners region in numbers that, at times, reached tens of thousands and, in many places, far exceeded current population.
Not much is known of the details of their lives, and modern puebloans, Zia Pueblo Gov. Peter Pino says, accept and even value that mystery.
"Your culture wants to have no mystery. You want to overturn every rock," Pino said. "We accept things as they are because this is how they have to be. We don't have to have all the answers."
For most of their Four Corners tenure, the Ancestral Puebloans lived scattered in canyons and on mesa tops, but by A.D. 1250 they had moved into bigger, defensible villages and vertigo-inspiring cliff dwellings. They suddenly left these elaborate homes as the 13th century came to a close.
For years the popular script read that the Anasazi had mysteriously vanished by A.D. 1300. Modern puebloans pointed out that they hadn't disappeared, they had just moved south to 19 pueblos in New Mexico, most in the Rio Grande Valley, and to one region of northern Arizona.
Drought, social chaos, warfare, deforestation of the area and other calamities have been suggested by scientists as the reasons for their quick departure. The line still often written, from tourist brochures to Smithsonian magazine, is that the Anasazi suddenly and mysteriously abandoned the Four Corners.
That word "abandoned" also offends modern puebloans, Pino says. They still feel a profound spiritual connection to these ancient dwellings. They didn't abandon this region, he says; they're simply at a different point in their millennia-long, pre-ordained journey.
The tribes' determination to own their own past has in some ways fettered scientists. But it also has encouraged them to re-examine dusty museum collections and statistically sample small portions of sites to learn about entire buried villages. They use new technologies to examine long-stored artifacts and to peer underground without digging and destroying.
"We call it excavating museums," Matlock says. "Let's ask our new questions and try to answer them with previously dug data."
Excavation costs had skyrocketed, Lipe says. So the discipline has developed ingenious new approaches to gleaning new clues from old digs. And archaeologists also squeeze out information by using surface surveys, magnetometry, electrical resistivity, aerial photography, ground-penetrating radar and computer modeling.
"Our job is not just to find stuff, but to make some sense out of it," Lipe says. "My biggest excitement comes from looking at data tables. We must make frugal use of the record."
At Mesa Verde National Park, Larry Nordby, archaeology field director, is still finding new things in a national park where cliff dwellings and other ruins have been scrutinized for more than a century. He is known for his work marrying computer databases to produce exquisite graphic depictions of cliff dwellings with descriptions of every detail of construction. Nordby has re-created the stone record in his computer. His record is more easily cross-referenced and checked for telling patterns and surprising idiosyncrasies. In one sense he has preserved tens of thousands of answers waiting for the right questions.
Wide-open exploration is out. Very tightly focused questions or problems are posed by researchers, Nordby says.
He, Lipe and Matlock also believe that the strong conservation ethic in archaeology began emerging three decades ago, long before NAGPRA.
The looting of sites by amateurs, who took pottery or whatever artifacts they could dig up and sell, had been a growing crisis. In the late 1960s, Matlock says, archaeologists began waging a major campaign against pot hunters. "But pot hunters said to us: 'You do the same things we do."'
Removal of artifacts from sites, whether professionally done or not, destroys the record, Matlock says. It destroys context. Archaeologists said they were different because they documented everything they could and put found objects in museums. But museums were bursting at the seams, lacking space and people to take proper care of burgeoning collections.
NAGPRA was the coup de grace.
"We've had to change the way we do business," says Canyons of the Ancients National Monument Manager Louann Jacobson. "We didn't have to talk to Native Americans about cultural resources. Now we do. There was a great deal of resistance at first, but NAGPRA has opened up our eyes to a lot of things."
Jacobson, steward of the new 164,000-acre monument in southwest Colorado dedicated to the protection of cultural resources, consults with 25 Indian nations that claim an affiliation to ancient Puebloans or to the Four Corners landscape or both.
"We dug up their ancestors. That was offensive," Jacobson says. "As a result of working with Native Americans on this, we've gained a much deeper understanding of Ancestral Puebloan culture."
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2211507,00.html |
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