El Morro Valley Prehistory Project Arizona State University Summer Field Session

During the summers of 2003 and 2004 we co-directed the ASU archaeological field school in
the El Morro Valley of west-central New Mexico. Although the valley is best known for large,
Pueblo IV period villages such as those located in El Morro National Monument, our work
examined the dramatic increase in population during the mid-AD 1200s, when hundreds of
ancestral Puebloan farmers migrated into what had been a relatively empty area. Graduate
students from ASU led undergraduate and graduate students from throughout the United
States and Canada in targeted excavations, small site testing, and survey exploring the
rapid formation of settlement clusters in the most densely occupied portion of the valley.
Our work was generously supported in a variety of ways by Mr. Paul Davis and family,
Peter McKenna, Joe Nicoll, Roger Irwin, the Amaterra Foundation, and the Department of
Anthropology and Summer Sessions at ASU.

Los Gigantes Excavations
The majority of the field school effort was focused on the village of Los Gigantes (LA 56159),
a dense cluster of Pueblo III roomblocks located on the rim of a high mesa along the
southwest margins of the valley. Los Gigantes includes a large, 50-room Post-Chaco great
house, a 31m diameter unroofed great kiva, and ten small residential pueblos ranging from
3-15 rooms. At the great house, field crews excavated portions of five rooms, a section of a
large kiva, and six test units in the midden. The great house does not fit classical Chacoan
definitions, as it was only a single tall story in height (~2.5m) and was constructed using
banded, but not core-and-veneer, masonry. Nine dendrochronological samples yielded dates,
including three cutting dates, ranging from A.D. 1253-1270. A small courtyard within the
central portion of the roomblock contained a large, subterranean kiva dug over 1.5m into
bedrock. The interior of the kiva included a flagstone lined bench and floor, as well as the
remains of a floor vault. Virtually no reconstructable or whole artifacts were recovered from
the great house, suggesting that the residents likely moved to one of the nearby massive
Pueblo IV villages sometime in the A.D. 1270s.

We also conducted extensive excavations at two small roomblocks. This part of the project
was intended to assess the occupation span of small pueblos in the valley and was modeled
after the small site testing program of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center (Varien 1999).
Archaeologists working in the valley have long noted the paucity of surface artifacts
associated with pueblos, which stands in stark contrast to the densely covered sites in
nearby areas such as the Zuni Indian Reservation. Excavations were designed to yield a
large sample of ceramic artifacts in order to examine the accumulation of cooking pot debris
as a measure of site occupation length. ASU graduate student Scott Thompson is currently
working on an M.A. paper analyzing the data generated from this portion of the project.
Preliminary results suggest that both roomblocks were occupied by a small number of
families for less than ten years. The short occupation span is quite surprising in relation to
the architectural investment at the sites (masonry roomblocks, pitstructures, kivas), but
does help explain the lack of artifacts present both on the surface and in subsurface
deposits.

One of the more intriguing architectural features of Pueblo III period sites in the Cibola
region are large, unroofed great kivas. A number of these have been documented in the
region, but only two have been excavated, at the Hinkson Site (Kintigh et al. 1996) and at
Hubble Corner (McGimsey 1980). We placed three test units in the 31m diameter, unroofed
great kiva at Los Gigantes, which suggest that it was built in a nearly identical manner as
the other two, with a 2m wide platform surrounding a slightly sunken, round interior space.
The Los Gigantes great kiva has a floor area nearly two times that of Casa Riconada,
indicating it could have accommodated a far larger number of people than the few dozen
residents of the central Los Gigantes community.

Small Site Testing & Survey
In addition to our primary excavations we conducted test excavations at eighteen pueblos
located throughout the southeast portion of the valley. At each site we excavated 2-4 test
units in trash middens in order to provide artifact samples that could be used for
chronological seriation and compositional analyses. These excavations suggest that most of
the roomblocks in the valley were constructed over the course of a few decades in the
mid-A.D. 1200s. Middens at nearly all of these sites were less than 20cm in depth, further
corroborating patterns seen at Los Gigantes.

We also surveyed nearly 1200 acres, identifying 50 archaeological sites. The majority of
sites were Pueblo III period residential roomblocks, but we also located a number of sites
dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Navajo and Anglo resettlement of
the valley. This survey coverage complements that of a number of previous projects, and is
adding to the picture of settlement dynamics in the valley.

Summary
In addition to our continuing write-up of the excavations and documentation of the artifact
collections, our work is contributing to a number of dissertation and thesis projects at ASU.
The EMVPP collections are a key part of Schachners dissertation project which is using
settlement pattern studies and chemical compositional analysis of ceramics to study how
the formation of early El Morro Valley communities was structured by varying patterns of
migration into the valley. (A portion of his project was funded by a research grant from AAHS
in 2004.) In addition, two ASU graduate students are using EMVPP collections in their
masters papers. Scott Thompson is assessing variation in the occupation span of
residential roomblocks and Sophia Kelly is examining ceramic stylistic diversity in the Cibola
region during the late Pueblo III and early Pueblo IV periods. Two ASU undergraduates are
also using EMVPP collections for research projects, one examining variation in lithic raw
material procurement, and another analyzing all of the tree-ring data from the valley. The
El Morro Valley Prehistory Project has already generated a number of interesting findings,
and we are confident that the collections will continue to yield fruitful information in the
future.

Contact:
Keith Kintigh