Aztec Ruins Administrative History

1923-1933

In theory, the National Park Service assumed the role of protector of Aztec Ruin when it was designated a national monument in 1923. Beyond a few signs warning against trespassing and naming Morris a nominal custodian so that he would have authority to represent the government in any confrontation with looters, there was little serious attempt to fulfill that obligation. For two years, the National Park Service did provide $500 annually for limited repairs. [10] The American Museum on occasion also contributed small sums for repairs as were mandated under terms of the government excavation permit. [11] Together, these monies represented a greater investment in reparation than in the preceding excavation period.

In 1924, only $324.20 of the National Park Service repair money was spent. Two-thirds of the sum went to pay Owens, Tatman, and Hudson for work on the ruin and a week's work by a team and driver to haul off debris. Morris reported the works as:

the rebuilding of the front wall of room 58, and the repair of the wall in front of this room; the repair of the cement drainage courses around Kiva G; the filling of sunken places at the northwest and southwest corners of Kiva J and recovering the same with cement; the repair of the drainage spout in the wall between rooms 96 and 120; the construction of nine cement floors for the protection of intact ceilings beneath rooms 154², 152², 153², 191², 140², 127², 134², 179², and 133² (see Figure 12.3). [12]

Figure 12.3. West Ruin, Numbering system of 1988.
(click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

In passing this information along to the director of the National Park Service, Pinkley knew that some explanation for concrete over roofs was needed. He wrote:

Earl has found several cases where a two or three story tier of rooms have collapsed in the upper portion, but the ceiling over the lower room has held and is supporting the debris. It is necessary to take this superimposed weight off such ceilings in excavating the ruins and this leaves what was the second story floor exposed to the weather as a roof over the room below. Unless a skin of cement is run over such an exposed place and the drainage carried away, water seeps down and destroys the construction below. [13]

The same year Morris wrote Wissler of other required repairs. "In the west half of the pueblo approximately 40 rooms have been opened, the walls of which have been left as found. By strict economy it might be possible to rebuild where necessary, and to cap the walls for $30 per room, making a total of $1200, for the entire forty." [14] Again, this work was not done at that time.

While Morris was working in Yucatan in the spring of 1925, he had Oley Owens doing repair work at Aztec Ruin with the National Park Service money. Owens placed a cement covering over the troublesome roof on Kiva E, built up and capped the walls of Kiva L, and fixed various unidentified nearby room walls. He placed a cement protective slab over Room 178 and prepared the roof of Room 137 for later cementing.

Because $140.67 was left from the original $500 budgeted for 1925, Morris sought Pinkley's approval to have Owens return to a possible kiva in the courtyard. It lay deep beneath the surface to the west of Kiva E. Earlier this structure was partially dug out in hopes of finding another deeply placed deposit of Chaco pottery, but it was in such poor condition that work was halted. [15] By going some six to eight feet through its floor and then tunneling eastward to the base of Kiva E, Morris felt a drainage sump would be provided for Kiva E. That chamber already was suffering from collected moisture. When the sump was created, the unidentified kiva would be filled with loose rock. [16]

The first two full-time custodians of the monument, George Boundey and Johnwill Faris, were faced continually with the enormous job of countering damage to walls of rooms and kivas caused by heavy summer rains and winter snows. Increasingly, a previously unrecognized source of trouble was subsurface drainage from irrigated fields to the north of the house block. This moisture undercut wall bases and even dissolved the friable sandstone of which the walls were built. Remedial actions usually were the responsibility of the custodians, who spent many hours bailing out potentially destructive water and reconstructing rock and mud walls. Only under dire circumstances was it possible for them to hire part-time assistants.

Boundey tried a number of preservation measures. Although he felt that adding a terra cotta colorant would improve the appearance of redone sections, he continued the use of natural cement for wall rebuilding. He improved drainage around bases of some walls by grading, and he dug dry barrels in the floor of certain chambers to collect standing water. Boundey discovered that many of the cement-covered kiva corners had cracked, allowing water to get down around the kivas and through their walls. He removed the cement and filled the spaces with crushed rock to absorb the moisture. He observed the same problem in a few roofs erected over prehistoric rooms with Anasazi ceilings. Boundey sealed cracks in those concrete slab roofs with tar. [17]

Because of the seriousness of the threats to the ruin, in the summer of 1928, Boundey hired a man to help with wall repair. Some of the higher walls were so precarious that he reported, "they will not hold out through winter" and that "...it is a mystery to me that they had not fallen long ago." Seventy-one units were capped during the Morris years, but there remained 42 exposed rooms with no cappings.

To counter man's damage, Boundey removed almost 10,000 initials scratched or scrawled on ceiling beams. A blow torch obliterated the former, a wet cloth dipped in sand the latter. [18]

With many prehistoric structures included within the Southwest Monuments, Superintendent Pinkley was very aware of the mounting difficulties in maintaining them. He sought the first of what was to become a succession of engineering studies for means of protecting them. As he explained to the director of the National Park Service, "This whole situation of the repairs to ruins has been almost unbearable. We have been in a situation of a half dozen men trying to put out a forest fire.... Wherever we were and however hard we worked with what we had, we knew Nature was getting ahead of us someplace else." [19]

Nevertheless, funds for ruin repairs were seldom allocated. Custodian Faris made repeated pleas to his superiors for money to take care of some of the trouble spots. Local citizens tried to help by going directly to their congressmen. In 1931, the Aztec Chamber of Commerce drafted a resolution, which was transmitted to the New Mexico congressional delegation (see Appendix I). It strongly urged an appropriation for repairs to the ruins, saying they were getting in "bad condition." [20] The document brought no immediate reactions, but the wheels of government were turning slowly.

In 1933, James B. Hamilton, assistant engineer from the National Park Service's field headquarters in San Francisco, was sent to Aztec to evaluate the precise condition of the ruins from a professional point of view and to work out methods that could be taken to keep them from reverting into rubble heaps. Upon finding several feet of water standing in some rooms, walls recently caved in, and the Great Kiva virtually obliterated, he concurred with local assessments and reported that, "At Aztec Ruins National Monument much work should be done soon to prevent deterioration which is progressing rapidly there." [21] Hamilton agreed that a soft, poorly consolidated sandstone used by the settlement's builders was being destroyed by dampness. Moisture attacked walls at foundations, from where it was drawn into the lower courses by capillary action. Precipitation soaking into wall tops rotted the stone, dissolved mortar, and, when it froze, split the construction.

Hamilton also observed that some of the earlier preservation aids were not satisfactory. The concrete troughs with which Morris had capped many walls were badly worn in places due to variation in quality and thickness of the cement used and lack of reinforcing elements or expansion joints. Water funneled through the resulting cracks into the cores of walls. Some concrete-slab, secondary roofs placed over rooms with intact ceilings had split, letting water reach the perishable ceilings below. Although Custodian Boundey previously removed faulty concrete coverings from soil-filled areas around some kivas, a few such cappings remained in place. They, too, were fractured and were not keeping water from the kiva walls. Moreover, the reconstructed cribbed-log roof and its concrete-and-tar paper shield covering Kiva E were in bad repair. Some logs were rotting from the effects of moisture that penetrated the roof.

Hamilton offered many recommendations, accompanied by engineering drawings, for further monitoring of destructive forces and upgrading means for dealing with them. [22] He said that test pits should be dug about and within the ruin to see if seepage from nearby irrigation ditches reached the footings of standing walls and the sides of subterranean kivas. If so, it should be intercepted and diverted. Troughed wall cappings should be replaced by more appropriate rounded coverings of several courses of selected stone laid in reinforced cement provided with expansion joints. Tar paper bases with water-tight connection to walls topped with earthen fill should be installed in order to eliminate undermining of walls. At the time of Hamilton's inspection, there were 20 known original ceilings. In order of the urgency of repairs to the roofs over them were Rooms 143, 132, 142, 197, 198, 200, 208, 156, 141, 61, 59, 124, 189, 178, 262, 146, 237, and 263. Severely cracked cement on these roofs should be removed; those not badly damaged should be repaired. A new outer tar paper roof should be put on Kiva E but hidden from view with a thick layer of dirt. Further, in order to keep the kiva dry, a tile drain should be implanted in the bottom of a deep, gravel-filled ditch. The floors of rooms most susceptible to standing water might be paved. Perhaps a skirt of pavement extending eight to 10 feet away from the exterior walls of the house block should be considered. [23] A dry barrel should be dug into the room in the North Wing next to those housing the museum exhibits in order to collect rain water. Restoration of the Great Kiva, following a plan proposed by Earl Morris, should commence as soon as possible. Cost of necessary improvements was estimated to be $10,175, about what Morris also figured but short of the final output. [24]

In preparation for the big repair effort, Custodian Faris and Assistant Engineer Hamilton made three tests. They put down borings about 50 feet north of the northwest corner of the West Ruin. They encountered wet sand at the 12-foot level, or at an elevation of 5,630 feet above sea level. This was believed to be some three to four feet above the damp floor of Kiva E. [25] The two men also obtained two 20-pound samples of fine sand from exposed riffles in the Animas River, a sample of the monument water, and several cans of earth. These were shipped to the National Bureau of Standards laboratory in Denver. Hamilton wanted to know if the sand were suitable for the fine aggregate needed for masonry mortar, if the water were too alkaline to have sufficient strength, and what was the relative moisture content of the earth. [26]

The results of the tests were negative on two counts. The sand did not meet National Bureau of Standards grading requirements, and the water lowered tensile strength about three percent in a seven-day test. [27] The soil was of satisfactory organic and tensile strength. [28] That meant that sand had to be acquired commercially, and a water softener was needed to take care of the alkali.

In related preliminaries, Faris dug by wall bases in many portions of the pueblo to determine that their foundations did not go more than two and a half feet below the ground surface. [29] William J. Ashley, Branch of Engineering, supplied concrete specifications for capping the walls. [30]