Aztec Ruins Administrative History

1917: FIRST FULL-SCALE EXCAVATION

The season of 1917 commenced on June 10 with a labor strike and a change in field procedure. One disgruntled man felt he was not receiving adequate pay. Morris raised wages to $2.50 per day for 25 laborers and added an extra team of horses and a wagon. The tram cars were not satisfactory. The ones on hand had a capacity of only a half yard, but they could not be replaced because of the lightweight rails. [25] Cars and track were sold for $100.

As was his custom, over the winter Abrams grazed his sheep among the ancient mounds. This cropping of the vegetation had some advantage archeologically, as Morris reported to Nelson: "It is now plain to see where Morgan got the addition that he tacked on to the west end of the main building [the Annex]. There are the remains of a very considerable cobblestone structure which appear to run under the sandstone building. I should judge an older ruin." [26]

Intriguing as that idea was, excavation took up where it left off in the East Wing. Ralph Linton, then a graduate student at an Eastern university who worked with Morris on the La Plata drainage in New Mexico and at the Guatemalan site of Quirigua, joined Morris as an assistant. Probably he and Morris shared the house on Abrams's farm, but other than his arrival in June and departure in August, there is no further mention of his contributions to the Aztec project.

The opening days of the season yielded grim evidence of a tragic end for an Anasazi man and four children. The carbonized remains of their bodies were found in clearing Kiva D in the aberrant unit of rooms at the south end of the East Wing. Apparently they had been consumed by a fierce fire, which had raged through the structure, brought down the log roof, and baked the stone walls to a brick red. [27]

Morris put another part of the crew to work opening Kiva E. This was an unusually large chamber isolated and sunk into the courtyard close to the East Wing. [28] Its walls contained lenses of cobblestones set in adobe. Doubtless it would disintegrate rapidly if left exposed. Therefore, Morris ordered a new cribbed-log roof, again based on that in Peabody House at Mesa Verde (see Figure 3.12). [29] Unlike the ground-level roof on Kiva B, this one was elevated above the surface of the court. That was because an aboriginal retaining wall at least seven feet high upon which the roof structure rested encircled the kiva. The reason for the roof style was that Morris believed a Mesa Verde structure was superimposed over an earlier Chaco kiva in the same location. All that remained of the lower kiva was the foundation stones. Recovered artifacts discarded on the floor of the upper kiva were four bone awls, two stone pendants, one obsidian projectile point, and one piece of quartzite.

Figure 3.12. Interior of Kiva E, showing reconstructed cribbed log roof.

The next phase of the season's work entailed further clearing of the major room block of the East Wing. Work there was slowed by the physical exertions required to mine room shafts from the top of the mound down to lowest room floors and hoist out the debris (see Figure 3.13). Each room was filled with tangled masses of wooden ceiling elements, collapsed walls, drifts of household dust and windblown sand, and some deep strata of consolidated refuse that reached to the mound surface. The workers dumped buckets of spoil dirt into wheelbarrows, outside of walls, or directly into large, flat-bedded farm wagons, which carted the loads to an embankment of an abandoned river channel along the east side of Abrams's farm. Several floor boards of the wagon bed were removable so that contents could pour out. [30]

Figure 3.13. Overview of the West Ruin in 1918 showing roofed Kiva E,
Kiva I being cleared with hoist and bucket, storage shed, and capped walls.

As expected, much of the architecture was that common to the Chaco branch of the Anasazi. [31] The room block was made up of five parallel rows of rooms of equal size spaced from court to outside eastern wall. Access generally was from the court and from room to room. Hallways were nonexistent. The four rooms facing the court appeared to have been added after the remainder of the unit was erected. Their floors were three feet above those of neighboring rooms. Logically, that floor plane was the court level at the final occupation. The exterior eastern facade originally rose sheerly to two stories, with no apertures other than those small ones needed to ventilate inner chambers. Wall cores were rough stone and mud. Aboriginal masons had carefully laid veneers on each exposed surface of tabular sandstone separated by small, neat chinking anchored in limited amounts of mud mortar (see Figure 3.2B). The unavailability in the Animas area of sandstone that fractured into uniform blocks or thin tablets restricted duplication of top quality Chaco masonry. The sandstone used was thought to have been carried from quarries three to four miles away, where outcroppings of Tertiary beds were at the surface. The material was soft and subject to quick deterioration. Walls made of it were battered. That is, they were wider at their bases and became progressively thinner as they rose to the upper story. Although the walls appear not to have been bonded at their junctures, recent studies indicate that they were vertically interlocked as construction progressed.

Door openings were both rectangular and T-shaped and were elevated a foot or so above the packed earthen floors. Series of eight to 12 small, peeled, wooden lintels remained in place. The arid environment forestalled decay. Slanted vertical stone ledges offset at doorway sides were meant to support a stone, mat, or hide closure. At least one corner doorway serving as an interior access angled between a lower and upper room. [32] Openings in this positon are a unique Chacoan construction.

Other features of a few rooms were fire hearths, storage bins, mealing bins, wall recesses, protruding pegs, and ventilator mouths. Some window-like openings between rooms were high up on walls and near corners. [33] There were occasional patches of mud plaster clinging to interior room walls. [34]