Aztec Ruins Administrative History

1920: DENDROCHRONOLOGICAL PROMISE AND LIMITED DIGGING

Working during several winter months to bore cores from ceiling beams in the West Ruin, Morris decided the implement supplied by Douglass was not satisfactory because it cut very slowly, was made of too soft material, and was too short. Thinking the cores were too rough, crooked, and incomplete, he quit the task after taking 10 samples from the North Wing. In place of the tubular saw, he suggested a tool modeled after an ordinary bit with the central screw removed. [81]

Within two months, Douglass enthusiastically responded with the startling news that, with only three or four exceptions, every core submitted by Morris showed a reliable relative date in the Aztec series. Even more amazing was that all the dates clustered within an eight-year span. The principal times of cutting were relative dates 524 and 528. [82]

Earlier, Douglass had indicated that a series of relative dates from Pueblo Bonito ranged from R.D. 476 to 487. This meant that part of the great house construction there had occurred some 40 years before the intensive building program took place at the West Ruin of Aztec. [83]

Elated at this progress but astonished at the short interval required to build such a large establishment as the West Ruin without metal tools or mechanical implements, during the rest of the year Morris worked with the tubular saw. Ultimately, he supplied Douglass with 52 tree-ring samples from the West Ruin. [84] The number of specimens available was less than hoped because some logs in the primary structure were found to span two rooms. Timbers from what were presumed to be more recent portions were decayed. Additionally, Morris secured four specimens of living red spruce from Pine Gulch, a rincon some 18 miles northeast of Aztec. He had come to consider that region a more probable source of construction timbers than the more distant Basin Mountain.

In the spring, small-scale excavation continuing in the West Wing uncovered Room 156. It was in the first story along the west wall of the village and was especially well preserved six feet below the mound surface. Much of the original plaster of this room was unblemished. [85] A red wainscoting reached from the dirt floor to a height of approximately three feet five inches. Above that, walls were whitewashed to the ceiling. Nine sets of three red triangles extended from the junction of the wainscoting to upper white walls. The underlying earth-colored plaster was composed of clay tempered with sand. The pale red color seen in this and other protected patches came from solutions made from disintegrated red sandstone applied as washes over the earth-colored coat. White plaster streaked by seepage from above was made from impure gypsum from nearby deposits. Two straight clean pine logs a foot in diameter spanned the ceiling, on top of which was a pole layer of six sets of three cottonwood saplings. A tree-ring sample taken from them in 1934 by Harry T. Getty, of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona, yielded a date of A.D. 1115. [86] White hand prints were daubed on beams in several places. Morris believed the room was of Chaco construction, but masonry-sealed doorways pointed to a later Mesa Verdian reoccupation. A passageway, obscured by modern stabilization, cut through the west wall of the room gave access to the cobblestone structure irregularly sprawled just west of the main house block.

Morris was so pleased with the Anasazi construction skills demonstrated by Room 156 that he hoped to build a full-size replica at the American Museum. He told Wissler that the stones for the masonry could be from elsewhere, but the ceiling members should be original ones taken from the ruin. [87] He probably had in mind the stacks of salvaged timbers saved for future repairs.

On July 23, 1920, the Aztec Independent carried a story about the painted room, which estimated that the village construction had required some 200 pine logs 30 feet long and a foot in diameter, 600 cedar logs 10 feet long and of the same diameter, 1,200 poles of pine and cottonwood, and 100 cords of split cedar splints. The dependency of the West Ruin builders for pine and cedar obviously was upon some undetermined upland source at a distance from the Animas valley.

Workers cleared Rooms 149, 150, and 155 in the extreme southwest corner of the village. These units had relatively high standing walls. The men covered the rooms with modern plank-and-tar paper roofs and converted them into a garage for Morris's car, a blacksmith shop, and a privy. They removed portions of fallen west walls of Rooms 149 and 150 to permit ready access from the modern house then being erected just to the west.

Several walls in these and other West Wing rooms incorporated narrow bands of thin, tabular, green stone set within the typical tan, blockier sandstone (see Figure 3.22). Reasons for these elements are unclear, since when finished, many walls were covered inside and out with mud plaster. That would seem to eliminate aesthetics; however, it may point to a practical use of all available resources but in an attractive way. During Morris's day, the quarry where such stone was obtained was not located.

Figure 3.22. Room in southwest corner of the West Ruin showing bands of green stone inset
within more typical sandstone masonry. Modern tar paper roof at center right covered a
utility room during the 1920s. Mound at upper left was an aboriginal refuse dump.

Elsewhere in the site, excavators worked primarily to prevent further deterioration. For example, in a second-story room in the North Wing, they removed a load of debris threatening to break ceiling timbers of the room below from which tree-ring samples had been removed. Laborers hauled 85 wagon loads of earth from this room and from around the ruin to mud holes in the road leading to the site. All these various jobs consumed $800 of the annual budget. Another $100 was spent on ruin repair.

In planning for the future commitment of the American Museum to the Aztec project, Wissler asked for an appraisal from Morris of what was left to be done. Morris replied, "My feeling is that our knowledge of the ruin will not be complete until we have found out the condition and contents of every chamber in it." He went on to estimate that there were approximately 175 unexplored rooms, exclusive of the cobblestone South Wing, which could be exposed and repaired by a crew of four diggers and some laborers working for 700 days at an expenditure of about $3,000. [88]

At the same time, Morris reminded Wissler of an untested depression in the courtyard of the West Ruin, which he judged to be the surface indication of a subterranean Great Kiva. Similar large ceremonial chambers were in Chaco Canyon, several being suspected to grace plazas of Pueblo Bonito. None was excavated. However, in 1920 when the National Geographic Society initiated a new excavation program at Pueblo Bonito, Morris began to agitate for permission to clear Aztec's Great Kiva at once. He longed to be the first to dig such a structure in order to make the Aztec Great Kiva the type example to which other archeologists would have to refer. "I am most desirous of opening and describing this at present unknown type of structure before the Chaco Canyon people dig out a similar one," he wrote. [89] It was not just professional competition and doubtless envy at the ample funding and staffing afforded his colleague, Neil Judd of the U.S. National Museum, but comparable constructions would reinforce Aztec's ties to the grander remains within Chaco Canyon. Morris petitioned to have his crew work on this effort through the winter. To his disappointment, the Great Kiva clearing had to wait until the next appropriation.