Aztec Ruins Administrative History

1923-1928: WRAPPING UP

During a final five-year interval in the 1920s, Morris squeezed odd bits of Aztec Ruin research and the tedious task of reporting it in between far-flung activities from the out reaches of the Colorado Plateau to those of southern Mexico. A permit good for three years' work, issued by the National Park Service in 1923, allowed excavation of Room 189. This was a first-story unit in the corner of the house block where the North and West wings met. Other rooms in this part of the site were productive of articles. This caused Morris to hope for further interesting finds. Also, its clearing continued the opening of the West Wing. Morris's unpublished government report indicated the same Chaco-to-Mesa Verde sequence of occupation that he noted elsewhere in the West Ruin. Ninety-six artifacts included Chaco pottery on the floor level, a wooden ladder, a hafted stone knife, the dried carcass of a dog who had clawed the plaster, and Mesa Verde potsherds in upper levels of trash. [111]

After the American Museum purchased the second parcel of Abrams land in 1927, Morris hastened to satisfy his curiosity about the East Ruin by putting two men to work doing some exploratory testing. While he was attending the first Pecos Conference, a gathering that was to become an annual exchange of archeological field information by men and women engaged in regional studies, the workmen cleaned out two small first-story rooms in the northwest corner of the pueblo. They found the rooms unharmed by seepage from the irrigation ditch along the north side of the ruin.

With just two exceptions, the diggers unearthed Mesa Verde potsherds in the excavations in the East Ruin from a cut driven into the long, low aboriginal embankment paralleling the north side of the pueblo, from the floor levels of two rooms in the southeast corner of the site cropping into the bank of the old river bed, and from a recent wash between the site and a large refuse mound to the south. On the basis of this pottery, Morris concluded that the structure was constructed by Mesa Verdians during a time of reoccupation of the general area by persons of that affiliation after Chacoans moved elsewhere. [112]

Another find the excavators made in 1927 was a probable funeral pyre. It was in a heap of waste from wall construction dumped along the north side of the East Ruin. The crew dug a test trench through the pile to uncover several thin layers of burned vegetable substance. In the topmost of these layers was charred residue of at least five burned bodies. Scattered bones lay in the dirt on both sides of the cut. The bodies were placed close together, provided with the usual wrappings and offerings, burned, and then covered with earth. When found, the carbonized mass engulfing the human remains contained quantities of charcoal derived from matting, sandals, cloth, and baskets.

If a communal cremation were represented by this mound, it was an oddity deserving further study. Morris asked for and received some money to continue his exploration. [113] No report is known to have resulted. Because a landscaping campaign in 1934 leveled the area, further investigation was not possible. Morris's personal pottery collection now at the University of Colorado Museum includes a Mesa Verde Black-on-White mug taken from this site. [114]

The writing part of Morris's remaining obligations to the American Museum came to fruition in two papers published in 1924. He devoted these to burials recovered in the West Ruin and to the excavation of the Annex. In 1928, Morris's room-by-room description of the site as then exposed was the final number of the American Museum volume devoted to Aztec Ruin. [115]

In the late 1920s, two significant developments greatly molded interpretations of aboriginal cultural developments on the Colorado Plateau. One occurred in the summer of 1927, when the individuals attending the conference convened by Alfred V. Kidder at Pecos Pueblo accepted a chronology of Anasazi evolution as they had outlined it by their varied explorations and established a mutually understandable terminology for it. This was the Pecos Classification. By application of the criteria for observable periods of that sequence, Morris knew that Aztec Ruin in its most typical manifestation fell into a grouping called Pueblo III, a time of cultural culmination that faded with Anasazi exodus from the San Juan area. Earlier occupation evident beneath the great house and in some surrounding spots likely was of Pueblo I or Pueblo II phases or perhaps even the earlier Basketmaker III. At those stages, the regionalizations expressed later in certain crafts had not materialized.

The second major step forward was the emergence of the science of dendrochronology. During the Pecos Conference in 1927, Douglass, the astronomer for whom during the preceding decade Morris had gathered tree-ring samples from ancient Anasazi structures, thrilled him with the prospects of an approaching conclusion to the long-term quest for dates through analysis of tree-rings. Wood samples taken from more than 30 aboriginal sites across the Colorado Plateau were about to connect a floating prehistoric chronology on to rings of the oldest living coniferous trees in the Southwest.

Anticipating the momentous accomplishment, which would put Anasazi sites on the Christian calendar, Morris immediately sent Douglass 15 wood cores from timbers of the East Ruin to see how they might compare with those from the West Ruin submitted eight years earlier. [116] Then, he waited.

Linkage of the present to the past did not come until two years later. Finally in 1929, the tree-ring chronology was taken back to A.D. 700 with such certainty that it was known exactly when the Aztec Ruins great houses had been built and how they related in time to sites at the centers of the two branches of the Anasazi Morris believed were involved. Some roof elements in the West Ruin were cut in a span of time from A.D. 1106 to 1121. The heaviest cluster of dates fell between A.D. 1111 and 1115. Researchers secured comparable twelfth-century dates from East Ruin samples; they grouped others from that house in the third decade of the thirteenth century. [117] Comparisons of dates from Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde showed that the Pueblo III efflorescence in those regions occurred about a century apart. The Anasazi of Chaco Canyon had risen to their zenith in the 1100s. Those of Mesa Verde rose to theirs in the 1200s. Morris ended his research association with Aztec Ruin reassured that the cultural sequence he felt he had demonstrated with his shovel and trowel was reinforced by these new data obtained by his coring implement. [118]