Aztec Ruins Administrative History

CIVIL WORKS ADMINISTRATION PROGRAM
(continued)

Excavations

Excavations were done in order to make safer trails, to repair walls, to obtain building stones for reconstruction purposes, or as a result of various new constructions exposing prehistoric features. Tatman was overseer of a six-man crew under the general direction of Morris. One young man on the team was Robert Burgh, borrowed from the coeval work at Mesa Verde. He later became a laboratory assistant to Morris in Boulder. [38]

To prevent collapse, a weighty layer of windblown sand and decayed ceiling elements was taken from second-story Room 202². [39] Pressure needed to be removed from the intact ceiling of the ground-level room below. No small artifacts were present in the fill.

Morris's Room 203 (current number, Room 249) in the North Wing contained 17 feet of fill. This was removed to make access easier to the first-story museum rooms. The crushed skeleton of a small child with wrappings of feather cloth and plaited rush matting was on the floor. The burial body reposed on a mat of peeled willows with flattened side upward. Above these remains, about a five-foot deposit of wall stone was thrust across the chamber when the north boundary of the room split at the bottom and collapsed. The crushed timber of the second floor covered the stone. On the second floor was a small accumulation of refuse, the most conspicuous element of which was a mass of corn tassels done into small bundles tied with a twined lacing of yucca strips. Charred remains of the ceiling of the third story lay above the earth, which had formed the floor of the second. The remainder of the fill was composed of stone and adobe, resulting from the gradual disintegration of the upper walls. Tatman's crew recovered bone awls, bone cylinders, potsherds, and a quantity of lignite, such as was used for the manufacture of beads and ornaments. [40]

Tatman then turned to five rooms in the southwest corner of the house block in order to further understand this sector of the village. Room 151 forming a southwestern limit was a narrow corridor about 85 feet long west to east with a hall-like southward extension at its western end. Reminiscent in its length of some similar features in Chaco Canyon, for a number of years this passage was used by the National Park Service as an entrance to the pueblo's central courtyard. Whether it functioned in Anasazi times as a passage from the outside to the village center is uncertain. There also is a probable entrance through the line of southern cobblestone chambers. Associated rooms (209-212) were only partially intact. [41] They contained some adobe walls in which reinforcements of two-inch poles were laid horizontally in mud alternating with layers of brush and sticks. Occasionally, small straight sticks were inserted as a layer diagonally through the walls. The construction method was not unlike that used for the four massive square columns supporting the roof of the Great Kiva. The method of execution in the domestic units was less precise.

In an area intensely occupied for at least two to three centuries, cultural materials were present wherever digging was done. As work continued around the monument, random finds were a small two-room cobblestone structure 24 feet northwest of the northwest corner of the West Ruin; a skeleton farther to the west of this dwelling accompanied by a Mesa Verde mug, bowl, and corrugated jar; a portion of a cobblestone wall beneath the north wall of the new parking lot; the ventilator shaft and southern recess of a kiva beneath the east wall of a patio created behind the house; a boulder-lined firepit, 24 by 38 inches, dug to a depth of 28 inches south of the village retaining wall; and six burials and associated pottery between Kiva A2 [Annex] and a trash heap to its southeast. [42] Individually, none of these finds contributed much to the history of the site, but together, they confirmed earlier discoveries.

The open expanse of the courtyard that formed the heart of the village was trenched during the Civil Works Administration work so that a large drain tile could be laid diagonally from higher ground in the northwest to lower ground in the southeast. The drain was needed to carry off ground and storm water endangering the friable sandstone walls of the various building units. Workers cutting the trench hit three subsurface kivas of various sizes. Their finding cemented Morris's earlier opinion that the court was where the cultural sequence of the site eventually could be delineated. [43] On behalf of Morris, Nusbaum sought authorization from the director of the National Park Service to excavate any archeological features exposed during the drainage work. Because of the danger of loss of scientific data, this aspect of the project, not spelled out earlier, could not be ignored. [44]

What appeared to be either an unfinished or dismantled Great Kiva, some 40 feet in diameter and situated just northwest of its excavated counterpart, was the most spectacular of the previously unsuspected structures in the courtyard. It was under portions of three surface chambers forming a ring around the known Great Kiva.

The trenchers happened on to two small kivas more than nine feet beneath the last used court surface to the east of the excavated Great Kiva. In Morris's opinion, both were of Chacoan derivation, with multiple layers of smoke-blackened plaster indicating long usage. One was in the part of the site where Morris began his explorations in 1916. Since it was isolated from adjoining house remains, it had been overlooked. Workers found a third small kiva with a pronounced southern recess of a Mesa Verde style 10 feet below the court surface almost abutting the east face of Kiva E, excavated and reroofed in 1917. Despite its Mesa Verdian attributes, pottery scattered on its floor was of a Chacoan tradition. Other explorations in the courtyard found an abandoned, filled, small kiva under Room 166, a surface chamber in the southern arc of rooms around the excavated Great Kiva. Morris assumed that this lesser room was an earlier Chacoan construction.

Only one ceremonial room within the house block, Kiva T, was examined in the Civil Works Administration effort. Morris regarded the kiva, poorly built, as a Mesa Verdian remodeling exercise. [45]