SALINAS "In the Midst of a Loneliness": The Architectural History of the Salinas Missions

EXCAVATIONS AT ABO (continued)

The Second Season: February-October, 1939

Toulouse returned to Abó on February 15 for the 1939 season, which was funded as a Works Projects Administration undertaking. Detailed records for this year are not available, but general details can be determined from Toulouse's final report and the excavation record and artifact record sheets prepared during the season.

Excavation continued where it had been left off in December. Within the church, clearing of the rubble filling the nave and sanctuary progressed, and the search for the north wall finally succeeded in late May. [5] Stabilization concentrated on the east wall of the nave for the first few months.

During the clearing of the nave and sanctuary, Toulouse stopped excavating when he reached what he considered the floor of the church. Only when he saw recognizable architectural or cultural features in the floor did he go deeper. The stone bases of the pillars supporting the choir loft were defined by cutting into the floor of the church, and several child burials in a single grave pit were investigated in the same way. [6] Toulouse's failure to recognize the foundations of the north wall of the first church across the sanctuary, or to see other burials that more recent archeology suggests are plentiful, confirms that he was careful about following floors.

He followed the same methods in the convento. Again, only when he thought he recognized deeper features did he cut through the final floors of the building. The kiva in the west courtyard and some walls of the earlier patio were traced by deeper excavation, as was the lower floor of room 15, but Toulouse did not see the many other wall foundations only inches below the floors of the rooms and corridors. [7]

Most of the convento rooms were located by trenching and given identifying numbers by the end of February. In the convento, the excavation crew began emptying the rooms along the south corridor and digging a rectangular network of exploratory trenches across the rest of the building. The short hall connecting the east corridor to the east courtyard and the room just north of it were the first rooms to be defined outside of the row of rooms and corridor along the south side of the convento.

Excavators working on clearing the sanctuary and the altars found the doorway to the sacristy. The general plan of the convento quickly became apparent after that. The sacristy and the three rooms east of it were defined, then the kitchen south of room 10, and so on.

After their outlines were determined, each room was cleared of rubble down to the floor level. Room 15 had been cleared down to its upper floor level by February 22. [8] Most of the sacristy (room 12) and the adjacent room 17 had been emptied to floor level by February 28, although some areas of the room were still being emptied in mid-June. [9] The clearing of the storage room (room 11) was nearing completion by March 3, and room 18, the sacristy storeroom, by March 21. Rooms 16 and 22 were still being cleared in late April, while work in room 20 continued to mid-May. The excavators finished most of room 14 in late May and emptied the privy itself (Toulouse's "turkey pen") during the first week of June. The East Court was emptied from March through June. As the excavation crews completed the emptying of each room, stabilization crews began work on repairing and rebuilding the walls.

The greater part of the burned wood came from a limited area. Most of the material was found in the church, sacristy, baptistry, portería, and on the South Terrace. Within the church and sacristy, the sections of burned beam were mixed into clean fill on the floors ranging from six to twelve inches deep. Toulouse considered the fill to have been blown in, but some of it could easily have been the earth from the roof itself, dumped in as the roofing collapsed. Blown fill would then have covered this irregular layer. On the South Terrace, beams were found in the "blown fill" at depths ranging from directly on the flagstone of the terrace to as much as two feet above it. In the remainder of the convento, significant amounts of charred wood were found only in the sacristy storeroom (room 18) and the kitchen storeroom (room 11). A layer of charcoal was found above the lower floor level in room 15. The rest of the convento apparently had very few charred beams. Whenever the fill of a room was mentioned, it usually consisted of a foot or so of blown fill covered by one to several feet of fallen wall debris.

While cleaning out room 17 in late February, Toulouse encountered fragments of intricately carved and painted wood and carved gypsum fragments with mica decorations. These may have been the remains of one of the altar retablos from the church. [10]

During the excavations within the west courtyard, or patio, Toulouse located the kiva and indications of an earlier version of the convento. The excavation crew cut two trenches across the patio, one north to south and the other east to west. These trenches located the sides of the final patio, and its ground surface. Toulouse's profile drawing of the kiva and photographs taken during the work indicate that the kiva was first seen as a depression in the patio surface. According to the excavation records, this was in about mid-March. When the reason for the depression was sought by further trenching, the excavators found the kiva and the east and south walls associated with earlier versions of the patio.

The trenches were continued down into the kiva, leaving sections of the fill at the sides of the structure. By March 22, the trenches had been excavated four feet deep. By March 30, the excavations had reached a depth of six feet and had found the top of the layer of refuse shown in Toulouse's profile drawing.

In the first week of April, Toulouse began to see the structures on the floor of the kiva. The first detail seen was the top of the deflector of the fireplace. By April 24, the crew was excavating the firepit, and the emptying of the ventilator shaft took place in the last few days of April.

During May, Toulouse removed the remaining sections of fill in a more careful manner, attempting to detect any stratigraphic structuring. Apparently two blocks of fill were left. The top several feet of one were removed in the first two weeks of May. In the second half of May the rest of one block and all of the other block were removed at the same time. The final cleaning and stabilization of the structure was carried out throughout June.

Meanwhile, the clearing of the rest of the patio continued. The excavation crew began in the southwest corner during the last week of March, and were digging out the west side by mid-May. At the end of May, they were clearing the southwest corner.

Although in Toulouse's final report he implied that the walls of the earlier patio formed a somewhat raised walkway along the east and south sides of the later patio, the photographs taken during excavation indicate that the later patio floor was at the level of the tops of the earlier foundations. In its final form, the patio was a flat space level with the floor of the surrounding corridor, with no visible trace of the earlier foundations. The kiva apparently continued as a circular structure in the center of the patio about six feet deep.

Most of the majolica found by Toulouse came from the kiva in the west court and from around "annex 2," interpreted here as an entranceway or porch into the guardian's quarters. [11] Additionally, virtually all the Chinese porcelain came from the kiva. This is curious, because the refuse in the kiva was dumped in a single episode, with fragments of the same vessels mixed throughout the material. It is likely that the refuse was not from "the nearby kitchen," as Toulouse says, but was brought from a midden and dumped into the kiva as part of its backfilling, after the structure had been unroofed for a period of time long enough to build up an irregular layer of blown sand to three feet deep. The refuse would have built up somewhere around the convento between the construction of the building beginning in 1622 and the filling of the kiva in about 1650 as part of the first renovation of the west courtyard. The material from the kiva must therefore date from between 1622 and about 1650. [12]

At the same time that the convento rooms were being excavated, Toulouse began clearing around the outside of the church and convento to the colonial ground level and investigating the structures around the church complex. In early April the crews were working outside the west transept and they probably traced the out lines of the Spanish buildings west of the church in April and May. Toulouse determined that the plaza areas to the west of the church had been used on occasion as corrals, based on the layers of animal dung found both here and in the east courtyard of the convento. [13]

The crews began clearing the area just north of the church in early June, and continued on across the walled enclosure to the north. [14] Room 29 at the northwest corner of the walled area was excavated in late June. Toulouse called this area the "mission gardens." [15] During this period he must have also excavated the ruins of an L-shaped building near room 29 within the "garden."

Beginning in late June, the crews cleared along the south and east sides of the convento. The ruins of Marcos Luna's house, converted to a toolshed by Toulouse in 1938, were probably removed about June 22 while the area north of room 1 was being cleared.

Toulouse completed all excavation by the end of June, 1939, except for a few detail excavations, such as the exploration of the lower floor in room 15. [16] Stabilization work continued until October. During this same period, the construction crew probably built the present visitor contact station and the old restrooms west of the church on the west fence line.