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

Excavations in the Pueblo

Bertha Dutton, 1944

In 1944, Bertha Dutton conducted a series of test excavations in some of the pueblo mounds of Abó. Of these, "Test I" sampled part of mound J in the historical pueblo. [17] Dutton's excavations examined three rooms (or two rooms and a porch on the west). The ceramics indicated that the rooms were abandoned in the late 1600s. [18]

Dutton tested three other areas west of the arroyo between the historical pueblo and the older house mounds. These excavations revealed the complexity of the structural history of the pueblo, and found evidence that the first houses may have been constructed as early as the mid-tenth century. [19]

Ray Ghent, 1958

In 1958 the Museum of New Mexico conducted further excavations at Abó. Ray Ghent, an archeologist with the Laboratory of Anthropology, excavated two rooms at the east end of mound I, just west of the baptistry of the church. He began work on May 15, and wrote a brief three-page report on May 22. [20] The two rooms were left open, and eventually capped and stabilized.

Ghent found that both rooms measured eight feet wide and nineteen feet long, with the long axis oriented east-west. The two rooms were adjoining, sharing one wall. [21] In room 1, Ghent found an adobe floor on which were ash and charcoal, including charred corn-cobs; animal bones; some worked stone items; a clay effigy figure of a bull; Indian ceramics; and some "Spanish potsherds," presumably majolica.

Room 2 contained many more items of Spanish manufacture. On its adobe floor, Ghent found four objects of iron: a hatchet, a chisel or wedge, a nail, and an undescribed "implement." Also on the floor was a copper rod six inches long and 1/8 inch in diameter, and a thick layer of ash and charcoal containing animal bones. In the southwest corner of the room, Ghent found a fire pit, but he did not describe it.

Ghent saw what at first he believed to be a stone "pavement" eighteen inches wide along the north wall of room 2. The "pavement" extended from the northwest corner along the wall to about four feet from the east wall of the room. Here it turned a right angle, ran across the room, and disappeared under the south wall. Ghent excavated two pits through the adobe floor of the room to examine this "pavement." He found a second floor fifty-eight inches below the first. The "pavement" along the north wall of room 2 turned out to be the top of the wall of another room on the remains of which room 2 had been built. Ghent did not describe the fill beneath the floor of room 2. The north wall of the buried room was distinctly odd: the first forty inches above the floor were made of "pressed adobe brick," as Ghent calls them. Above this, the remaining eighteen inches were of stone.

In the northwest quadrant of room 2, Ghent found a burial. He identified it as male, probably Indian, 35 to 40 years old at the time of death. The burial was about two feet deep beneath the floor of room 2, lying on its back, knees "doubled up," oriented with the head towards the west. On the chest of the burial were "parts of 2 pots." The cranium showed distinct flattening from a cradleboard, and rested on the decayed remains of a "board."

Stewart Baldwin, 1982

Stewart Baldwin excavated three rooms in mound J of the historic pueblo in 1982. During the excavations, Baldwin was under the impression that the three rooms had burned out at some point during the historical period and were then reoccupied and rebuilt. Examination of Baldwin's results has prompted Park Service archeologists to propose an alternate explanation. They suggest that the three rooms were originally two stories high. The collapsed roofing found by Baldwin was not the result of two occupations, but of two floors falling into the room fill. [22]