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

ARCHEOLOGY AT QUARAI (continued)

Excavations in the Pueblo of Quarai

Wes Hurt, 1939

After a pause of almost three years, Wesley Hurt arrived at Quarai to continue the excavations and to stabilize the ruins of the church and convento. He had trained under Joseph Toulouse during the first year of excavation and stabilization at Abó. On January 25, 1939, he and a crew of Works Progress Administration workmen began the excavation of the pueblo of Quarai. For the next five months they cleared the plaza west of the church while delineating the exterior walls of the pueblo buildings. In May, 1939, Hurt and the crew turned to the mission buildings.

During the second week of May, the crew cleared rubble from the Spanish ruins west of the baptistry and began work on the convento. During the third week the crew repaired the portería and the kiva. As part of the stabilization of the kiva, Hurt rebuilt the adobe-lined ventilator shaft in stone. [52]

Figure 55. The pueblo of Quarai west of the church. This is the appearance of mounds H, I, and J after Hurt completed the clearing of the rubble from the outlines of the mounds in 1939. Courtesy Wesley Hurt.

Excavations in the "Southeast Convento"

Wes Hurt, 1939-40

At the end of May, Hurt and the crew began excavating the remaining rooms extending south from the southeast corner of the east courtyard. They started where Baker had left off, at the south side of rooms 58 and 59, and the midpoint of room 51. Over the next seven months, Hurt carried the excavations to the south end of room 53 and two-thirds of the way across room 54. South of this point an irrigation ditch prevented further work in 1939.

By the end of July, 1939, most of the eastern area of the mission had been finished. The eastern courtyard and its associated rooms had been cleared, and most of the rooms in the southeastern area had been emptied of fill. In the southeast, the crew was still tracing some of the single walls enclosing what Hurt called "Patio 3," the open area between the east campo santo wall and the west side of the southeastern buildings.

In June, 1940, crewmen began work on the interior of the church. They removed and relayed much of the flagstone in the nave and transepts, probably because the original flagstones had shifted, making the flooring irregular and uncertain. [53] This relaying of the floor destroyed the arrangement of flagstone outlining the altar platforms in front of the two side altars, and the platform for the stairs to the main altar. At the same time, the workmen removed the decayed traces of the main altar steps, and built replacement steps across the mouth of the apse. These replacement steps were located about 3 feet north of the originals and were of the wrong riser and tread sizes.

In the first week of February, 1940, the crew finished excavating the known rooms of the southeastern area of the ruins. They removed the fill from the last few feet of room 54 and stabilized the walls. At the same time they apparently moved the irrigation ditch a few feet to the south so that it passed just south of the ruins. Finally, on August 9, Hurt and the crew packed up the equipment and left Quarai.

Albert Ely, 1944 and 1958

In October, 1944, Al Ely conducted stratigraphic tests at an unknown location in the pueblo of Quarai. He was teaching a class in archeology in Santa Fe, and gave the students field experience through two days of excavation during October 20-22. No known records of this excavation are available. [54]

Albert Ely returned to Quarai in 1958 to repair and re-stabilize the buildings. In order "to obtain clay for making mortar he uncovered six rooms" of the pueblo in mound J, as Wes Hurt puts it. Only a set of plan drawings of the rooms uncovered have been found. [55]

The "Chapel of 1629": Stubbs Excavations in 1959

In 1959 Stanley Stubbs excavated the "chapel" in the plaza just south of mound J. Stubbs found no artifacts in or around the church that allowed him to date it. He assumed that it had been built before the large church of Quarai, in about 1615-20. [56] Stubbs stated that the church outline had been "unrecognized for years by archaeologists and visitors at Quarai, and also not mentioned in any known Spanish record." However, the outline had been quite clear to Bandelier, who marked it on his plan of Quarai with the note "Chapelle," or chapel. [57] The archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe records the construction of a church at Quarai in 1829, stopped soon after it was begun. These two pieces of evidence show that Stubbs was wrong in his estimation of the age of the building. The date of its construction was probably 1829, and its walls never got much higher than about one foot.

Excavations in the Church and Convento

Valder, 1972

In 1972, the Museum of New Mexico carried out a major stabilization of Quarai. Assigned as field foreman was Timothy S. Valder, an archeologist. His wife, Linda Valder (also an archeologist), worked as photographer, records-keeper, and excavator, as well as working on the stabilization crew. In the process of room clearing and stabilization, the crew uncovered a number of previously unnoticed details about the structure and construction of the mission and convento. [58]

The Valders and their crew found several surviving pieces of wooden beams in the convento. While stabilizing and capping the south wall of the patio, one of the stabilization crew accidentally removed the charred remains of an upright beam from the wall west of the south doorway. The beam was apparently one of the original pillars that supported the open side of the ambulatorio before it was walled up. The beam was sent to "the lab," presumably the Laboratory of Anthropology. In the northeast room of the convento, while clearing out fill from the lower portion of the room, the crew found beam sockets on the north and south sides of the room. The socket on the south side was 9 1/2 inches across, horizontally, and 4 1/2 inches high. It originally contained two beams side by side; the badly decayed base of one of these still remained in place. The surviving chunk was only 2 3/4 inches in diameter. The Valders observed that the beams extended almost through the wall between room 11 and room 12 on the south, and that the ends of the beams had been covered with a thin layer of mortared stone from the south side of the wall. During stabilization, the holes on the north side of the room collapsed and were filled as solid wall. The west edge of the south socket pair was four feet four inches from the inner face of the southwest corner, and twenty-eight inches above the floor surface of the room as it existed in July, 1972. [59]

The Valders removed the flagstone from the platform in front of the church and from the interior of the building. [60] When they began on the platform, Linda recorded that the platform extended the width of the church facade from the front room of the baptistry on the west to the east edge of the facade, thirty-eight feet and two inches. The platform extended thirteen feet and nine inches from the front of the church. Traces of a second level or step just south of the south edge of the upper platform were visible in some places. Inside the church, as the flagstones came out the Valders noticed several post holes against the walls, previously covered by the stones. There were four of these, each about eleven inches in diameter and seven inches deep, with a rounded bottom. Two of the holes were in the southeast and southwest corners of the church interior, the third was sixteen feet six inches from the southeast corner against the east wall of the nave, and the fourth was sixteen feet from the southwest corner against the west wall. The Valders thought the posts that had stood here were to support the choir loft, but they were more likely main vertical supports for the scaffolding set up for the construction of the church in the seventeenth century. [61]

Beneath the flagstone floor of the church, the Valders found information about both the construction of the floor and the burial practices of the Franciscans who tended the mission. The Valders set up a seven-foot by nine-foot unit in the middle of the south half of the nave, and excavated to eighteen inches in six-inch levels. In this unit they found that the flagstones had rested on about three inches of brown loam, beneath which was a hard-packed, smooth surface. The hard-packed surface had been penetrated in a number of places, and scattered concentrations of re-deposited human bones were found everywhere in the test unit. The Valders hypothesized that the hard-packed floor had been the original surface inside the church, before the flagstones were installed. In actuality, it was probably the last "construction floor" within the church. When the construction crew finished the building, they then shoveled a thin layer of bedding clay onto the surface, and set the flagstones in place onto this clay. When it was necessary to bury someone, the missionary probably lifted two or three stones to uncover a patch of earth big enough for a grave, and then excavated a pit to contain the body. After the body was covered, the flagstones were lowered back into place. As the floor area filled with bodies, new graves reexcavated the old burials; the bones of the earlier burials were tossed back into the fill of the new graves. This is the typical sequence of events in a church that is used long enough to fill the favorite areas of the nave floor with graves. [62]

As bodies decayed, the flagstones would have settled unevenly over the graves, making the floor irregular. Whether the Franciscans ever felt the situation had gotten pronounced enough that they relevelled the floor cannot be determined.

1978 Stabilization Excavations

During the State stabilization of 1978, the Museum of New Mexico excavated a pit to examine the construction of the foundations of the church. The test pit was five feet long, and extended from the north face of the southwest tower, north along the west face of the west nave wall. The test found that the foundations of the church extended about seven feet below the present surface. The lowest 1 1/2 feet of foundation were built of cobbles, or water-smoothed stones. The next four feet of foundation were built with the same smooth veneer found on the above-grade walls. At about 1 1/2 feet below the present surface, the surface of the wall stepped back several inches, forming what the stabilization report called "a narrow footing." Above this footing, the veneer continued upward onto the above-grade wall surface. [63]

The veneered surface followed by this excavation must at some point become the surface stabilized into existence during the work by Senter in 1934. Senter's reports and field notes indicate that the stabilization had reveneered all of the wall surface below ten feet above grade. At least some part of the series of steps or setbacks built as part of the stabilization were a creation of the 1934 construction work. It is likely that the original surface had no setback, but dropped straight to the top of the footing, 1 1/2 feet below the ground surface. If so, then this footing would have originally been about 1 1/2 feet wide along the west side of the church.