0037 - Pecos 2016 - Pecos Poster: Cedar Mesa Perishables with Erin Gearty

08/25/16 • 11 min

Cedar Mesa, Utah, is an amazing landscape with a rich archaeological record. Excavations took place throughout the area, including in the dry caves in the Greater Cedar Mesa region. The Cedar Mesa Perishables Project set out to study 4,000 unpublished textiles, baskets, wooden implements, and hide and feather artifacts excavated during the 1890s. These artifacts are housed in six different museums! The overall goal of the project is to carefully document each artifact and make the collection more widely known to archaeologists, native communities, and the general public.

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0036 - Pecos 2016 - Pecos Presentation: Landforms as Architecture

“Landforms as Architecture and the Appropriation of Place on Orayvi Wash, A.D. 550-800” by Kellam Throgmorton Binghamton University During a 2015 survey of Orayvi Wash, Arizona, two adjacent sequentially inhabited community centers were documented. The communities date between A.D. 550 and 800, the Basketmaker III and Pueblo I periods. The particularly unique aspect of these communities are the large buttes near the habitation area, which may have been seen as formalized ceremonial structures. On top of these landforms, post-and-adobe architecture was constructed, consequently manipulating the landscape into a power symbol. Consequently, we can see the creation of new power dynamics in early aggregated villages in this area.

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0038 - Pecos 2016 - Pecos Poster: Fuels Removal from Cultural Resources

The buildup of fuels, such as tree branches, on archaeological sites is a major concern in the Jemez Ranger District of the Santa Fe National Forest due to the potential for wildfire in the area. Since 2013, the SW Jemez Mountain Landscape Restoration Project-Archaeological Site Thinning has endeavored to remove fuels from sites, creating a unique treatment plan to prevent damage to archaeological sites.