A new photo of the week...

It has been a busy week here, got back from the conference Sunday night and then all week at work. We spent most of Wednesday in the field and found three new petroglyph sites and a couple field houses. Not a bad days work.

The first site is a single small panel:

The second site is spectacular. It appears to have later elements, including the basket in the photo below and a animal trap glyph, the second I know of in the park:

The final site is a series of panels including this element. For lack of a better term we called a trojan horse. It is overprinting some earlier glyphs:

Overall a very unique day...

Archaeological Society of New Mexico Meetings:

After my talk on the archaeology of the Estancia Basin on Saturday morning had a BBQ lunch and listened to papers all afternoon. The banquet was pretty good and I enjoyed the Bandelier lecture. But the highlight of the conference was the Sunday morning field trip to La Salina....

Despite the fact I have now worked in the basin for years I have never been to La Salina, which through some trick of the upwelling groundwater is the only sub-basin of the 80 or so which produces pretty pure sodium chloride. The playa has historically been used as a commercial source of salt and extensively used prehistorically. I was able to actually collect some for table salt at home. It is a pretty cool thing to see.

La Salina also has the distinction of being the only land grant granted by the Republic of Texas after they claimed New Mexico still in existence. The ownership was then actually recognized by the congress of the United States in a Private Bill.

Sorry, no picture this evening. But not all of archaeology involves pictures. A fair amount of it involves sitting in cheap motel rooms, fretting about conference papers. And this cheap motel is one of my favorites. The second time I stayed here the owners went on vacation and left me alone in the place for a week. It was actually really nice, though I couldn't get clean towels. The air conditioner in my current room is broken, but it is a beautiful New Mexico evening and having all the windows open is nice.

Although this is the weekend of the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Memphis, I am giving a paper in Moriarty New Mexico. It was an invited lecture, which is nice. But at the same time a little depressing that I have become the expert on something, especially something as odd as a bunch of spear points ringing a lake which has been empty for the last eight thousand years...

Another shot of the grasslands of the northern corner of the park.

In the first of the Photo of the Week series!

The view from Pilot Rock

This is a view looking southeast from the extreme northwest corner of the park, about 8 1/2 miles from my office. The large black hill is pilot rock, the highest point in Petrified Forest. The area is beautiful and about as remote as you can get. While most people access this by foot we took the service road which take about 2 hours. A brief survey for archaeology was conducted here several years ago and found sites on both the volcanic plug and surrounding grasslands. The sites mostly consist of slab lined architecture and petroglyphs.

Good Evening,

I have started this blog for two reasons.

First, I would like to take the idea of the photo of the week to a wider audience. Show, and tell, people what it is that I do as a field archaeologist on a daily basis.

Second, I would like to get back into the habit of writing. Writing things that interest me, discussions of topics I find intriguing. Hopefully that will encourage me to write more and finish up my dissertation.

I intend to update the blog every week, mostly with my archaeology photo of the week.

I hope that somebody else finds it interesting too.