...a shot from the northern wilderness area at sunset.

Monsoonal floods

First snow of the year...

Here is a view of the Painted Desert with the first snow of the year falling. 

And another shot of accumulating in the badlands and as I write this is is finally starting to cover the ground outside the office. It has been raining here off and on for the last four days and this might mark the end of the 2013 archaeological field season.

Well...we are still shutdown.

The Plains Conference in Loveland went really well. I think that my paper seemed to go alright and it was nice to hangout in Fort Collins for a bit again. On my way back from the conference I swung through the South San Juans and snapped a couple pictures.

The leaves are changing and it is quite a sight. I also snapped the following shot looking up the valley towards Telluride.

Well here is a park sign that you do not see every day. They park is closed and locked until further notice, myself and the archaeology crew have been furloughed indefinitely.

Patio House

This is a picture of a site we call Patio House. If you look closely in the center of the image there are sockets for roof beams carved into the rock face. Behind where this structure was is a rock shelter with petroglyphs.

We took the dog on a drive north of the park yesterday. Here is a shot off the Defiance Plateau.

Overlooking the Puerco

Pecos Conference!

We went to the Pecos Conference last weekend and had a great time. We had a poster session of Petrified Forest material and I won the homebrewing contest.

Archaeological Survey

Here is a shot of the field crew out surveying a large Basketmaker site. So far this field season has gone well and we are finding a lot of new and interesting archaeology.

Some more re-photography. This time a shot of old Route 66.

Morning commute...

Billings Gap

It has been a busy couple of weeks. I have managed to successfully complete the paperwork for the summer field crew, which was not an easy task. I also managed to track down one of two vehicles for the summer field crew which only involved obtaining one truck, trading it for another, and shipping that new (used) vehicle to the park. But we are getting to the point where we might be able to pull off a summers worth of field work.

However I tried to take this week off to do some more dissertation work. I have been mostly successful only spending four or five hours at the office so far this week. But I though I'd include a shot of the beach ridges on the western side of the Estancia Basin. This location was part of Ernst Antevs Willard to Mountainaire transect which he study to help support the age of the Blackwater Draw site. I did a little work out here tracing out his study. If you look closely you can see three or four separate beach ridges which the road crosses.

This morning I was able to recover a nearly complete corrugated pot at a site in the park. It had begun to erode out of a small site from what looks like the floor of a pit/house structure cut into the wall of a dune. We recovered the vessel in-tact and full of sediment. Hopefully I will be able to recover some seeds or organic remains from the sediment. To remove the vessel I excavated around it and with the help of the fossil preparers we wrapped the pot in foil and plaster. We were then able to lift it and sling it in a cargo net for the hike down the mesa and into the truck.

The process ended up taking most of the day. But hopefully we'll be able to get some good information about it.

So... sorry for the absence. I have been trying to get some hiring done and spent last week at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in Honolulu. The conference turned out to be a good one. I got to see many interesting papers, although there wasn't much in the way of Paleoindian or geoarchaeology papers. Waikiki was a little touristy for my tastes, but once you got out of Honolulu the island was very pretty. I'd like to go back for a real visit someday and maybe hit up some of the less developed islands.

We tried a little re-shoot photography at work today. The first image was taken by a paleontologist named Charles Camp in 1921. The second shot was just a couple hours ago.

 

It is a pretty striking example of what 92 years of erosion and probably a little bit of looting can do to a site.

We had a few snowy mornings lately, but it seems to be warming up. Here is a shot from just up the road from the office.

I got a call yesterday evening from a sheriff in a neighboring county about some human remains. As the only archaeologist for hundreds of miles I occasionally get called out for this type thing. So this morning I got up early and grabbed my gear and headed out to meet him. While out there I was shown a very interesting site. There is quite a bit of scattered artifacts on the surface of a dune ridge, but eroding out of the side were a series of rectangular adobe structures. In two cases they appear to have entry ways. There is also burned adobe and one has an upright post set into the walls. There are currently no trees for probably over 20 miles.

In this shot my field book is leaned up against some burned adobe and behind it the wall alignment can be seen (the corner of the structure is in the center of the photo). The dark stain to the left is ash and charcoal in the entryway.

Here is a shot of one of the other structures. Again my field book is against the outer wall, to the left the structure interior corner is easy to see with the entryway above it.

The land owner was a really nice guy, he would love to see some research and excavation happen out here. Now I just need to talk somebody into it....

Stuck in the office today watching the snow storms roll up from the Mogollon Rim. It snowed last night and has been bitterly cold. They closed the park for most of the morning. Here is a shot from just outside the office of the next storm sweeping up.

We had a rock art recording trip last weekend. It rained off and on the night before and almost all day Saturday. It made for some very muddy conditions and it was almost impossible to see the petroglyphs against the wet rock. But we did find some interesting new glyphs at a previously recorded site and a new panel of cowboy glyphs. So despite the cold, rain, and mud it was a pretty productive day.

I got to spend the day out looking for petroglyphs. We'll be having a rock art recording weekend and I think that we have some interesting areas to look for unknown glyphs. But one of my friends doubted that I stop for hot tea on cold mornings. So here is a shot of the kettle boiling at the top of a cliff above the Rio Puerco.

Been on vacation for a week so no pictures from the Painted Desert. But here is one off the deck on Christmas morning.