Editors: Photo scans of the two sites are available by calling (303) 492-3114.
Two groups of students from the University of Colorado at Boulder are now in Utah and New Mexico studying ancient Pueblo ruins as part of a larger effort to understand the fate of the Four Corners Anasazi people after A.D. 1100.
One group of 11 students will be studying an ancient "great house" in Bluff, Utah, that was partially excavated during CU-Boulder field schools in 1996, 1997 and 1998. The great house is similar to but smaller than great houses in Chaco Canyon, N.M., the hub of the Chacoan Empire that once housed several thousand people and dominated an area in the Southwest the size of Ohio.
The Bluff site is thought to be one of about 150 Chacoan "outlier" sites that were connected to Chaco Canyon culturally, politically and by roads and paths. Previous excavations by the group indicate the Bluff great house was likely two stories high and had scores of rooms, said CU-Boulder anthropology Associate Professor Catherine Cameron, who is heading up the 2002 Bluff field school.
"Now that we have confirmed the Bluff site was connected with the Chacoan Empire, we will focus on the people living at Bluff following the collapse of Chaco about 1130," she said. Bluff appears to have been occupied well into the 1200s.
The CU team will be working with the Southwest Heritage Foundation -- a nonprofit corporation founded to support the project -- and Abajo Archaeology, a private contract firm in Bluff, which is in the extreme southeast corner of Utah. The Bluff field school is funded by a $20,000 National Geographic Society grant.
Cameron's team also will investigate what appears to be another great house some 20 miles from Bluff known as the Comb Wash great house, which may have been built after the fall of the Chacoan Empire. "It's possible the people living in some Chaco outliers didn't know the party was over," she said.
The team is mapping several dozen small stone houses around the Comb Wash great house to better understand the relationship between villagers and the use of great houses, which usually had communities surrounding them.
While Cameron and her students work at Bluff and Comb Wash, another part of the CU field school will be running concurrently in southeast New Mexico near Socorro. There, CU Museum Anthropology Curator Steve Lekson, Cameron's husband, will be working with seven CU-Boulder students studying a site known as Pinnacle Ruin, some 250 miles south of Mesa Verde, Colo.
While archaeologists know many Mesa Verde families migrated short distances to northern Arizona and New Mexico, the new evidence being studied by Lekson indicates whole communities made swift, southern migrations up to 250 miles long to Pinnacle Ruin and other nearby sites. "It looks like some of these communities may have picked up and moved far south in fairly short periods," said Lekson.
Lekson's team will be working with archaeologist Karl Laumbach of the non-profit Humans Systems Research Institute and the site's landowners, Dennis and Trudy O'Toole, directors of the Cañada Alamosa Institute. About a dozen amateur archaeologists from the Earthwatch Institute, a professional organization that sends paying volunteers to help on scientific projects, also will be working there.
The researchers agree Pinnacle Ruin appears Mesa Verde-like because of its characteristic black-on-white style pottery and clustered masonry room blocks similar to those found adjacent to the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings in southwest Colorado.
Pinnacle Ruin, which once may have been home to some 200 people, was an ideal place to settle, said Lekson. "It's located on a tall, defensive butte next to permanent spring water and arable land and sandwiched between two mountain ranges." Game was plentiful, including deer, elk and rabbits, he said.
The two student groups will meet for a joint field trip at Chaco Canyon and Acoma, N.M. -- two ancient and spectacular Pueblo towns -- in early June, then switch sites. "We want to show all the students the bigger picture of the Anasazi movements and migration and illustrate how these sites are connected," she said.
Cameron's team will include four CU-Boulder graduate teaching assistants, while Lekson's team will have two graduate teaching assistants from CU.Ìý