By John D. Speth

For six weeks this past summer, 13 undergraduates in the Summer Training Program in Archaeology discovered the thrill of uncovering the ruins of an ancient Indian pueblo (a village of densely clustered rooms) that had remained shrouded in mystery for centuries, hidden beneath the dust and sand of the arid Southwest. They experienced the challenge of piecing together a picture of how these early Americans eked out their living in a vast wilderness. And they have added to the knowledge necessary to explain one day why the occupants of this pueblo, numbering no more than 100 or so persons at any one time, vanished before the first Europeans set foot in the Southwest.

The students' routine began each day shortly after sunrise with a hasty cafeteria-style breakfast of rubbery scrambled eggs and coffee that tasted like yesterday's brew. We then all piled into two dust-covered University vehicles and set off on the daily 14-mile trip from Roswell, New Mexico, where we were headquartered for the field season, to the Henderson Site, the ruins of a 13th-century Pueblo Indian village that we were excavating. Located on the 2C\ cattle ranch, the site was southwest of town atop Six Mile Hill, a low rocky ridge that formed the western edge of the Pecos River valley.

To the uninitiated, the Henderson Site wouldn't look like much. In fact, the first time we climbed the hill most of the field school students weren't sure how I knew there really was a prehistoric village there. But as they neared the crest of the hill and began to look more closely at the ground, the omnipresent scatter of flint chips, pieces of decorated pottery, shiny slivers of mussel shell, and broken manos and metates (the corn-grinding tools of these ancient Southwesterners) were hard to miss. And it didn't take them long to discern the unmistakable outlines of the village itself--long, low, grass-covered earthen mounds gently rising four to five feet above the rocky surface of the hill top. The pueblo had been built entirely of mud, or "adobe" in the parlance of Southwesterners.

Standing exposed to the elements for centuries on this wind-swept hill, the walls and roofs of the village gradually disintegrated, melting down into gentle mounds. From the layout of the mounds, it was easy to see that the village had been E-shaped (see map), with each arm of the 'E' made up of parallel rows of adjoining rooms, with the low, open spaces between the arms serving as plazas. The entire site was about 70 yards long and 35 to 40 yards wide.

We began the season by selecting two places where we would focus our excavations. We then carefully laid on a grid system over these areas, a checkerboard of one-meter squares demarcated by wooden stakes driven into the ground. This grid became the basic reference system for recording everything we found. Then we began the excavations.

At the beginning, I suspect most students thought that digging a room meant simply shoveling out the dirt that had blown or washed into it over the centuries. They soon discovered just how complex this process can be. Since the rooms had been built of adobe, when the walls began to disintegrate, the materials of the structures became filled in with the very same material. Thus it is often very difficult to distinguish walls from room-fill or collapsed roofs from floors.

Further complicating matters, the villagers often remodeled rooms, adding new walls and floors and removing others, and, finally, over the centuries following the abandonment of the site, countless rodents burrowed into the mounds, riddling the so organic-rich deposits with crisscrossing tunnels and dens. Excavating these ancient rooms was no simple matter.

Perhaps the hardest thing for the new students to come to grips with was excavating into the unknown, trying to figure out from subtle changes in the color and texture of the dirt what they were exposing and, of course, destroying as they dug. This is one of the hardest skills to learn, and one virtually impossible to convey to students in a formal classroom setting.

Something else that is very difficult for newcomers to learn is to leave every artifact in place, no matter how thrilling a discovery might be. The students' first impulse understandably was to yank the object out of the ground and run to me with their finds. As the season progressed they learned that to the archaeologist an object's context--that is, its exact position in the ground, the sediments in which it is embedded, and the other objects with which it is associated--is often as important as the object itself. A pot is just a pot, but its context may reveal that it had been hung from the rafters, or had been sitting on the roof when the structure collapsed, or had been some sort of votive object placed in a wall niche.

Not unexpectedly, the students dug very slowly at the beginning of the season, inching their way downward into the deposits at a snail's pace, worried that with every slice of their trowel they would destroy the key piece of evidence that would unlock the past of the Henderson Site. But their confidence grew rapidly as they learned to decipher the complex history of a room's construction, use, remodeling and abandonment. They were becoming real archaeologists. And they adjusted marvelously to the long tedious hours in the blazing shadeless sun--and even to tarantulas.