Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Home builder finds Pueblo artifacts on land

By Juan-Carlos Rodriguez
Journal Staff Writer
      It's a fascinating thing about the Middle Rio Grande Valley — that digging just a few inches under the surface can reveal remnants of the early inhabitants of the area in the form of pottery shards, tools and even human remains.
    That's what happened to a unsuspecting Los Ranchos homeowner recently.
    As he was clearing space for the pad of his new home on an open field, David Waszak's backhoe turned up more than just dirt and rocks.
    Waszak is building a home for his family in the village and said he never expected to uncover burial urns, pottery shards and other artifacts from a valley Pueblo that dates from at least the 1300s.
    "I noticed some pottery shards on the surface of the ground," Waszak said. "When we got down about 18-20 inches, we noticed a black staining of the soil, it looked suspicious. The first thing we discovered was some human remains."
    University of New Mexico archaeologist Scott Worman said the discoloration of the soil is an easy sign to spot a midden, or a place where people would have dumped garbage.
    "The soil gets that color because people heated and cooked with wood, and they would dump the ashes out somewhere near their house and it just built up over time. So it's a mix of pieces of stone tools, pieces of pottery, bones from animals they were eating, and typically, they would also put their burials in the midden area," Worman said.
    New Mexico law covers such discoveries, according to State Historic Preservation Division archaeologist Glenna Dean.
    "There's a law that the Legislature passed in 1989 that protects unmarked human burials," Dean said. "That's defined as a burial that lacks traditional surface marking such as a headstone or a fence or a pinwheel or shells or toys. What it says is that those kinds of graves merit the protection of law and appropriate and respectful disposition."
    The law requires the discoverer, if a private property owner, to notify local law enforcement first, which will then determine if the remains are part of a crime scene. If not, the state is notified.
    "Most of the archaeology that's done in this country today is done as part of construction projects," Worman said.
    The remains are of "ancestral Puebloans," Dean said, or the ancestors of pueblos in the general Rio Grande area today.
    "As to which pueblo might claim it as an ancestral site, we don't know, because we haven't gone to consultation," Dean said, referring to the process by which a pueblo is notified of a discovery of human remains.
    She said that in this case the bones will most likely not be moved, and therefore state law does not require notification of the pueblos.
    "If you can leave them alone, leave them alone," Worman said.
    Dean said there are many such archaeological sites in the Middle Rio Grande Valley.
    "Certainly anywhere you have water you're going to have archaeological sites. And the reason people want to build in a place today is probably the same reason that somebody was there before," Dean said. "Human needs just don't change, so if it looks like a nice place to live, odds are someone has been there before."
    A larger site is directly underneath Alameda Elementary School.
    "Its' a really sad story. It was a huge pueblo, but around the turn of the 20th century, it was mined for soil to use for road construction. They knew it was a site, there were dead people and everything else, and they just dug it up and hauled it away. And then they built a school on top of it. So now whenever the school wants to move its playground equipment or build on a wing or something, they have to do archaeology because they are on top of a pueblo," Dean said.
    Los Ranchos Mayor Larry Abraham said the discovery is a good reminder of the rich history of the valley.
    "My understanding is there are a quarter of a million pottery shards, just from Los Ranchos, at the Maxwell Museum," Abraham said, referring to UNM's anthropology museum. "I encourage all of our residents to just be very careful when they're digging and not to disturb anything, and go through the right channels when something like this happens."
    Dean echoed Abraham's admonition.
    "Human remains in archaeological sites are dead people. And it is a felony to take anything or disturb them. You can't take the skull and leave everything else, you can't take a bowl and leave everything else. ... People have this idea, pretty commonly, that its OK to rob the dead if they're Indian. And actually you can go to jail for this," Dean said. "These are people, and they deserve respect just like everybody else."
   

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