Lab News

Tsama Pueblo Collection

"Orphan" Assemblage Examined for Possible Connections Between Mesa Verde and Northern Rio Grande Regions

by Jamie Merewether, Collections Manager

July 10, 2009

This biscuit ware bowl fragment is characteristically light tan in color, with tuff temper.

In the summer of 1970, renowned Southwestern archaeologist Florence Hawley Ellis directed a crew of field school students from the University of New Mexico during excavations at a site in northwestern New Mexico called Tsama Pueblo. Thirty-eight years later, in the summer of 2008, the artifacts recovered during those excavations made their way to the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, where lab staff and volunteers began the painstaking process of cataloging and analyzing the materials.

Tsama (which means “wrestling pueblo ruin” in Tewa) is located near the confluence of El Rito Creek and the Rio Chama, in the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. The site consists of three large, rectangular plazas surrounded by multiple banks of surface rooms. The west roomblock and plaza, which make up the oldest portion of the site, were probably built in the late A.D. 1200s and abandoned by A.D. 1400; the middle plaza (a short distance east of the first plaza) was built a little later. The east plaza was probably built in the A.D. 1400s and was inhabited until the time of early Spanish explorations in northern New Mexico in the early seventeenth century.

Clay bell.

Although the 1970 field school worked in all three plaza areas, they focused primarily on rooms and kivas in the western and middle roomblocks. Not much had been done with the artifact collection since the summer of 1970.

Acting Director of Research and Education Scott Ortman arranged for Crow Canyon to borrow this collection from the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico as part of his dissertation research, which investigates the nature of the relationship between ancient pueblos in the Mesa Verde region and present-day pueblos in north-central New Mexico. To explore possible connections, Scott is using many lines of evidence, one of which is artifacts from the two regions.

Over the years, the Crow Canyon staff has compiled abundant information on pottery from ancient Pueblo sites in the Mesa Verde region. The pottery from Tsama Pueblo provides an ideal comparison because much of it dates from the period when Pueblo people in the Mesa Verde region are believed to have migrated to the northern Rio Grande region in New Mexico (the late A.D. 1200s). Although the raw materials used in pottery manufacture were different in the two regions, one might expect the decoration of vessels to show some similarities if Tsama were initially built by immigrants from the Mesa Verde region. This is one of the primary questions we hope to address by examining this collection.

Selenite pendant blanks. Selenite is a form of gypsum. Each piece has been drilled, but the edges were never completely shaped.

Thus far, most of our work with the Tsama collection has involved cataloging and basic analysis. First, we entered the provenience information from the field school’s artifact bags, field notes, and summary reports into our database. Then we cataloged all the artifacts, entering basic artifact data into the database, and repackaged the collection in archival-quality storage materials. This last task in itself was quite interesting, because the artifacts were still in their original field bags and boxes (including cigarette boxes, candy boxes, and shoeboxes) from 1970, and the packing material included old 1969 and 1970 newspapers, which the staff and volunteers thoroughly enjoyed perusing!

Unusual painted pottery jar lid with holes. The handle is missing.

Before we could analyze the pottery in the collection, we had to learn how to identify northern Rio Grande pottery types. We were fortunate that Dean Wilson of the Office of Archaeological Studies at the Museum of New Mexico was able to come to Crow Canyon for several days to train us. Once we knew what to look for, we began analyzing the pottery, focusing on assemblages from the rooms and kivas in the west roomblock. This area of the site is of greatest interest to us because it was built about the same time that Pueblo people migrated from the Mesa Verde region. Finally, after the basic pottery analysis was completed, Scott and Laboratory Analysis Specialist Fumi Arakawa examined the designs on the rim sherds to gather data for Scott’s comparative studies.

For the lab staff, it was interesting to see the pottery and other artifacts from a different area of the Southwest. Many items were unusual from our perspective. The assemblage included approximately 14 cone-shaped clay pipes, one clay bell, hundreds of selenite pendants and pendant blanks, lightning stones, biscuit ware pottery, glaze ware pottery, and an unusual pottery lid with several holes in it.

The complete collection from the 1970 Tsama Pueblo excavation contains more than 40,000 artifacts in 1,745 bags. We will continue working with it in the coming years, as time and funding permits, and hope to eventually produce a publication describing the results of this important project. We believe that working with "orphaned" collections like the one from Tsama—collections that have not received the attention they deserve—is an important way for Crow Canyon to contribute to archaeology on a larger scale than is possible when focusing only on the sites we excavate directly.