Lab News

Crow Canyon Studies Another "Orphaned" Collection from the Northern Rio Grande Valley

by Scott Ortman, Director of Research and Education

July 27, 2010

Rim-ticking, parallel framing lines, and an elaborate exterior design on this biscuit ware bowl from Ponsipa'akeri are reminiscent of painted designs on Pueblo III pottery from the Mesa Verde region.

In previous lab updates, Jamie Merewether and I described Crow Canyon's work with the Tsama Pueblo collection (see July 10 and August 26, 2009, articles). In this column, I'll talk about work we are doing with a second "orphaned" collection this summer as part of the Village Ecodynamics Project.

The collection, which is on loan from the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, comes from the ancestral Tewa site of Ponsipa'akeri'owinkeyi, or "plumed arroyo-shrub bed height village ruin." The village site lies on the banks of the Rio Ojo Caliente, a northern tributary of the Rio Chama in New Mexico. It appears to have been established as the Mesa Verde region was depopulated in the late thirteenth century A.D. and was occupied into the Spanish colonial period. At its height, the village contained about 1,000 rooms in eight architectural blocks, some of which were two to three stories high.

The collection we are working with derives from Occidental College field school excavations directed by David Bugé from 1978 through 1981. During these field schools, students excavated test pits in each of the architectural blocks and in several plaza areas and kivas. Most of the recovered artifacts were inventoried following excavation, but there is no record of analysis other than information recorded on the artifact bags themselves, and no final report was produced. As a result, stratigraphic information obtained during excavation had never been correlated with detailed pottery data from analysis to reconstruct the occupational history of the site.

Lab intern Rachel Sites analyzing sherds from the Ponsipa'akeri collection.

Crow Canyon has several goals in working with the Ponsipa'akeri collection. First, we are examining the stratigraphic and artifact records that already exist to get a better understanding of when the site was built, how it may have changed over the years, and how long people lived there. Second, we are correlating excavation results with observations about architecture and artifacts visible on the modern ground surface to better understand patterns of growth in other northern Rio Grande villages where no excavations have been conducted. Finally, we are studying the thirteenth-century pottery collected from the site to see whether it exhibits comparable traces of the Mesa Verde decorative style that we found in our work with the Tsama collection.

This summer, lab interns Rachel Sites and Erina Gruner have made a good start toward accomplishing these goals. In conjunction with laboratory staff and volunteers, they have cataloged the entire collection, reanalyzed all the late thirteenth-century pottery, and recorded the decorative elements on rim sherds in the collection. Preliminary results suggest that characteristic embellishments of Mesa Verde Black-on-white pottery (for example, rim ticking and framing lines) are common on late-thirteenth-century sherds from Ponsipa'akeri, just as they are on pottery from Tsama Pueblo (see August 26, 2009, update). This in turn adds support to the argument that the ancestral Tewa population of the northern Rio Grande region derives at least in part from Mesa Verde–region immigrants.