An unexpected sign of spring: my Venus Flytrap is blooming.
James Allison
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Archaeologist studying the ancient farmers of the Southwestern U.S. and eastern Great Basin; quantitative methods, ceramic analysis, archaeological theory.
It's Super Bowl Sunday here in the U.S., and many people will be watching the big game. But it is also a day for social media postings of pictures of SuperB owls. So here is a superb owl petroglyph from Nine-Mile Canyon, Utah.
Made it back from Paquimé just in time for Paul Minnis's plenary talk, but my phone died (I guess I took too many pictures at the site). So, I couldn't post anything about the talk. Now it's the closing fiesta. There's a folk dancing performance going on now, and rumours that a mariachi band is coming (actually the band just arrived).
I'm in Casas Grandes, Mexico, for the Southwest Symposium, a biannual conference on the #archaeology of southwestern North America. The conference really starts tomorrow, but here's a photo from a side trip this afternoon to a site called La Cueva de la Olla.
Went past this waterfall on a Christmas Day hike with my youngest son today. When he was just learning to talk, he thought the word for water was 'blah.' 24 years ago I carried him in a backpack on the same hike. When we reached the place where he is standing in the photo, he spotted the waterfall and shouted "blah! ... fall! blah! ... fall!." He has grown up a lot since then, but I still call the waterfall the blah falls.
I started doing #archaeology field work 40 years ago. I love doing it, but over the last year or two, it has become clear that too much excavation work has been hard on my body. In particular, I've developed osteoarthritis in my back due to my sometimes overly energetic approach to excavation. My second surgery in four months inspired this:
The Pecos Conference finished today. It is an annual gathering of archaeologists who work in southwestern North America, always held outdoors in the late summer. The first Pecos Conference was organized in 1927 by A.V. Kidder and held near Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico, where Kidder had been excavating. This year's conference was in the forest near Flagstaff, Arizona. It started raining soon after I took the picture.
I had planned to publish daily updates on our excavation at Coal Bed village, but it's been really busy (as field work always is).
But here is one thing we are working on. We dug this trench in 2018. The trench is in a structure that dates somewhere between 500 and 700 AD. But in 2018 we only exposed a small portion of the structure, and I had lots of questions about it. So we took the backdirt out of the trench this week, and we are going to expand the excavation a bit.
Soon after the last photo was taken, we started a trench across the line of megaliths and up into the AD 1200s rubble mound behind it. Here it is in 2022, after expanding the excavation a bit. We started the trench next to one of the fallen stones. The corridor between the wall with the row of megaliths and the building it paralleled had an adobe surface, which we cut through in a couple of places. There is earlier (AD 900s) material below the corridor.