Clues to Indians : Paying to Get a Dig at History

Bill Freeman wiped the sweat from his brow as he chipped away at the rock-hard clay beneath his feet, inching his way toward unknown treasures.

“Just think,” he said, pondering the wonder of it all. “We pay money for this kind of torture.”

Indeed he had. Freeman, a retired electrical designer from Oregon, is one of hundreds of people who paid $575 to spend a week this summer searching for ancient clues about those who passed this way so long ago, an endeavor that seems to have almost universal appeal. For that price, Freeman got his meals in a cafeteria, a bed in a small bunkhouse, and the chance to work seemingly endless hours beneath the hot summer sun under the picky supervision of professional archeologists.

Hard Work, Long Hours

The work is hard, the hours are long, and when it is all over, Freeman and the others leave with only their memories. Whatever treasures they discovered--pottery, usually broken, an occasional arrowhead, and sometimes a partial skeleton--must remain behind.

But for Freeman, it is well worth the price. He has been coming here each year for the past five years, taking part in an unusual archeological program designed to carry out a long-term study of the complex society of the Anasazi Indians, ancients who built great ci1953064307before the Navajos arrived and then mysteriously abandoned them.

And to the Crow Canyon Archeological Center, people like Freeman are more than hard laborers. They are the lifeblood of a program that promises to offer continuity in a field noted for its sporadic endeavors, abandoned efforts and unpublished findings.

The center, which currently has two archeological projects under way in the area, gets most of its operating funds from people willing to pay hundreds of dollars to dig in the dirt alongside professionals, learning as they go and ending up with the feeling that they have accomplished something. The participants are immersed in the Anasazi culture through seminars and informal discussions with the archeologists, and they take part in every aspect of the program, including laboratory studies of the artifacts.

Unusual Vacation

“It’s a rather unusual way to spend your vacation,” said Ian (Sandy) Thompson, executive director of the center. “Excavation is labor intensive.”

But each week as many as 60 persons take part in the venture. By the end of October, when the six-month season ends, around 1,200 amateurs will have participated this year, including 800 students from elementary through college level who are charged a reduced tuition of $325 a week. Most participants spend one week at the center, although many spend longer periods.

Patricia Jones, a history teacher at Crescenta Valley High School in Glendale, spent a week this August digging in one of the center’s two archeological sites, and she hopes to bring back some of her students next summer.

By the time the week was over, she had sore hands, blisters, and three stitches in her forehead after a rude encounter with a tree branch.

But she says it was worth it.

“I’ve wanted to do this ever since I was a child,” she said.

The center is in the heart of the Four Corners area where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet, a spectacular region of red bluffs and high mesas dotted with as many as 20,000 Anasazi sites. Many of those sites have been looted by pot hunters over the years.

“Of those that have been excavated, only about .04% have been done in such a way that they are valuable scientifically,” said Bruce Bradley, the center’s chief archeologist.

And on that dab of information, “the entire Anasazi story is built,” he added.

It is a story with more questions than answers.

The bits and pieces of fine pottery, the exquisite arrow heads, the precisely constructed buildings and the elaborate communities tantalize scholars who wonder why people who ruled this area for seven centuries suddenly abandoned it around 700 years ago.

Experts like Bradley, who earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge University in England, are trying to understand a complex society that appears to have had many facets.

“We are trying to reconstruct a culture,” he said.

The centerpiece of the program is a cluster of ruins called Sand Canyon--one of two sites being excavated--on the edge of a mesa that Bradley believes must have been something special to the Anasazis.

He hopes the work at Sand Canyon will eventually help scholars understand the agony that drove the Anasazis from the land that had been their home for so many years. Was it a drought that was so severe it dried up their crops despite impressive irrigation systems? Was it an enemy, real or imagined?

The answer may lie buried somewhere around here, especially if Sand Canyon played a major role in the rituals of the Anasazis, as Bradley has speculated.

“I think these people were desperate to find an explanation for what was happening to them,” he said.

The Sand Canyon site has at least 350 structures, including an exceptionally high percentage of kivas-- circular rooms that are believed to have been used for rituals. But the large settlement is unusual in another way. Unlike other sites of that size, there are very few areas where the Indians dumped their garbage, such things as broken pieces of pottery and ashes from their fire pits.

That has led Bradley to conclude that Sand Canyon was probably used intermittently and most likely for major ceremonial purposes. That is why some of the amateur archeologists spent their time recently digging on the edge of the site, literally looking for garbage. A huge repository of garbage would disprove Bradley’s hypothesis, and he said he would be as pleased with that discovery as he would with confirmation because either would represent progress in understanding the Anasazis.

Bradley, who has has worked on archeological projects in Africa as well as throughout the Southwestern United States, believes you cannot understand ancient people unless you learn how to do what they did best. With that in mind, he has mastered the art of duplicating their pottery, and, according to Thompson, Bradley may be better at making Indian arrowheads than anyone else in the world.

Sitting in front of the center’s lodge one recent afternoon before several dozen volunteers, Bradley held up a piece of obsidian, a form of volcanic glass that is as black as coal. Using a piece of soft sandstone, he began striking the rock on one point and then another, “flaking” off pieces of obsidian with edges that he described as “10 to 20 times sharper than a scalpel.”

The ancients liked obsidian, he said, because they knew exactly how it would break if they hit it a certain way.

“These were people who understood predictability,” he said.

Moments later he changed tools and began chipping away at the edge of the stone with a soft antler, applying just enough force at just the right spot to achieve exactly what he wanted.

A mere 40 minutes after he had started, Bradley held up a spear point that looked like it could have come right out of the Smithsonian.

As he held up the jewel he had just created, he added: “This gives us an appreciation of these people as individuals and artisans. I’m as close to their thinking right now as one will ever get.”

But the search will go on for other clues. The center hopes to excavate as much as 20% of the Sand Canyon site, a process that could take as long as 20 years. As each area is completed and the artifacts removed and logged, the rooms are “backfilled” with dirt and left intact to preserve them for future archeologists with new information who may want to dig them up all over again.

The artifacts will become part of a federally funded Anasazi Heritage Center nearing completion in the nearby community of Dolores.

Tuition from the amateur participants pays about half the operating cost of the center’s entire archeological program, said Thompson, and fees from traveling seminars provide another 20%.

“We also do a lot of fund raising,” he added.

That combination has netted the 5-year-old program a 70-acre “campus” in the heart of this historic area. It is about 10 miles from the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park where the Anasazis built some of their most spectacular dwellings in the sandstone cliffs above Montezuma Valley. This summer, the nonprofit center moved its facilities out of a series of dilapidated old trailers into a $600,000 laboratory that was funded entirely by donations from interested benefactors, mostly from the Denver area.

The center has a permanent staff of 18, including seven archeologists, and in the summer months the staff swells to around 40, Thompson said.

What sets the program apart from most archeological projects is the continued funding that the public participation provides, thus assuring the center of being able to finish projects that may take years to complete.

“It’s a real luxury to be able to say we will work here for 20 years,” Thompson said.

Return Year After Year

The program also provides an opportunity for members of the public to take part in a continuing process, returning year after year to work in the same area. That sense of permanence sets it apart from extension college courses, which also involve public participation, or similar archeological programs of more modest scope.

The chief failure of most archeological projects lies in the fact that they are funded for brief periods, usually involving students from a university over a few weeks in the summer, and the funds rarely include the tedious, time-consuming process of refining the data and publishing it in a form that other scholars can study, according to Bradley. With a steady source of income, the scientists at the center can spend their winter months organizing their data and publishing their findings.

“Not depending on grants allows us to go off on all sorts of limbs,” Bradley said, noting that the freedom to pursue goals that may not look promising enough to interest such funding agencies as the National Science Foundation. “I don’t care if some of those limbs get sawed off.”

Although professional archeologists were initially skeptical of allowing amateurs to excavate in archeological sites, several universities in the region have endorsed the program after viewing the close supervision under which the volunteers work.

Professional supervision assures that the sites will be excavated in such a way that the results will be scientifically reliable, Bradley added.

Every Artifact Logged

Every artifact, from tiny bits of broken pottery to complete human skeletons, becomes part of the record, and the amateurs participate in every step of the process. Logs of each day’s digging include the precise location of each item, including its depth beneath the surface and its position in the room in which it was found.

“The more controlled you are with your digging, the more specific you can be with be with your conclusions,” Mary Etzkorn, an archeologist with the center, told participants during a recent evening seminar.

Later, out in Sand Canyon, Maurice Bandy, a computer scientist from San Diego, scraped away at the floor of a small room, sweltering beneath the midday sun.

Asked why he paid $575 to dig in the dirt, he answered: “It beats going to the Caribbean and sitting on a boat and getting sunburned and blasted.”

Several participants said it was hard to put into words just what they got out of the project, other than the realization of a long-term dream and the chance to do a little hard work on a worthwhile project.

“It’s therapy,” said Andrew Wright, a Midwestern attorney who has spent part of his vacation here for each of the last three years.

Thompson said the participants come mostly to participate.

“People come, and they leave self-renewed,” he said.