Erosion Threatens Archeological Sites

Archeologists at Bandelier National Monument and the adjacent Santa Fe National Forest are worried.

A fire last spring that burned more than 16,000 acres and stripped away ground cover was followed by heavy flooding, damaging valuable evidence of human settlement dating back as far as 9500 BC. This spring’s snowmelt and summer rains could cause further harm.

“We can’t save all of them,” said Elizabeth Mozzillo, archeologist with the National Park Service at Bandelier, referring to the hundreds of archeological sites within the burned areas.

“We’re dealing with rapidly accelerating erosion,” she added.

Last April’s Dome fire--which flared from an abandoned campfire--burned 16,516 acres of pinon, juniper, ponderosa pine and mixed conifer trees in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico near Los Alamos.

Severe burning stripped the thin topsoil in some areas of erosion protection--grass, brush, trees and an organic layer containing their seeds.

“We experienced major flooding last year, and we’ve been told it apparently will be worse this year,” Mozzillo says.

Mountain snow will be melting, rushing down canyons. Summer thunderstorms will unleash their fury on the barren landscape. Water will cut or trickle through archeological sites. Come winter, water will freeze, rocks will crack.

The burned landscape included 4,779 acres in Bandelier, 3,092 acres in the adjacent Dome Wilderness--for which the fire was named--and the remainder in the Jemez Ranger District of the Santa Fe National Forest.

The scorched area in Bandelier included 422 known archeological sites, although there could be as many as 600 within the fire perimeter.

Mozzillo says 298 sites have been examined since the fire; 172 were burned and 48 required immediate treatment, mainly for erosion control.

“Things like building check dams, masonry dams, people putting in erosion breaks, reseeding with native seeds,” Mozzillo says. “We also used geo-textiles--mats of fibrous materials are laid down.”

Charisse Sydoriak, chief of resources management at Bandelier, says at least eight other sites need immediate attention.

And four to six additional sites--such as stone one-room fieldhouses or terraces--need emergency excavation.

A full assessment of sites will have to wait until the snow melts and the ground thaws, but some problems will have to be fixed before the heavy summer rains come in July and August, Sydoriak says.

The 32,727-acre national monument has about 3,600 archeological sites, 2,113 of them documented. The neighboring 224,000-acre ranger district has 3,500 recorded sites and an additional 5,000 to 8,000 unrecorded sites.

Archeological sites in the monument and ranger district include some paleo-Indian sites dating back to 9500 BC, some archaic ones from 2000 BC to AD 600, some Spanish sites from the late 1500s to the late 1600s and some recent Anglo ones.

Most of the Bandelier sites date from about 1150 to 1450, when the ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians flourished on the mesas and in canyons that reach like fingers from the Jemez Mountains east to the Rio Grande.

Besides kivas and cliff-side homes in Frijoles Canyon, Bandelier has many other archeological sites, including fieldhouses, rock art panels, stone figures and areas where stone tools were flaked.

Sydoriak says $333,500 has been spent at Bandelier for rehabilitation and researching flood and geological hazards since the fire.

Bandelier’s budget request for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, includes an estimated $1.3 million to deal with the fire’s aftermath, she says.

Authorities have already approved $566,300 of that for work on Park Service land, Sydoriak says.

“About half will be used to stabilize the watershed on Forest Service lands up slope from us, because that’s where flood-source areas are,” she says. “The other half is for excavation of sites that will be lost and to assess and treat sites that we looked at last year.”

While Bandelier is at the bottom of the watershed, most of the archeological sites on the forest land sit on mesa tops away from the main canyon arteries carrying runoff.

The Jemez Ranger District has fieldhouses, scattered artifacts and quarry sites where obsidian was taken for tools such as arrowheads, scrapers and knives.

“We had about 100 known sites that burned over just on the forest side,” says Rita Skinner, Jemez Ranger District archeologist.

“The fire itself didn’t do a whole lot of damage to the sites. It’s the fire’s aftereffects--erosion, things like that,” Skinner says.