Park Service Halts Erosion to Preserve Sites of Pueblo Ancestors : New Mexico: With history washing away in Bandelier National Monument, archeologists are using burned logs and aspen-fiber matting to shield 54 areas from runoff.

Blackened skeletons of ponderosa pines stand guard over knee-high green grass and wildflowers poking up around volcanic stones.

The stones--more than a dozen in pink, brown and gray--are in two parallel lines next to a gully that cradles small stagnant pools of water from recent rainfall.

The stones likely are remnants of a single-room fieldhouse for an ancient Indian family that nursed corn, bean and squash plants on nearby terraced land and hunted deer or rabbit, said Peter Dudley, a National Park Service archeologist.

Some stones bear black lines-- evidence of an intense spring fire in 1996 that denuded thousands of acres of rich volcanic soil, laying it bare to wind, rain, ice and snow.

The fire scorched 4,770 acres and 515 archeological sites in Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico, including some single- or multi-room dwellings, said Charisse Sydoriak, chief of resources management at Bandelier.

Fifty-four sites needed treatment to save them from the effects of erosion--primarily from water sheeting off the landscape. “I would say that we were successful on the 54 sites,” Sydoriak said.

“On the whole project, it was 90% nature and 10% us,” she said. “We were lucky because the weather was favorable in the years after the fire--wet springs and summers.”

The people who built the stone walls are believed to be the ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, gone for hundreds of years from what is now the monument.

But they left their calling cards on Bandelier’s mesas and canyons --stones that once were walls; shards of pottery that once held food or water; arrowheads once aimed at game; obsidian flakes from the tools they fashioned.

Besides nature, the most effective prescription for erosion turned out to be burned logs and aspen fiber matting.

The logs were set in place to divert water runoff, said Mike Elliott, a former Park Service archeologist who now works with the state Historic Preservation Division.

Aspen mats--held together by a thin web of biodegradable plastic fibers--were laid down to help hold the soil in place, Elliott said.

“By providing this Band-Aid to the wound, we were able to stop this erosion from causing more damage and encouraging more growth of vegetation and to speed up the recovery of the land we treated,” he said.

In 1997, archeologists excavated six of the sites in the Capulin Canyon area that were damaged by flooding after the fire.

“We considered it an emergency situation because we were trying to recover the data from these archeological sites that could be severely damaged by flooding and accelerated sheet wash erosion if we didn’t get this work done,” Elliott said.

The rehabilitation work in Bandelier cost $960,805, Sydoriak said.

“Fire stripped away the ground cover, and nature’s bringing it back. I love it. I love it!” Dudley said as he scanned the remnants of two stone dwellings around Capulin Canyon.

The fire, which fanned out 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.

Bandelier sits at the foot of the mountains, so archeologists worried about runoff from summer thunderstorms and winter snowfall.

Water easily cuts or trickles through archeological sites. It finds paths through tunnels left by burned-out tree roots. Ice causes porous volcanic rocks to crack and spall.

The archeological sites included some paleo-Indian sites dating back to 9500 BC, some archaic ones from 2000 BC to AD 600, some Spanish sites in the late 1500s to the late 1600s and some more recent ones.

Most of the Bandelier sites date from 1150 to 1550, when the ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians flourished on the mesas and in canyons that reach like fingers from the mountains east to the Rio Grande.

Bandelier is best known among tourists for its excavated and reconstructed ancestral Pueblo Indian sites in Frijoles Canyon, west of the fire.

But Bandelier has many other archeological sites, including fieldhouses, rock-art panels, stone figures and areas where stone tools were flaked.

Park managers will be using knowledge gained from their work when it comes time to use fire to their advantage, intentionally burning acreage to prevent the spread of massive fires and protecting sites in the flames’ path.

“Our argument is, return the area to the natural environment and let nature take its course,” Elliott said.

But when it comes to erosion, nature can be a bit too aggressive, and archeologists are engaged in a constant battle to save Bandelier’s history.

“The park’s biological productivity and cultural resources are literally washing away,” Sydoriak said in a report.