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WSU undergraduates, supervised by graduate student Alissa Nauman (background, left), work on portions of the Cox Ranch dig in New Mexico.

The edge

The last few weeks of digging season in mid-July, before the summer rains drench the remote open mesa south of Gallup, are the most exciting. Students working at the Cox Ranch Pueblo with archaeologist Andrew Duff have taken more than a month to excavate down two meters from ground level to the floor of a large round meeting room, while another student in a pit a few feet away has found carvings on the lower stones of a wall. Two women excavating nearby have discovered a beautiful mortar and pestle.

The village doesn’t much look like the majestic cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde eight hours to the north. But there is a connection.

Here Duff, a 40-year-old assistant professor at WSU, has found an outlying settlement where the Anasazi met up with another culture in the latter days of the civilization. The site is near the Zuñi reservation and just a few miles from a small salt lake that is sacred to the tribe. Duff theorizes that Zuñi Salt Lake was also a special site for the community in the Cox Ranch area from A.D. 1050 to 1150.

Remnants of clay pots are everywhere. Sherds of red, black, white, and brown scatter through the soft earth. But Duff and his students leave them in the middens outside the dig, and focus instead on the rubble remains of a large community. Time and weather have collapsed the walls roofs. The damage was worsened by a backhoe a few decades ago that Duff believes was brought in by someone hunting for pots. The looter probably didn’t find any intact artifacts where he was digging, says Duff, but he did harm the site.

One windy morning, Duff hikes the quarter mile from the rocky road through brush to check on his field school, an assemblage of about 20 students who have already lifted the blue tarps off their excavation areas. He drops to his hands and knees and peers into a long, narrow hole that runs along the back wall of a room. Duff cautions the students to trade their whisk brooms for paint brushes as they uncover the floor. “It’s hard to know what to expect down there,” he says, adding that artifacts in the floor area will explain the last use of a room before it was abandoned. His advice pays off. About a half hour later, the students come across an almost intact pitcher.

It’s not an easy summer job. It’s hot, it’s dry, it’s hard labor, as sunburns and bruises testify. Sleeping in tents and washing their clothes in buckets, most of them are disconnected from their families and friends for the first time in their lives.

“During the week, we work them to the bone and send them to bed early,” says Duff. At the start Duff assesses their skills handling shovels and trowels. If they are careful and precise, they win prime spots on delicate portions of the dig. If not, there is still plenty to do, especially when it comes to moving fill—the years of rocks and soil that have fallen into the room blocks. “Some days it’s fun, some days you get really tired,” says WSU student Jarod Stone, who seems always ready to move heavy buckets of rock and earth.

At the end of the day, the students load up their clipboards, buckets, and backpacks and board the white vans back to the camp. There they converge on a shed where trays of artifacts wait to be washed clean of dirt and ash. They work shoulder to shoulder and, under the watch of graduate student Jen Mueller, slosh and scrub pieces of stone and pottery picked out of the excavations.

“You could say we’re over-educated garbage collectors,” says one student to laughter. “Naw,” says another, dipping into his archaeology terminology. “I’d say we’re a subset of garbage collectors.”

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