Research Highlights
Rock Art Ranch Field School 2011 Findings
by Chuck Adams and Rich Lange
August 2011
photo by Rich Lange
Students at work at Rock Art Ranch
photo by Chuck Adams
Rock Art Ranch is located 20 miles south and east of the work we have conducted at Homol’ovi State Park for 25 years. We felt that this new area might help provide additional context on the period preceding the late pueblo period (late 1200s and through the 1300s CE) at Homol’ovi. The field school excavated at two sites dating about 1200 CE and tested surface features at two pre-ceramic (before 500 CE) sites. We hope we recovered botanical materials that can be successfully radiocarbon dated.
Metates from Rock Art Ranch
photo by Chuck Adams
The field school also began a survey of the Rock Art Ranch property. We recorded nearly 20 new sites as we concentrated our work this past summer on the area between the ranch and the first major canyon to the west— Chimney Canyon. Close to the canyon, we got a surprise. Within about 100 to 150 meters of the canyon edge, there is a light but continuous scatter of very fine petrified wood bifacial thinning flakes, and fragments of slab and shallow-basin metates. Several projectile points or diagnostic fragments were found, dating to the late Paleoindian (8000 to 6000 BCE), Middle Archaic (4000 to 1500 BCE) and early Basketmaker (800 BCE to 500 CE) periods. About half the survey sites have pottery dating to 600–1230 CE. The similarity of their assemblages with sites at Homol’ovi suggests groups were living in both areas at the same time, about CE 1130-1230 and were likely in contact.
Looking up Chimney Canyon
photo by Rich Lange
Our initial impression is that the study area has not been intensively occupied since at least pre-ceramic times, and that it may have been a boundary area between different cultural traditions. At various times, populations from these different traditions moved into the area for a while and left their mark on the landscape. Pre-ceramic groups show these connections and boundaries through lithic assemblages—lots of petrified wood and no obsidian, suggesting connections to the east; whereas ceramic-using groups are dominated by pottery traded from the north but those on the ranch have more diverse assemblages showing stronger contacts to the south. Amazingly, the obsidian and yellow pottery so common at the Homol’ovi pueblos is nearly absent on the ranch with no obsidian recovered and only one lonely yellow ware bowl rim.
The micro-environment of Chimney Canyon is quite interesting and we hope to learn more about it in the future. We hope to expand our survey to the south as well as to the west along Bell Cow and Chevelon canyons in the coming years.
