Dirt Under Your Fingernails
Are your ready to get your hands dirty? Each year about 4000 people do just that and more at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center near Cortez, CO. At Crow Canyon, amateurs and archaeologists work side by side studying the remains of the ancestral Puebloan society that once thrived in the semi-arid Four Corners region of the United States.
Humble Beginnings
The tradition of education at Crow Canyon stretches back to 1968, when Drs. Ed and Joanne Berger established a school there. At that time, the Crow Canyon School did not specialize in any certain field, but offered mostly general education classes. At the outset, the Bergers concentrated on helping students who could not find their niche in the traditional education system. Crow Canyon School catered more to the needs of the individual student instead of the student body en masse.
When Stuart Struever, a professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University in Chicago, entered the scene, he proposed an obvious next step to the Bergers. Why not establish Crow Canyon as a center of archaeological research? Considering its location in the history-rich Four Corners region, near Mesa Verde National Park, this seemed a good idea. In 1982, Struever and the Bergers worked together to transform the Crow Canyon School into the Crow Canyon campus of the Center for American Archaeology. In 1984, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center was officially established.
"Crow Canyon became an experiment to see if the public would support long term archaeological research," said Lynn Thompson Baca, Crow Canyon's Director of Marketing for the last 8 years, who also holds an MA in Anthropology.
In the years following the establishment of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, building, research and publication took priority. Crow Canyon's Gates Archaeological Laboratory building was constructed in 1987 and in 1988 the Small Site Testing Program was begun. Excavation got underway at Crow Canyon's Duckfoot site in 1983, Sand Canyon Pueblo in 1984, Castle Rock Pueblo in 1990, Woods Canyon Pueblo in 1994, Yellow Jacket Pueblo in 1995 and Shields Pueblo in 1997. Crow Canyon's first professional publication The Architecture of Social Integration in Prehistoric Pueblos was published in 1989, followed by The Sand Canyon Archaeological Project: A Progress Report in 1992, The Duckfoot Site, Volume 1: Descriptive Archaeology in 1993 and many others.
And now. . .
Today, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center specializes in "archaeological research and public education programs", said Baca.
So, what are archaeologists at Crow Canyon studying?
"Crow Canyon archaeologists are studying the ruins of American Indian settlements in southwestern Colorado that were occupied between A.D. 1050 and 1300. These settlements were built and used by Indians whose modern descendants include the Hopi, the Zuni, the Acoma, and other tribes who live in the pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico today," answers Dr. Ricky Lightfoot in Archaeologists On-Line, a special section of Crow Canyon's website, where those interested in such topics can pose questions directly to one of Crow Canyon's archaeologists.
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