Episode 1š Arroyo Hondo Pueblo œ Santa Fe

Welcome to Arroyo Hondo Preserve and this is Arroyo Hondo Pueblo and I thought we'd just walk around a little bit and see what we can see. It's a very fascinating place so let's go. Well to the right of this, this is Arroyo Hondo and this is a huge arroyo and it's been there for a long time and this is probably why the Pueblo is here. Down in the arroyo is a permanent spring and the spring is a really strong one and so that's more than likely why they decided to put the Pueblo here. And so going back to the 1300s when Arroyo Hondo Pueblo was first created at this point, Arroyo Hondo was a coalition Pueblo and this is a period of time in southwestern prehistory when a number of scattered groups were merging together to build larger Pueblos. One of the things about Arroyo Hondo is that since it was occupied and abandoned prior to the Hispanic arriving here, we don't have a lot of firsthand information about this Pueblo. We don't know exactly what language is spoken here although it can be speculated and so there are a lot of unknowns about Arroyo Hondo. So let's take a look at some of the features. If you look out over the horizon you can see all this yellow grass. These are the room blocks of Arroyo Hondo. Arroyo Hondo was about at its apex probably a thousand room Pueblo and it had 10 room blocks and dozens and dozens of Pueblos. And so the room blocks usually would be about two or three rooms wide. Many of them were two-story we believe that some of them may have been three-story in prices. And so the room blocks would be built in squares around plazas. Plazas would be here everything happened. Most of these people would spend almost all of their time out of the rooms. They would only go into the rooms whenever they were sleeping or when it was two increments. So let's go ahead and walk toward some of the room blocks and we'll be able to see a little bit more. We are now looking at Plaza C and Plaza C is surrounded by four room blocks and this is where schools of American research did much of their research in the 1970s. And I was actually part of that excavation program. And so 49 years ago this summer I would have just finished my freshman year at University of New Mexico and I had been hired by schools American research to help them excavate right here in Plaza C. And so this place means a lot to me because I helped dig some of the rooms. And so much of Plaza C was two-story and the rooms that are right at the edge of the arroyo were masonry rooms. And the rest of the rooms with these three room blocks were all adobe. Now a lot of people try to ascribe some sort of cultural significance between rooms that were made out of stone and rooms that were made out of adobe. But what archaeologists have pretty much concluded is that it all depends on the availability of stone. And so we found out a lot by excavating many of the rooms in this particular project. This is room block 16 right in front of me and this room block was almost completely excavated. We found some very very interesting elements. As an example one of the things that we discovered was evidence of a significant fire. Most of the second story rooms were used for habitation. Almost all of the first story rooms would have been used for corn storage. They would have stored as much as two years harvest of corn in the bottom story room. One of the room blocks at Arroyo Hondo that was excavated in the early 1970s found that the entire room block had burned and that all of the corn was charred. All of the activity, a lot of the activity that would have taken place here in terms of everyday living would have taken place in the plaza and we actually excavated a portion of the plaza in room block C. And some of the things that we found were very interesting and indicated how they used the plazas. We found a lot of turkey pens. These people would have raised domestic turkeys and one of the most important reasons to raise domestic turkeys besides meat would be the feathers because the warmest thing that you can find on a cold winter night in the southwest to allow you to survive and come home is a turkey feather. So turkey pens were here. We found a number of trash pits on the plaza floor. We found all sorts of creatures and activity areas. We found places where we believe that maybe they had set up rooms. We also found something very interesting, super interesting as far as I'm concerned, and that is we found a scarlet macaw burial in the plaza of plaza C. We determined that it was a very old bird because of the calcification. It was a formal burial that had been prepared and it had been buried with buried goods. And so we know that scarlet macaws were traded. They were obviously not wild in the southwest. We know that they were traded probably from northern Mexico. And so we have found scarlet macaws as far north as the Mesa Verde region and we found evidence of scarlet macaws throughout the Anasazi region. So there would have also been a kiva in the middle of the plaza. And there are kivas in most of the plazas here at Arroyo Hondo. And so there are 10 plazas. There's also a great kiva. So each one of the kivas would probably be considered clan kivas or family kivas. And the great kiva would then be a communal place where the entire community could gather. So there were actually two different occupation periods here at Arroyo Hondo. And the first one was the largest. That was the 1100 room pueblo. And the 1100 room pueblo spanned the time period from about 1300 to 1340, roughly. There was then a hiatus when no one lived here. And then there was a reoccupation period that occurred around 1400 to 1425. And that was a much smaller pueblo. As a matter of fact, there were probably no more than about 200 rooms in that particular pueblo. And they built that pueblo right on top of the ruins of Plaza C. And so after 1425, this area was completely abandoned and never reoccupied. Now the features that you see to your right are part of Arroyo Hondo's history, as opposed to its prehistory. And what we're actually looking at, this is a reservoir that was built. This is one of the reasons why Arroyo Hondo was purchased and protected way back when, like in the 1920s, 1930s. What actually happened was that a bunch of people back east decided that they were going to come up with an enterprise in New Mexico. And the enterprise was that they were going to take water out of Arroyo Hondo. They were going to build a dam. There's an irrigation ditch that goes all the way from the dam. The dam is about a quarter mile away up the canyon. The irrigation ditch comes around and into this reservoir. And in the process of building this reservoir, they wiped out two room blocks. And so their plan was to irrigate a huge area to the south. And they were going to grow crops. It was a failed enterprise because, after all, this is in Arroyo. And everybody in the southwest is taught to stay out of Arroyos because you know what happens. A wall of water came down in Arroyo right after they'd finished the dam and blew the dam apart. And so at that time, there was an organization in Santa Fe founded by Edgar Lee Hewitt called the School of American Research. They were founded in 1906. They were very interested in preserving and protecting the prehistoric and cultural resources of the southwest. And so one of the board of directors realized that, hey, this company that owned Arroyo Hondo Pueblo had just had a failure in their business plan and all this land was up for grabs. And so that member of the board of directors said, you know, I think I'll buy this property that has the Pueblo on it and give it to School of American Research so they can protect it. And School of American Research went on. And in the 1970s, they conducted a very important archaeological program here at Arroyo Hondo. It was a five-year excavation program involving extensive excavation all over the site, funded by the National Science Foundation. And it resulted in a number of very important monographs that reported the information that was found. And all that material is now stored in a curation facility at School of American Research. SAR was very involved in archaeological research in its early days. However, their mission changed through the years. They became much more involved in other archaeological and anthropological issues. And so at one point in the 1990s, one of the directors of SAR said, you know, we do own two or three archaeological preserves. And more than likely, we will not be working on those preserves at any time in the future. So instead of holding on to them, why don't we transfer them to entities who are more interested in archaeology? And at one point, one of the directors of School of American Research was actually on the Archaeological Conservancy's Board of Directors, Doug Schwartz. And so it was decided that ownership and responsibility for Arroyo Hondo Pueblo would be transferred from School of American Research to the Archaeological Conservancy. And we are very proud to be able to continue the preservation and protection of this priceless resource.