EP6 BONUS CONTENTš Extended Tour of the Verde Valley Archaeology Center and Museum

We are now at the Fruity Valley Archaeology Center and Museum building that contains not only our museum but also our classroom and our repository, collection center, laboratory, etc. that you'll see in a little bit. My name again is Ken Zoll. I'm the executive director here and you'll also be introduced shortly to our deputy executive director Monica Buckle. She's not only deputy executive director but she's also the director and curator of fine art within our section here. She'll be talking to you about some of the art within our collection. It's a pleasure meeting with you and joining you and showing you the ruins the other day and I hope you'll enjoy your visit within the building. I'm Monica Buckle. I'm the deputy director and curator of fine arts here at the Verde Valley Archaeology Center and Museum. I'm also an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma through my mother's side. I bring with me a native sensitivity to work with indigenous artifacts, objects, as well as art. It's an honor to be here on the territories of the Hisasinom. The Hisasinom are the ancestors of the Hopi. The Hopi reside up at the mesas in northern Arizona. This territory is also Yavapai and Apache territory. We're just a few miles down the road from the Yavapai Apache Nation so it's always wonderful to come with an indigenous perspective to honor those who reside here on this land. Right now we're in the Hisasinom gallery. The Hisasinom means ancient ones in Hopi. The Hopi are the descendants of the Sinagua. Sinagua was a Spanish word given and the Hopi prefer Hisasinom. We also love to exhibit contemporary art here at the Museum. This mural was commissioned and painted by Filmer Coyoema. He's an elder and a Hopi artist. This depicts the Hopi migration from the Verde Valley to the Hopi mesas. This is the fourth world. Filmer's mural tells the story of the Hopi emergence from the underworld to this world and when they received this world they were greeted by Masao. Masao is the Hopi guardian and caretaker of the people. The imagery we see here are depicting different clan symbols. We have butterfly clan, squash clan, we have spider clan over here. Masao, from my understanding, gave the Hopi the guidelines and instructions on how to live a peaceful life and also for survival. Masao told the to go into different directions here on Turtle Island. Turtle Island is what we native people refer to as North America. This is our Yavapai Apache Nation gallery. We work closely with the nation and these objects here are on loan from them. The walls are adorned with grass cloth which mimics the inside of a wikia and the organic materials used to create a wikia. That's Yavapai and Apache, their traditional dwelling. We have the mural here on the wall to my left. We have a burden basket that so many women have used here in the southwest region to gather berries, nuts, carry children and also carry things to trading markets. This bronze maquette to my right is a smaller version of what's outside the Yavapai Apache Nation It's a large statue and this maquette depicts an elder who's carrying an older woman in a burden basket on his back. This marks the symbolism of the Yavapai Apache exodus in 1875 where it was a forced march. The painting hanging above depicts the Yavapai Apache return to the territories here. Now we are in the Paul Dyke Retrospective. This is one of two galleries allocated for the retrospective. Currently we're in Paul Dyke's memorabilia room. Paul Dyke was a rancher and a famous western artist who lived 10 miles north in Rimrock. He had a 300 acre working ranch and his studio was there. The Paul Dyke Foundation Research Institution of American Indian Culture, Scottsdale Museum of the West and Tucson Museum of Art were instrumental in the development of this retrospective. This easel was in Paul Dyke's studio. These are his paints. This is a beautiful painting. Paul Dyke was also a collector of Plains Indian art and had over 2,000 objects of Plains Indian art that's now located up at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum in Cody, Wyoming. Paul Dyke lived with the different Plains Indian nations and was also the adopted son of One Elk. One Elk was a Sioux warrior who fought in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Even though Paul was non-native, he was adopted into the communities and he respectfully portrays native peoples. Now we're in the second gallery devoted to the Paul Dyke Retrospective. This gallery features his paintings that are on loan from the several institutions I had previously mentioned. This artwork here is on loan from Scottsdale Museum of the West. Its title is The Spirit of the Buffalo Medicine. This beautiful painting here is titled Shoshone Dance. This depicts the Shoshone peoples doing their ceremonial sun dance. It's a ritualistic process that involves days of fasting from food and water and the men would dance around a pole in the middle of the heat, high sun, during summer months until they received a vision. This painting depicts a traditional Plains Indian woman wearing an elk's tooth dress. To this day, women of the Great Plains Nations wear elk's tooth dress as a status symbol. It symbolizes what their father is in the community, perhaps their husband, brother, or uncle. The elk's teeth are actually made of ivory and the dress is adorned with them. The more elk's teeth you have on a dress, the higher you are within the tribe's standing. It wouldn't be a Paul Dyke Retrospective without horses. Paul Dyke had an intimate connection with horses, as do many people here out west, as well as Native tribes. Personally, I have a devoted love to horses and can't imagine my life without them. Horses are spirit animals. They're messengers. They bring messages from the spirit realm down to the physical realm. At the Archaeology Center, we like to offer the public a wide range of exhibitions and programming and, of course, we love to pull science into it as well. This is our meteorite exhibition. All six meteorites are on loan from Arizona State University. Three of these meteorites were actually discovered in ancient dwellings here in the Verde Valley. What was their significance? Why are these objects so important to the people of this region? Was there a spiritual significance, something coming from the heavens to earth? So the largest collection of artifacts that we have within the Verde Valley Archaeology Center is that from the Dyke Cliff Dwelling. And the Dyke Cliff Dwelling was occupied from around 1050 to about 1250 A.D. Unlike Montezuma Castle that some of you might be familiar with, which is a very shallow but large facility, this was very deep where they were actually able to create five masonry separated rooms within it. They were occupied by basically, we think, one family group during that entire time. It was undisturbed for over 700 years. So when Paul Dyke, the artist, acquired the property and he found this cliff dwelling, he was amazed. And he put fencing across the front of it, big keep out signs to preserve it. And then he didn't say anything to anybody from the time he bought it in 1935 until he was doing a art show in L.A. County in 1961. And he mentioned to the archaeologists at the time that he had this cliff dwelling and offered him to come out and take a peek at it. But when he got out, he was basically blown away. And for the next 10 years he brought PhD graduate students out to do their summer field work in excavating this cave. At the time they pulled out over 50,000 items. We have their field notes, their drawings, we have their in-situ photographs of every artifact that's there. And so in order to give justice to the collection, we've separated into three galleries. The gallery that I'm in right now is called Domestic Life. And so we have artifacts in here of everyday life, some of the things they would have used on a daily basis. The next gallery is on diet and subsistence and talks about the hunting, gathering, and some of the planting materials. And then the last one we'll visit is on textiles. We have now the largest textile collection ever found in the Verde Valley area. So this first case here that we have of domestic items, we have some sandals, we have some jewelry or adornment items, we have bracelets made out of clamshells, we have different pendants made out of bird bones, beads, a cactus spine turned into a ring, we have figurines, we have an anvil that they used, we have some prayer sticks, as well as some funnels that they would have used, as well as agave knives. So basically everyday kind of things that would have shown daily life. In the second case in this room, we have a wide variety of items. So we start with some fire sticks, some hair pins, one is stone, one is slate, we have awls, different types of tools made out of bones, an arrow straightener. The most interesting piece in here among many is a woven basket, but within the woven basket are corn cobs. And if you look closely at the corn cobs, there's a hole at the end of it that's sticking out. And then over here we have some corn cobs with sticks at the end. Now some have said, well that's like a corn dog. Well no, it's not like a corn dog. They were actually a game that they would take the corn cob out, put a stick, pointed stick at one end and feathers at the other end and try to toss them into rings of corn husks. It was like the lawn darts of prehistoric times. And so our guess is here we have this very elaborate woven basket with corn cobs in it. Is that like today's professional dart players who carry around their own personal darts for the next competition? Who knows? But it's kind of interesting to kind of think of that, that they could be just the same as any of us today with pride in their particular craft. And one of the more rare items we have is actually a reed pigment container. It's a reed that was decorated, which in itself is unusual, but the end of the reed has a funnel type piece with a piece of cotton in it. When you take that piece of cotton out, it's filled with black pigment that they would have used for painting or decorating, whether it would be rock art or pottery. So they would tap out what they needed, mix it with a binding agent like yucca juice, animal fat, something like that, and then make it pliable and then paint with it. So it's really a very rare object, especially the fact that it's decorated. So we're now in the Diet and Subsistence Gallery, and on the wall behind me is a mural of one of the walls, as I mentioned in the previous area, where they caved. It was very deep and they made masonry walls to separate them. This is a close-up of one of those walls, masonry walls, and if you were here and looking closely, you could actually see fingerprints of where they were making the plaster within it. And so in one case over here, we have our hunting material, we have bows, we have arrows, and one of the most unique things that we have is we have 70 arrows, but 40 of them are painted, and they're painted under where the feather fletching would be. The other unique thing is none of them are the same. All 40 are different, different colors, different patterns, and we have no idea why they did that. So we don't know if they're prayers or personal decoration, just an interesting feature of it. We have a rabbit stick in the collection here, and sometimes this is referred to as a one-way boomerang. They would throw it to kill a rabbit. And to show what it's like, we were able to purchase a photograph from the 1920s of a Hopi, and he's got a rabbit stick in one hand and a dead rabbit in the other hand. The interesting thing here is we were doing an art show a few years back, and one of the women artists came in this room, she started screaming, and I come running in here, and she says, that's my grandfather. I have the original 8 1⁄2 by 11 that the Smithsonian took in 1924. So that was a really pretty cool little side bit there. One of the unique things about the people who lived here is this was clearly an agricultural community. These were a group of farmers, prehistoric farmers. And so it was not surprising that within the collection, we found a huge variety of gathering and farming material. So we have farming seeds of various corns, beans, squash. We have acorns. We have pinyon pines. We have a lot of quids. If you're not familiar with quids, they would roast agave and yucca. And like an artichoke, they would put the leaf in their mouth like you do today, and you would pull off the pulp to eat it. What they would do is just take a piece and throw it in their mouth and chew it like chewing gum, sometimes called prehistoric chewing gum. And they would spit out the fibrous remains that they had, and those are called quids. And we have something like 13,000 quids in the collection. So obviously, it was a very popular form of food. And we have a variety of corn cobs. We have them in different colors. And what surprises a lot of people is when you're in the ruins here today, and you go into some of the caves, you might see a corn cob, and it'll look like the Chinese corn that you get in Chinese restaurants these days. But that's all that's left. And what you have in our collection is very large corn. Some of them are 12 inches long. So they have a variety of sizes. And we think part of the reason why they shrunk is that they did not understand crop rotation. So if this was your crop of corn, that was your dad's, your grandfather's, your great-grandfather's, and they didn't understand that it was sucking out all the nutrients, and the yields got smaller, and the corn cobs got smaller over time. So this is actually a perfect example of some of the difficulties of farming and gathering that they had over time. We're now in the textile gallery of the Dyke Collection. We've dedicated this gallery solely to the weaving and fabric material that we collected. The mural back here is of a cotton field. Many people are surprised that they grew cotton up here in the Verde Valley, but that's very common. And the University of Arizona has taken some of our cotton seeds, and they're analyzing to see whether or not this originated here in the Arizona area, or did it come up from Mesoamerica? But the bottom line is, they definitely grew cotton here. And there's a lot of cotton material and weaving that was done here. It was one of their major trade items of the Sonawa to other areas. So for them to get other trade items like decorative pottery, etc., materials like textiles were one of the things that they traded. One display case here has weaving material of yucca and agave. We have sandals, we have cordage, we have little baskets and trays, and even a little ring basket that we call it because it's small, but we don't know what it was used for. But it's kind of like what you'd find on your bureau today with, you know, you would throw your rings in at the end of the day. The biggest collection we have is of cotton textiles. We have over 14,000 fragments of textiles made of cotton generally. The variety of weaves is just amazing. We've had Hopi and Zuni weavers come up here to look at it, to study it. They've given us information about some of the items that we had not known before. But still, there are some techniques that they themselves cannot figure out how they were made. But we have a variety of colors, a variety of tools, and among the ones that are in this particular case today, and I have to rotate these every five to six months, is the maximum you can put out textiles. Even though we control the temperature, the humidity, the lighting, they're still fragile items. We have tools. We have battens. We have some of the raw cotton yarn here. We have spindles. We have batten finishing rods and needles. And when the Hopi and Zuni weavers come here, they look and say that's no different than the materials and tools they have today. So they're kind of amazed that here we have 700-year-old tools that are exactly the same as they use today. So to speak specifically to some of the items that we have in the collection that are specifically unique, we have a piece of legging that is made of human hair. That's very unique. We have another piece that we'll bring out in the next few months that we believe is made of bison hair, which is very unusual. We have a silt tapestry belt of six different colors, which is amazing. And one item that I've asked to be brought out that sometimes the ladies in the gallery are not too crazy about are loincloths. We have 12 loincloths within the collection. It is the only wholly intact garment that we have. So of course, the first question is, why weren't the mice eating the loincloths? They ate everything else. So a little giggle joke there. But it's wholly intact, so we get to see what they like. And again, it's just everyday life. That's what it was like. But the interesting thing with several of the loincloths is the cord that they held everything together ends in some very fancy tapestry stuff. So they were actually proud of what they were wearing. Had a little decoration. And we're here inside the Diet Collection Center. This is our receiving room for all archaeological matter, which also houses our decontamination room. This is the decontamination room. So all matter that comes into the facility is immediately inventoried and then put inside this chest freezer. The reason why we freeze objects for a minimum of two days is to kill off any bacteria, critters, any kind of bugs and so forth. We don't want to bring pests into the museum and especially in the repository. And now we're here in our collection center. This is where all the lab work is done from our survey crews. Our survey crews go out into the field to different sites and regions in the Verde Valley, approximately two to three times a week. We have dedicated volunteers where this is their second career. And this is where they inventory the material and archaeological matter and put it into our database. Now we're in our repository center. Our repository center is comprised of over 80,000 artifacts, textiles and remnants from the Sinagua, also known as the Hisasinom culture and the peoples who are indigenous to the Verde Valley. Behind me is a row of ollas and vessels and ceramics. This is a datora pot. This is what they made like a tea, the datora seeds, and it was like a hallucinogenic tea. And it was found in one of the kivas locally. And to my right, we have cabinetry that houses the Dyke Cliff Dwelling Collection. This collection encompasses 50,000 archaeological artifacts and remnants from the Dyke Cliff Dwellings that were found on Paul Dyke's ranch in Rimrock, Arizona. Rimrock is approximately 10 miles north of this museum. And the Paul Dyke Foundation Research Institution of American Indian Culture so kindly gifted us this collection and we're the stewards of it. In addition to our permanent collection, the Verde Valley Archaeology Center and Museum also houses other cultural institution and National Forest Service property and objects. There is a desperate need for storage and repository and space is so limited for nonprofit organizations. We have the capacity to house items and objects here and keep them safe within our climate controlled facility. We're fortunate to have Geoffrey King, who's our Director of Collections and Curation, as well as Catherine Turney, who's our Head Archaeologist, part of this organization. Their tireless effort is the reason why we have this repository, the lab and the decontamination center.