Vol. 13 No. 4 Winter 2009
  

High Life in the High Mountains?

By Lois Wingerson

Archaeologist Richard Adams never expected to find an ancient village straddling the tree line at an altitude of 10,700 feet in northwest Wyoming. But it was there that he discovered the remains of dozens of lodges cut into a steep mountainside. Single dwellings and hunters' blinds were found that high, but it has been decades since anyone found a whole prehistoric village in North America at such a height. In 1979, David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History found Alta Toquima, a village of about 20 prehistoric houses situated above 11,000 feet in Nevada. A few years later, Robert Bettinger of the University of California-Davis began excavating the first of about 12 prehistoric villages above 10,000 feet in the White Mountains of east-central California.

But never before has a whole prehistoric village been found at a very high altitude as far north as Wyoming. The discovery of High Rise Village prompts a number of questions. Why did these ancient people establish a large village where there is snow on the ground for nine months of the year? Why did they choose a slope with a 20 to 30 percent grade (as steep as a moderate ski run), using bone shovels to level the ground on which their lodges were built, when there's a meadow a few hundred yards downhill? Why carry tools made from stone that was quarried as far as 100 miles away, when there was a fine chert quarry only five miles distant? These questions remain, but after four seasons at the site, Adams and his team are confident they have answered their initial research questions: when did people live there, who were they, and what were they doing?

Thirty Years of Preservation

By Tamara Stewart

The founding of The Archaeological Conservancy 30 years ago was a response to the increasing destruction of archaeological sites across the country and the particular vulnerability of sites on private land. A federal court had just struck down the 1906 Antiquities Act, exposing the inadequacies of the nation’s first federal law enacted to protect archaeological sites on public lands and prompting Mark Michel, then a private lobbyist, to help write and pass the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) in the late 1970s.  

“Back then I was able to get good bipartisan support, something I wouldn’t be able to get today,” says Michel. The court’s decision to strike down the Antiquities Act indicated it clearly was no deterrent against looting. In 1979, the Society for American Archaeology hired Michel to put together legislation to fix the problem. ARPA was passed that same year, with more detailed descriptions of prohibited activities and more substantial penalties for convicted violators than the Antiquities Act.

“The idea for The Archaeological Conservancy came out of this,” says Michel. “ARPA protected sites on public and Indian lands, but how could we protect them on private lands?” Michel saw potential legislation in this area as a waste of time. “We needed a protection strategy that fit the U.S.,” he says. Purchasing property containing important archaeological sites was a uniquely American approach to preservation, where there is such a strong private property ethic. “This was the only feasible approach. It was an idea whose time had come.”

Understanding El Pilar

By Michael Bawaya

To Anabel Ford, it’s all very simple. To understand the great Maya cities, you must understand their settlement patterns. By this she means knowing their neighborhoods, their suburbs, and the activities that took place there. This knowledge is essential to drawing reasonable conclusions about what transpired in those magnificent metropolises.
           

When Ford, an archaeologist with the MesoAmerican Research Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, started working in the Maya region in the mid 1970s, virtually all archaeologists focused on the city centers. That, to her way of thinking, is backwards.  “It’s very difficult to understand the city centers without understanding what contributes to their prosperity,” she explains.

Things have changed over the years and, according to Ford, more Maya archaeologists are investigating the residential areas, but few of them concentrate on settlement patterns to the extent that she does. She’s convinced that knowing where people settled and what they did is not only crucial to understanding the ancient city of El Pilar, but also the entire Maya world.

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