Notes & News

maxwell@unm.edu

(505) 277-4405

NM CADRe project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services

The New Mexico Cultural Assets Digital Repository and e-Community - NMCADRe  - has received $135,718 from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop a collaborative digital repository for New Mexico museums.  Led by the Maxwell Museum, the repository will be established in partnership with the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) and the New Mexico History Museum Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. Long-range plans include partnering with state institutions, local museums, historical societies, archives, tribal governments and community centers.   Catherine Baudoin, Curator of Photographic and Digital Collections, and Tim Thomas, Deputy Director of CARC, are co-PIs of the three-year project.

This innovative facility will create, acquire, and present digital assets and operate as a clearinghouse for best practices in conversion, preservation, and accessibility for New Mexico’s rare and threatened visual treasures. The repository will provide a cost effective and robust long-term data storage capability and a public access Web site to foster and support collaboration and education across disciplinary, social, political, and geographical boundaries.

NM CADRe is the only project in New Mexico funded this year by the IMLS Museums for America program, acknowledging the importance of photographs and objects as essential to preserving the visual record of art, history, and natural history of the state.  NM CADRe will support community involvement, student success, and advanced digital research.  It will give teachers, children, students, and scholars both locally and globally, the opportunity to share in the wealth of resources the state of New Mexico holds.  

Ellis Archives Donated to the Maxwell Museum

Florence Hawley Ellis taught anthropology at UNM from 1934 to 1971, but her professional career spanned an even longer period – from her first teaching job in 1928 until her death in 1991.  During those six decades, she published extensively and also generated huge volumes of unpublished research papers, notes, maps, and photographs, most of them relating to New Mexico’s prehistoric and living cultures.  For years, the Ellis archives remained in Dr. Ellis’s house, and research access was limited.  The Maxwell Museum holds many of the archaeological artifacts from her collections, but without access to the field notes, researchers were reluctant to study the artifacts.

In 2009 Rieka Long, Florence’s granddaughter, inherited the archives.  Ms. Long’s wish was for the archives to the greatest possible benefit, so she allowed the Maxwell Museum staff to borrow the archives, organize them, and make them accessible to researchers.  The Maxwell Museum is pleased to report that recently, Ms. Long converted the loan to a gift.  Now that the collections and field notes have been reunited, they represent a critical research resource for New Mexico archaeology.  If you would like to help organize the Ellis archives, please contact Dave Phillips at (505) 277-9229.

Crow Canyon Archaeological Center Studies Tsama Collections from Maxwell Museum

In 1970, Florence Hawley Ellis led a field school at Tsama Pueblo in the Chama Valley of Northern New Mexico.  The site was occupied from the late 1200s until the early 1500s, so forms an important bridge between the Ancestral Puebloan villages of the Pueblo III period and the Pueblo world documented by the first Spanish explorers and colonists.  The site is important because it ties in with the late pre-historic migrations of the Pueblo people – for decades, archaeologists suspected that when the Mesa Verde region of southwest Colorado was depopulated, many of those people moved to the Rio Grande region.  Proof of that migration was elusive, in part because many immigrants mixed in with existing Rio Grande populations.  The exception seems to have been on the fringes of the Rio Grande region, in places such as Tsama Pueblo, where the Mesa Verde immigrants encountered few existing settlements and were under less pressure to assimilate.

Dr. Ellis’s 1970s collections from Tsama Pueblo were stored at the Maxwell Museum, and for the next few decades they merely gathered dust.  In 2008, that changed: the entire artifact collection was loaned to the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado for reorganization and analysis.  Crow Canyon used the project as a training opportunity for the public, teaching its volunteers how to process the collection and identify pottery types.  For Crow Canyon and the Maxwell Museum, the loan of the collection is a proverbial win-win situation – Crow Canyon is able to extend its research in understanding where the Mesa Verde people went, and the Maxwell will get back a collection that is far better organized and thoroughly documented than when it left.

Museum Receives Clovis Point from BLM

In late April, the Maxwell Museum received a most welcome and prized donation: a complete Clovis point.  The point was discovered as an isolated artifact on a parcel of Bureau of Land Management land a short distance southeast of the small community of La Cieneguilla, about 2 miles southwest of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport.  The point is made of a beautifully patterned red to pinkish red petrified wood, and exhibits a complex network-like pattern of cross-cutting red veins on a lighter pinkish red background.  Clovis points within the Rio Grande Valley are few and far between, and only two actual occupation sites are known.  Isolated points such as this one may represent the loss of a spear during the pursuit of a wounded animal.  However it came to be at this place on the landscape, the unfortunate hunter’s loss is our gain, and we have the BLM and Judy Kowalski to thank for this wonderful addition to our collections.

Maxwell Museum Association Donates Four Mata Ortiz Pots to Museum

From 1200 to 1450, the Casas Grandes people of northwest Mexico made polychrome pottery, sometimes of stunning beauty.  In the late 1900s, Juan Quezada, a resident of the tiny Chihuahua village of Mata Ortiz, taught himself how to duplicate the prehistoric pottery whose fragments littered the hills around his home.  Today, almost every family in Mata Ortiz make pottery inspired by – but not limited to – the ancient Casas Grandes examples.

The Maxwell Museum has long had representative collections of pottery from the other two great revival styles in the region – the polished black wares of the Rio Grande Pueblos, and the yellow wares of the Hopi mesas – but its collection of Mata Ortiz pottery was scant.  That is now changing, thanks to the Maxwell Museum Association.  In 2009 the MMA approved the purchase of four large Mata Ortiz vessels, from the high end of the range of artistic ability and expression.  The MMA’s generosity will encourage the growth of a representative collection of Mata Ortiz pottery – one of the great regional artistic revivals of the 20th Century.

Excavations at Conejito Shelter

In early 2006, the Office of Contract Archeology monitored construction of the Mid-American Western Expansion natural gas pipeline near Counselor, NM (about mid-way between Cuba and Farmington) when a prehistoric shelter enclosed by large boulders was discovered buried under 3 meters of natural sand.  The site, called Conejito Shelter, was an exciting archeological find because it retained intact cultural deposits from five superimposed occupation layers.  The lower layers were especially significant as they retained unusually well-preserved remains of burned seeds and fauna.

Radiocarbon dates obtained from a hearth feature indicate the earliest occupation took place between 780 and 410 BC (Late Archaic period), while narrow neck-banded ceramics found at the uppermost later indicate the last occupation dated to AD 900 to 1100 (Pueblo II period).  Excavations at the Conejito Shelter offered new and intimate knowledge of Late Archaic subsistence in New Mexico’s southeastern San Juan Basin.  Because the shelter was discovered completely buried under naturally blown sand, there is a strong likelihood that other shelters, such as Conejito, are still buried elsewhere in the southeastern San Juan Basin awaiting their discovery.

New Exhibit: Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas

In 1969 and 1970, Harvard researcher Patricia Marks Greenfield and Cara Childs, an anthropology student with the Harvard Chiapas Project, spent two summers doing fieldwork in Nabenchauk, a hamlet of the highland Maya community of Zinacantec in Chiapas, Mexico.  They were there to study hwo Zinacantec girls learn weaving in apprenticeship with their mothers and how weaving affects the way girls think.  Twenty one years later, in 1991, Greenfield and Childs went back to Chiapas to learn how weaving could answer their questions about the psychological effects of social and economic change.  Under contract with National Geographic, Lauren Greenfield accompanied them to photograph life in the highlands of Chiapas.

The fieldwork resulted in a long-range study of two generations of Zinacantecs.  Weaving Generations Together, Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas, a new exhibit currently at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, is based on the award winning book that explores how textile traditions have changed in one Maya community in highland Chiapas.  Visitors are invited to learn about the role of Zinacantec mothers teaching children cultural traditions; the transformation from community creativity to individual creativity; the techniques of backstrap loom weaving; how girls learn to weave and create textile patterns, and the use of textiles in everyday Maya life.