Tim Waterbury chiseled, dug and removed tiny pieces of debris from the earth recently at the “Casa Corral,” an excavation site of a 1800s adobe hacienda in Albuquerque’s North Valley.
Waterbury and his mother, Elaine, are members of a team of novice archeologists headed up by Dave Phillips, a curator at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at UNM.
Each Friday and Saturday morning the team gathers at the historic location. Phillips scours the ground to note differences in soil color and to look for signs of walls. He noticed that one small area of earth within the walls was a subtle pink color, indicating that the soil had oxidized, possibly the result of heat from a traditional adobe oven called a horno.
The weed-strewn lot north of Osuna, now covered with stakes, strings, holes in the ground and a few goats, was once an expansive adobe hacienda and corral. It was built on an old wagon road where Edith Boulevard now runs. Phillips believes the large dwelling was inhabited between 1870 and 1900 and vacated after that.
One of the most exciting discoveries came late on a recent Friday afternoon. A formation along the ground was uncovered and determined to have been the foundation for the north wall. The digging and scraping revealed a row of “terrones.” These were bricks of hardened dark mud, long ago extracted from the Rio Grande Valley bottom, west of the site. The formation was nearly two feet wide and more than 15 feet long and stood in stark contrast to the surrounding brown dirt.
Since the dig began in early June, more than 300 bags have been filled with animal teeth and bones, pieces of glass, broken china, scraps of wood and various metal artifacts. The findings are taken to the Maxwell Museum, where they are transferred into archival polyethylene bags. Phillips said the material is an excellent sample for continued research and hopes that a graduate student will use the findings as the subject of a dissertation.
“We have little fragments here and there that tell us how people lived when they were here and what their lives were like,” said Phillips. “There is an enormous amount of animal bones.” Phillips says the cut of the bones and the type of animal reveal clues about the household consumption patterns.
The last day of digging will be Friday, August 27. Then an Albuquerque metal detector club will locate objects not uncovered by the excavation. Volunteers are welcome and should bring their own tools, work gloves, hats and long-sleeved shirts. Also needed are sunscreen, lunch and water. For more information, e-mail Phillips at dap@unm.edu.
Contact: Greg Johnston, 277-1816