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Crow Canyon to appear on PBS

Show made discoveries about earliest residents here
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s Supervisory Archaeologist Shanna Diederichs kneels next to a partially excavated Basketmaker III pit house at the Dillard Site within the Indian Camp Ranch subdivision during field work in June 2012.

Archaeology and fast-paced television rarely have anything in common. But on Tuesday, PBS will air a show about what happens when a team of scientists with the latest technology comes to a dig for three intense days of investigation.

“Time Team America” visited the Dillard Site, a project of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, in June 2012 to film the show. The site dates back to the Basketmaker III period, which took place from approximately 500 to 750.

The show generally has the objective of answering one pivotal question about an area for each of its episodes, which have covered topics ranging from a 10,000-year-old buffalo kill to the discovery of a lost Civil War fort. For the Dillard Site, that question was: “Was this a site of one of humanity’s greatest shifts, from hunter-gatherer to an agriculture-based society?”

The site was already remarkable for containing a great kiva, the only known great kiva from the period in Colorado. It could have held as many as 60 people for community gatherings or sacred ceremonies.

“They identified at least 12 new structures in a different area,” said Shanna Diederichs, the supervisory archaeologist on the three-year Basketmaker Communities Project: Early Pueblo Society in the Mesa Verde Region. “We don’t have any pithouses overlapping, and they seem to be oriented together, which means they were probably contemporaneous.”

The findings may mean this was a large settlement for its time, and it may have been in the forefront of technological advances, such as pottery for cooking and the bow and arrow.

“It looks like they settled down here after being nomads,” said Allan Maca, an archaeologist with the show. “All human groups have passed through this historical stage, moving from hunter-gatherer to agriculture.”

Diederichs makes several appearances in the show, including taking a plane ride with Meg Watters, head of the geophysics team, to see if they can identify where the settlement might have gotten its domestic water.

Did they make some big discoveries?

“I’ve been doing archaeology in this area since 1977,” said Kristin Kuckelman, senior research archaeologist at Crow Canyon, “and this is the first time I’ve seen a mortar from this time period, much less dug one up.”

The team was in the area for only three days, so much of the work remained for the Crow Canyon archaeologists to do. But knowing where to dig and identifying sites beyond their original survey site tells a lot more than they knew before the team’s arrival.

The show may be seen by as many as 12 million people – half on television, half online – according to the show’s producers.

“This is a big deal for Southwest archaeology,” said Suzy Meyer, Crow Canyon’s communications specialist and former Cortez Journal publisher.

abutler@durangoherald.com

To watch

The “Lost Pueblo Village” episode of the PBS show “Time Team America,” which is about a Basketmaker III dig sponsored by Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, will air at 8 p.m. Tuesday on Rocky Mountain, New Mexico and Arizona PBS.

Visit www,pbs.org/time-team to learn more about the show and the episode shot near Cortez.

Mar 8, 2015
History around Four Corners informs present


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