She's digging it at college
Archeology major Holub files a report from the field

By SARAH HOLUB
Arizona State Student

It feels ridiculous to be putting on sunscreen when it’s still relatively dark outside and below sixty degrees, but I know that only two hours after sunrise I’ll be thankful for it—today it’s projected to reach 110 by noon. This dry, New Mexico heat is easier to deal with than the central Texas humidity, but it’s more dangerous too. Out here in the high desert your sweat evaporates almost as soon as it rises to the surface of your skin, lulling you into thinking you don’t need to drink as much water as the locals say and then Bam! dehydration and you’re out of commission for a few days.
I came to southwestern New Mexico for an archaeological field school run by Arizona State University. Archaeology is one of my majors at Texas A&M, but A&M hasn’t run a field school for at least 15 years or so and besides, the last one they did was Nautical Archaeology—a not-so-surprising discovery considering they’ve got the number one nautical archaeology program in the world. But I wanted to work on the land, in the dirt, so I applied to ASU’s school and was accepted. My parents drove me to the town, dropped me off at the local burger joint with kisses and extracted promises to be safe, and zoomed away in a flurry of dust. Dust, I would come to learn, pervades everything. After a few weeks all your clothes start to take on a grey tint and even after I got home and could take real showers I had dust in my pores for three weeks. (One of my mom’s first comments to me when we met again was, “Sarah, you’re so dirty!”)
There were ten of us students, two teaching assistants (TAs) and three professors—Dr. Peggy Nelson, and doctoral candidates Karen Schollmeyer and Steve Swanson. We divided into groups of 5 students and a TA to excavate our units and the directors sifted in and out, watching our progress and periodically assisting. The site we worked was on someone’s private land not too far from town. It was in a region inhabited by the Mogollon (pronounced Mug-ee-yo-n) Indians about 800 years ago. “Mogollon” is a name we archaeologists have assigned to these people since we don’t know if they were ancestors of the modern-day Tewa, Zuni, Hopi or numerous other tribes that claim them. In order to work the site we make a deal with the landowner: ASU gets to keep all the pottery shard fragments, lithics (worked stone), dendrochronology samples (burned wood we use to date structures) and C-14 samples (also used in dating, usually burned corn) we find, but any whole pottery we must give to the landowner. It’s a nice trade since we usually don’t find any whole pottery, but then again, if we found whole pottery we’d be able to photograph it, record info about it, and log it away before giving it up. Unfortunately, we have pothunters to contend with.
If you think of archaeology and immediately picture Indiana Jones, pothunters are the Nazis. This region of the Southwest has created some gorgeously painted black-on-white pottery that will fetch thousands of dollars on the black market or Ebay. Because of the huge demand, some people have made a living by sneaking onto private land to steal these treasures or, what’s worse, they’ll make agreements with naive landowners to split profits from sales 60-40. These people are an archaeologist’s nightmare. The problem is they’re smart and very knowledgeable about the pottery: when it was made, how to tell subtle differences between over 40 types, where to go digging, etc. If only they hadn’t gone over to the Dark Side of archaeology, most pothunters would be amazing academics. But the promise of money has lured them away.
 Of course, if they’re careless enough to be caught, that money is gone. The fine in New Mexico for “disturbing places of archaeological interest” is calculated by adding how much it would have been to excavate and analyze (using the lab, which is normally very expensive) the site, plus a base fine. If you happened to stumble upon human remains, add a couple thousand dollars extra to that. When all’s said and done, some convicted pothunters can wind up with fines as high as tens of thousands of dollars. If they are convicted. Getting evidence that will stand up in court is another story entirely.
Two of my fellow students and Steve were out on survey one day when they actually ran into a couple of pothunters. Survey is when you walk over an area that has the potential for habitation and look for remains of dwellings such as rocks in a line peeking through the dirt or an unusual amount of shards scattered on the surface. Steve and the two young men happened upon two pothunters who promptly jumped in their trucks and tried to leave. Somehow the team managed to get one to stop and talk for a while before he zoomed away, but “a while” was all they needed: Will, a former border patrolman and tattoo artist, had gotten a good enough look at him to reproduce his likeness well enough to show to the rangers who showed up only a few moments after the pothunters left. The rangers told my co-workers they’d been tracking these guys for months, had some DNA from a Coke can they’d left at a site, and were only weeks away from getting the last of the evidence they needed to seal the case. They thanked the guys and told them they may be asked to come in as witnesses at a future trial. Sam, who lives in New England, was not amused.
When we’re not saving the day, archaeologists live a hard but enjoyable life. Our residence consisted of tents, two port-a-potties (thankfully), and two 1 meter square showers we built out of 2x4s that had a pole with hooks to hang your bag shower. (Bag showers, for those unfamiliar with “roughing it” camping, are bags with a hose attached that you fill up with water and leave in the sun to warm. No pressure at all, but it gets you clean. Or at least cleaner than you were.) We got up every day at 5:15 am, began excavating at 6. The biting gnats came out from 8 to 8:45, snack was from 9 to 9:20, lunch 11 to 12. We leave the site at 3, wash the artifacts we’d uncovered all day from 3:15 to 4:30, have dinner at 5:30 and after dinner a lab or lecture until 7, at which time we could go to bed (yes, some people actually went to bed before it was dark) or sit around and talk. I usually went to sleep around eleven, maybe midnight, but others stayed up even longer than I—and I still don’t know how they managed.
It was interesting to be with students from all over the country. We had several from the New England area that were impressed at how much sky there is when not blocked by buildings; two from Arizona who fit in perfectly and thought New Mexico not a big change; a Louisiana girl who always seemed happy and was a hippie reincarnated; a Coloradoan that didn’t like the heat; a Missouri vegetarian who got upset with me when I smashed a scorpion crawling towards us one day because “he wasn’t doing anything to you!”; and me, the lone Texan who had to convince people the landowner’s cow tank was perfectly acceptable to swim in when temperatures rose above 95 degrees.
Texas has a reputation, as we all know, so I was always being asked bizarre questions or to do strange things. One morning the cows near where we were camped broke out of their pen and since no one knew what to do, I suggested we just chase them back in. This, of course, was met with silence, until Steve got there. He and I corralled the truants to the applause of the others and no one believed me when I said it was the first time I’d ever done such a thing. Another time I was handed a pocket knife to cut some string we had marked the unit with when the TA said to me, “Do you know how to close it? Oh wait, you’re from Texas, I forgot.”
But the best thing was our first ride in the back of the ASU truck. I’ve ridden in trucks all my life so I naturally sat up on the side near the cab but the rest of the students filed in and sat on the bed. I asked why no one was going to join me and the response was, “We can’t sit on the edge like that! Are you crazy? What if you fall off and die?” I laughingly assured them I would do no such thing and from then on it became a ritualistic game—I would hop over the side and take my place, cajoling the others to join me, and eventually, one by one, they would until at last, the very day before we went home, I had the entire group sitting on the edge of the truck and feeling the hot wind whip across their faces as we made our last ride back to camp.