Saturday, May 20, 2023, all day
Cost of trip: TBD

After a several year hiatus, the San Cristóbal Ranch has generously given us a rare opportunity to visit an astonishing place...Pueblo San Cristóbal. Details will follow, but the Office of Archaeological Studies has been granted permission to hold our Chiles and Sherds program (tours and catered lunch) at Pueblo San Cristóbal on Saturday, May 20th, 2023.

Just 25 miles south of Santa Fe, this archaeological site combines one of the largest Galisteo Basin pueblos with one of the most spectacular rock art sites in the Southwest. The human story includes dramatic responses to late twelfth-century climate change, village formation on a remarkable scale, the florescence of new religious ideas and institutions, Spanish colonization and the seventeenth-century mission system, the Pueblo Revolt, and ranching of the modern era. The Pueblo itself has an estimated 1600 rooms organized around a dozen plazas, and the rock art images are uncountable (estimated to be more than 10,000). Most of the images are pecked (petroglyphs), but some painted images are preserved in protected settings (pictographs).

The Chiles and Sherds event will consist of small group tours (16-18 participants each) of the rock art and pueblo itself, spaced at 30-minute intervals throughout the day. Each tour will last 2-3 hours and will cover about 2 miles of rough terrain, often up steep rocky slopes with cholla and prickly pear cactus. Tours will be scheduled around a long, catered lunch period, with some participants touring then eating, others eating then touring.

The specifics of this year's Chiles and Sherds event are still being fleshed out and the cost of the event has yet to be determined.

Please check back on this website and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation's Friends of Archaeology website for updates. A full introduction to the 2023 Chiles and Sherd event will be available in the February 2023 FOA newsletter, available on our FOA newsletter webpage.