Acomita Interchange
OAS archaeologists excavated three sites near the Acomita Interchange of I-40 in Cibola County, including a large, multicomponent artifact scatter. Large quantities of nonlocal material types were represented, including Jemez obsidian, fingerprint chert, Alibates chert, Edwards Plateau chert, Zuni spotted chert, and Jemez Polvadera obsidian, suggesting that selected cores were curated and transported to the site.
Cookes Peak
OAS archaeologists surveyed over 3,000 acres and documented about 2,300 archaeological features, many of them associated with mining activities in the Cookes Peak area between the 1870s and 1940s. The mining features included typical hard-rock mining remnants such as adits, shafts, open cuts, prospect pits, trenches, and waste rock piles. Habitation areas such as dugouts, tent pads, and trash scatters were also encountered.
Galisteo Basin
OAS coordinated and performed site condition assessments on the twenty-four sites specified in the Galisteo Basin Archaeological Sites Protection Act. We remain involved with the act coordinating committee and hope to participate in the next phase of the protection project.
High Rolls Cave
OAS archaeologists conducted archaeological testing at High Rolls Cave in 1996 and 2000, revealing deposits from the middle and late Archaic periods—about 3,500 years ago. The excavations exposed deeply stratified materials, floors, diagnostic artifacts, and features radiocarbon dated to 1500 BC to AD 250.
Northwest Santa Fe Relief Route
The OAS investigated 60 archaeological sites on the Santa Fe Piedmont with at least 77 temporal components. Fourteen of those sites were excavated, revealing a 7,000-year history of occupation in the piedmont from the Early Archaic to the historic Pueblo and Euroamerican periods.
Santa Fe to Pojoaque Corridor
In 1997 the OAS began excavations at three sites near Pojoaque, New Mexico, in advance of the reconstruction of the US 84/285 highway. The sites had great potential for examining issues of prehistoric Puebloan social structure, community development, and economy, and Spanish Colonial settlement and land use.
Water Canyon
Surface artifacts, including a late Paleoindian projectile point base, together with an extensive buried wet meadow deposit, were found in 2000 during an archaeological survey for a proposed astronomical facility in Socorro County. The wet meadow deposit has now been securely dated to between the early Paleoindian (Clovis) and early Archaic periods, while bison bone from the deposit falls squarely into the late Paleoindian period. Interdisciplinary research at the site includes archaeological investigations, pollen analyses, macrobotanical analyses, soil studies, and paleoclimatic reconstruction. Initial results of pollen studies indicate that during the late Paleoindian era, the site comprised a mosaic vegetational community, including the wet meadow, a surrounding sagebrush steppe, and a possible gallery forest of birch, maple, and possible cherry along the main channel of the Water Canyon drainage. Recent deep mechanical coring has encountered bone and filamentous algae spores at 3.7 m below the surface.