Studies in Ridges Basin Archaeology

Animas-La Plata Archaeological Project
1992-1993 Investigation in Ridges Basin, Colorado

Editors
Susan A. Gregg
Francis E. Smiley

Ridges Basin, of course, has never been thought of as a central place in southwestern prehistory. Nor has the rich archaeological record in Ridges Basin received scholarly scientific research attention commensurate with its potential for contributing to our knowledge of prehistoric life on the Colorado Plateau. This volume contains four studies of both local and greater regional significance to the archaeological study of Ridges Basin. Each of the studies makes a separate contribution of original research.

We hope that the studies in this series will contribute to the archaeological understanding of Ridges Basin and its contextual situation in the prehistory of the Colorado Plateau and the northern Southwest. As part of the archaeologically famous La Plata District (Morris 1939) and virtually centered in the equally well known Durango area (Morris and Burgh 1954), Ridges Basin, I think, has a great deal to offer as a laboratory for examining questions that bear on our understanding of the prehistory of the Southwest and human prehistory, generally.

These works consist of topical studies covering a diverse group of topics. Each study is designed to stand alone, providing its own frame of reference, both scholarly and geographic. Each study in this first volume works from a regional perspective.

In Chapter 1, Debra Martin and Alan Goodman present the results of intensive non-invasive examination, sanctioned by Fort Lewis College, of human remains recovered by previous excavations. This study will contribute to the NAGPRA process. I emphasize that these materials derive from previous and largely unreported work in Ridges Basin. The remains, housed at Fort Lewis College in Durango, were examined by Martin and Goodman in Durango in the summer of 1993 with the help and kind permission of Dr. Susan Riches, Department of Anthropology, Fort Lewis College.

Martin and Goodman have a great deal of experience in the human osteology of the northern Southwest. For example, these investigators bring an extremely useful research perspective to the Ridges Basin work as the scholars who carried out the extensive analysis of human remains from the Black Mesa Archaeological Project in northeastern Arizona. Because comparison of data recovered in the course of work in Ridges Basin archaeology with other large scale projects in the northern Southwest is a priority, the Martin and Goodman study presented here, while not primarily comparative, benefits enormously from the prior experience of the authors.

In Chapter 2, Christopher Lizotte provides, through the examination of lithic assemblages, a comparative examination of the transition from early farming on the Colorado Plateau to more sedentary village life. Lizotte's study provides a test of the model developed by Parry and Kelly (1987) from their studies of lithic technology and its links to changes in sedentism. Because the model constitutes a general construct that the authors apply very broadly, Lizotte's test is both timely and interesting. Lizotte's findings do not mirror the predictions of the model and provide alternative results and explanations. Accordingly, this study highlights both the utility of further work in Ridges Basin, and the fact that apparently similar adaptations, i. e., the early Puebloan occupation of Black Mesa and that of Ridges Basin, still hold surprises.

In Chapter 3, Amenia Cerovich Wiggins provides a Durango region study of early Puebloan ceramics. This study includes a detailed examination of the design styles of the early wares, and describes collections housed at the Arizona State Museum and excavated in the Ridges Basin area. Like the other studies presented here, Wiggins works to develop a regional, comparative approach that assigns context and perspective to previously undocumented archaeologically recovered materials. Wiggins' study complements the extensive investigations by Allison (1995) in describing and analyzing the baseline materials of southwestern pottery development.

Chapter 4, the final portion of this volume by Barbara Blackshear, addresses a very poorly understood, but centrally important issue in archaeology: the effects of "non-scientific" surface collection on archaeological assemblages. As I have repeatedly emphasized in other works (Smiley 1995), the Ridges Basin assemblages have been seriously reduced by intensive surface collection, particularly over the past 50 or 100 years. Because the several initial volumes reporting the 1992 and 1993 investigations in Ridges Basin are limited to surface collections, Blackshear brings a regional perspective to the obvious sampling problems with surface assemblages on Black Mesa and in Ridges Basin. Like Lizotte, Blackshear adopts an explicitly regional, comparative perspective drawing on the extensive excavations and surface collections of the Black Mesa Archaeological Project.

In addition, Blackshear provides a useful ethnographic perspective on surface collection. She conducts a preliminary test of the potential for the use of projectile points, as high-profile artifacts ("the goodies", in colloquial terms) in the evaluation of the effects of non-scientific collection on surface assemblages. Working from ethnographic and archaeological data, Blackshear offers insights into the kinds of culturally embedded motives for the collection of materials from archaeological sites. She supplies, in addition, recommendations for incorporating her findings into archaeological site evaluation procedures.

In summary, this volume provides detailed, regionally oriented studies that complement the works in the three initial volumes in the AnimasLa Plata Archaeological Project Research Papers series (Smiley 1995; Gregg et al. 1995; Allison 1995). All four of the initial A-LP volumes deal, for the most part, with the surface assemblages, but we have also undertaken the review and detailed study of previously excavated and collected materials. I hope the initial volumes and the works in this volume make clear some of the patterns and variability in Ridges Basin data and the research potential this locality offers.