[Katie]
Today we finished up LT 7 [5MT 17275]. We took an alternate route to the site today, but it ended up being a 30 min. walk from the car instead of a 5-10 min. hike up the canyon rim. It was pretty cloudy today and slightly chilly. It looks like fall is finally setting in. Chelsea and I went and looked at the petroglyph site. It was amazing! There were so many glyphs everywhere, spanning about 50 meters along the N side of canyon wall. There was also a granary some [checkdams] up top, and a possible roomblock. There were turkey tracks everywhere again. These mostly seemed to hike up the canyon side, going up. There were big ones and little ones, there were people and birds. All sorts of things. There were some very interesting spirals, a triangular spiral connected to a circular one….

The old site reports claim that the petroglyph site [5MT 1693], LT 7 [5MT 17275] and 5MT 1691 are all contemporaneous which could be true, but we don't know yet. It is pretty hard to tell, but I'm interested to find out what we discover. The petroglyph sites have a midden, but I don't know what's been found in it. So far, it looks like 5MT 1691 could be easily PIII, but it is too early to tell. Then we have Tarantula Pueblo which is late PII/early PIII. But we will see. My guess is that the rock art dates to the whole occupation of the canyon bottom (at least) and that people had temporary structures there. They first lived at Tarantula Pueblo and then Lightning Tree Tower. My reason for thinking the petroglyph site is used throughout occupation in at least the canyon bottom is because there is just so much there.

[Tucker]
I'm in charge of LTT [5MT 1691] so Ruth let me plan how to go about recording it. We started by going around the site and looking at the old map made in '83, very stylistically done and not super accurate. We identified all the features and then began flagging artifacts paying special attention to double flagging the diagnostic sherds.

When Katie and Seth showed up Katie and Chelsea continued flagging/beginning to record artifacts, while I showed Seth around the site and he decided how to map it.

On the LTT site there is a tower with masonry walls standing around 15 feet with the S side in rubble. To the south it looks like it has been terraced with a midden out in front, all of which has evidence of vandalism. To the west of the tower is a roomblock with at least 2 possibly 3 or 4 rooms abutting a boulder and just to the NE on the other side of the boulder is another pile of rubble which in the old site form is stated to be a possible tower, yet on their map they make it square. There isn't much evidence of pecked rounding of bricks and it is hard to tell the shape of the original structure, hopefully after a closer observation we will be able to tell. To the N of the tower there is the remains of a dam in a run off ditch as well as a dam to the east in the same ditch. I think these were used for slowing down the water as it came down the cliff, so that it would be more easily distributed to the fields down slope as opposed to creating a semi-permanent reservoir.

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