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| [Katie] Today this morning before we went out into the field, we listened to a talk by Karen Adams. She has studied maize of the Southwest for a while to see what kind of movement patterns and selective breeding patterns can be seen in the archaeological record. It was pretty amazing. I didn't know that there could be so many different types of corn, but apparently there are 123 types in the Southwest. The ranges of the types are from the Rio Grande area, Western Pueblo area, Lower Colorado River area, Sonoran Desert are in Northern Mexico and non-puebloan types in the Southwest area. They range in color from dark purple to white. There are five different types of maize kernels: there is flour (which is starchy and easy to grind), flint (which is harder to grind), popcorn (which, surprisingly, pops), dent (which is the usual corn grown in US by farmers and mostly fed to livestock), and finally sweet (which you can find in the grocery store). When Karen first started looking into prehistoric corn, not much was known about it. So she started working on figuring out what archaeologists could learn about it by studying the corn types we have now in the southwest to see if we could make distinctions about corn we find at archaeological sites and then seeing from both of those if we can somehow better understand the history and movements of maize in the past. It is pretty interesting stuff. So Karen first decided to find out what we can see about corn that we might be able to see in prehistoric corn and came up with genotype, environmental factors (such as drought, or times of lots of rain), burning (what can we see when corn is burned), and selection (which corn types have been selected for now and in the past by farmers). So Karen did an experiment (and is still working on it) by growing all 123 different types of corn in optimal conditions up here. She noticed many things about the corn like some corn is set to mature faster the hotter it gets, and some to mature fast when the days get shorter. So she has gotten one side of the "bell curve" of the model for corn growth by giving the corn plenty of water and sunlight. I think that more experiments should be done for some to find out as much as we can about corn because I think that it could definitely be useful for migration patterns of people prehistorically. Because if one type of corn is grown best in one area and you find it in another, that definitely means something. You could probably find out as well what and when people were selecting corn types and therefore maybe learn more about what environmental conditions they were facing, etc. It could probably be handled in a similar way to linguistics. In linguistics you can estimate who is related to who and how long it's been since they spoke the same language just by measuring the similarities and differences. A few things that I think Karen could take into account better (maybe she has and didn't really mention it) is how modern Puebloans grow their corn, like the methods they use. I think then she should try growing the different corn types separately in different areas in all conditions to see what effect it has on the corn. It would take a very long time, but I think a lot can be learned from this research and is worth taking the time to investigate. It seems to me like archaeologists have been seriously lacking in this area, which is kinda strange since corn is so important to Puebloans. I think that by finding out as much as we can about what is important to Puebloans we could certainly learn a lot about them and why corn in particular is so significant. It was obviously used for food, but why, for instance, is meat downplayed and corn so important? Small things like this were certainly past down through generations and maybe we could find out why. [Tucker] Kellam and Trevor were doing ceramics and ended up finding a lot of excellent sherds including many Chapin B/W which allows us to give a pretty certain date on the site and one Piedra sherd in the middle of all the upright slabs area, indicating that they were potentially erected later in time and suggesting that we may have a transitional site btwn. BMIII and PI time periods. Only one piece of Piedra is not definitive, but it's a good start. Chelsea and I were on lithics today and it was a good learning experience. Lots of rock to analyze today. Lots of Morrison mudstone, Burro Canyon MS and quartzite. Some chert, but mainly the above mentioned. Didn't find many formal tools today, only 3 or 4. Lots of retouched flakes. We found one nice metate frag that had been ground and pecked. Found 2 projectile pts today, one small side notched one with the top 3rd broken off made of Burro Canyon quartzite, and one large tip (possible paleo) made of Burro Canyon chert. It will be interesting to see if over the next few days we find any more Piedra B/W or even some Neckbanded pottery indicating there is a PI occupation at this site, I also hope to find more upright slabs. Hopefully the weather will hold up,
it's predicted that there will be frequent T-storms tonight and
tomorrow so we'll see. |
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