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Foreword

For more than 100 years, archaeologists have written site reports, which serve as the primary vehicles for reporting the results of archaeological excavation and analysis. Observations recorded in the field and laboratory constitute the empirical foundation upon which subsequent interpretations are based. Original handwritten records are the primary form of documentation, but in the process of writing site reports, archaeologists clean up their records, build logical arguments for their interpretations of archaeological contexts, and integrate various types of documentation, including text, illustrations, photographs, maps, and laboratory analysis results. Site reports provide other archaeologists, as well as the interested lay public, with access to basic information about what was found, what it means, and how the data might apply to other research projects.

The publication of The Sand Canyon Archaeological Project: Site Testing represents a milestone in both the research and publication programs of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. It is a milestone in research because it marks a shift in focus from the single site to the community, locality, and region. It is a milestone in publication because it marks the beginning of the Center's transition from traditional archaeological reporting to the dissemination of information through electronic media.

The Center's research program began in 1983 with the first season of excavation at the Duckfoot site, a ninth-century hamlet, and continued in 1984 with the first season of excavation at Sand Canyon Pueblo, a large, thirteenth-century village. In both cases, the emphasis was on the individual site--how and when structures were built and abandoned, what activities were conducted and where, how the site inhabitants organized and controlled access to space, and what site layout and organization might tell us about social relationships. Soon, however, the Center began to broaden the scope of its investigations beyond the level of the individual site. The people who inhabited the pueblos did not live in isolation, and, logically, archaeological inquiry needed to be conducted on a geographic scale that encompassed entire communities consisting of many sites. Research focused on a 50-square-mile area around Sand Canyon Pueblo, called the Sand Canyon locality, and on the thirteenth century A.D., when Sand Canyon Pueblo was occupied. What was the distribution of sites in the Sand Canyon locality? Were any of the sites occupied at the same time as Sand Canyon Pueblo, and if so, what were the relationships between them? What role did Sand Canyon Pueblo play as a center of political, economic, and religious power within the locality? How did Sand Canyon Pueblo function in the context of the larger social landscape of the Mesa Verde region and the greater Southwest? How and why were individual sites, the locality, and the whole region abandoned by the late 1200s?

Beginning in 1985, the Center conducted a series of archaeological surveys in the Sand Canyon locality, and a more comprehensive picture of life in the thirteenth century began to emerge. The concept of community, that is, the group of people who lived close enough to one another to have regular, face-to-face interaction and who were linked by common social, economic, and historical connections, became central to the Center's investigations. The starting point for assessing the community was site survey, which involved methodically searching the landscape to identify, record, and document every site in the area around Sand Canyon Pueblo. In addition to survey, excavation was needed to refine chronology and provide the data necessary for comparative studies. Excavation--even limited excavation--of all the sites identified during survey clearly was not practical, and so, in 1988, Mark Varien took the lead in developing a comprehensive research design to test-excavate 13 selected sites in the locality. The challenge of the Testing Program was to devise sampling and excavation strategies that ensured comparability between sites, enhanced the long-term utility of the collections, and resulted in the least amount of disturbance to the sites themselves. This publication is a testament to the success of Varien and his colleagues in meeting that challenge. The Testing Program is an excellent example of sound archaeology, well designed, well executed, and guided by a strong preservation-conservation ethic.

As originally envisioned, The Sand Canyon Archaeological Project: Site Testing was to have been a "traditional," albeit large, site report, printed on paper in standard book form in the Center's Occasional Papers series. Not until the manuscript was completely written and the Center was faced with the daunting prospect of transforming its 1,300 pages into a printed volume did the institution consider alternatives to traditional production. The Center had already made a commitment to produce future site reports electronically, rather than in traditional book form, to take advantage of the power of computer software in managing provenience records, artifact data, maps, photographs, and text. As envisioned by the Center's staff, the core of these future reports would be enormous electronic databases, with text limited to concise, interpretive summaries focused on specific research topics. With the Testing Program report already in traditional manuscript form, however, the Center had to devise another way--something short of a computerized database--to make this very important body of information available in a timely and cost-effective fashion. In the end, a hybrid approach was chosen: the text portion of the manuscript remains as originally written, but it is "printed" on the Internet and in CD-ROM format, rather than on paper. In addition, the hundreds of maps, graphs, tables, photographs, and bibliographic references are integrated electronically using hypertext technology. The result is a mammoth report with a traditional feel, but through which the user can easily navigate.

In the introductory chapter, Varien and Kuckelman present a brief history of the Sand Canyon Archaeological Project, a summary of the research design, and a review of the environmental setting. Thirteen chapters are devoted to detailed descriptions of site excavations, one chapter for each site tested. Each of these chapters includes a site-specific discussion of sampling strategy and field methods, as well as meticulous descriptions of the architecture and stratigraphy encountered. Five additional chapters present the results of artifact, pollen, macrobotanical, faunal, and human remains analyses; these studies are structured around specific research questions posed in the Testing Program research design. Together, the site-report and analytical chapters form the descriptive and interpretive core of the report. In a chapter on dating, Varien presents the results of tree-ring, archaeomagnetic, and pottery-dating analyses to support his chronological inferences for each of the 13 sites in the study. In the following chapter, Varien evaluates the tested sites in regional context, drawing upon the data and interpretations provided in the rest of the report to address the broader anthropological questions of how communities form, change over time, and eventually are abandoned. Understanding community dynamics required the completion of a number of instrumental studies that focused on chronology, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, length and season of site occupation, and site-formation processes. The results of these studies are presented in detail by Varien and Kuckelman in the concluding chapter. Among the methodologically innovative analyses developed as a part of the Testing Program are accumulation-rate studies, used to estimate the occupation span of residential sites, and an analysis of pit structure stratigraphy, critical in determining if sites continued to be used after they were abandoned as residences. Varien and Kuckelman synthesize the results of these studies, review the survey and excavation literature from throughout the region, and place the Testing Program data in the context of cross-cultural research. They examine two major changes in community organization--the change in community form from dispersed farmsteads to large, aggregated villages, and the shift in the location of residential sites from the mesa tops to the canyons--and conclude that these dramatic changes date to the middle A.D. 1200s in the Sand Canyon locality. They further document that the Sand Canyon community had a history that spanned at least a century, and possibly three centuries, despite changes in settlement patterns within the community. Finally, they show that environmental change and resource depletion cannot in themselves explain the abandonment of the Mesa Verde region and that conflict and warfare are other factors to be considered.

The Testing Program, as an experiment in low-impact archaeology, demonstrated that thoughtful design, careful sampling, and meticulous recovery and recording techniques can produce a wealth of data with minimal disturbance to sites. The result, this publication, contributes enormously to our knowledge of the final century of Puebloan occupation of the Mesa Verde region and stands as an excellent example of how new methodological approaches may be brought to bear on issues of perennial concern to archaeologists and anthropologists alike.

RICKY R. LIGHTFOOT
President
Crow Canyon Archaeological Center