An interesting study is underway in Crow Canyon’s laboratory. The lab team (Reuven Sinensky, Kate Hughes, and Daniel Hampson), along with four dedicated volunteers spend their Tuesdays analyzing grinding tools that came from the Haynie site, an Ancestral Pueblo village near Cortez, Colorado (part of the Northern Chaco Outliers Project).

In archaeology, ground stone is a category of stone tools used to process plants, minerals, and other substances for food, seasoning, medicine and pigments. Ground stone tools are also used to manufacture ornaments, shape bone tools, and even straighten arrow shafts! What sets ground stone tools apart from other stone tools is that they are used to process substances or shape materials using abrasion rather than cutting or chopping motions. Depending on the goal of a particular grinding activity ground stone tools are often made from coarse-grained basalts rhyolites, granites, or fine-grained cryptocrystalline and igneous stones.

“In the Southwest archaeologists haven’t invested as much time into studying grinding tools as they have hunting tools and ceramics,” explains Reuven Sinensky, Crow Canyon Laboratory Manager.

Specifically, the team is studying manos and metates. Mano is the Spanish word for “hand,” and refers to a stone that’s held in one or both hands and moved back and forth against a larger stone in order to grind seeds, nuts, and other hard materials. Metate is derived from metatl, a word used by Nahua peoples in central Mexico to describe the larger stone against which the mano is drawn to process materials. Peoples Indigenous to what is now the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico have their own words for these tools, however most archaeologists have adopted the terms used by Spanish colonialists.

“Manos and metates are passed down over generations. They’re very important belongings,” explains Reuven. “They’re also intensely used on a day-to-day basis for extended periods of time. They can give us significant insight into routine, daily activities. For example, in the Mesa Verde Region, using grinding tools to process plants for food are likely activities that women were doing day-to-day, and can therefore tell us about the central roles that women played in communities. Food and cuisine are important aspects of people’s identities, and this is still the case for Indigenous communities throughout the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico today”.

The team is meticulously working through a sizeable number of grinding tools acquired over the past seven years of field work at the Haynie site. The tools represent more than 450 years of history.

“We take one at a time and each volunteer has a different one. Each individual mano gets a lot of attention and a complete report,” shares Dave Melanson, one of the volunteers working on the project. Dave has volunteered with Crow Canyon for 10 years and serves on the organization’s Board of Trustees.

There are many things the team hopes to better understand through their analyses. Among them are questions like:

– What was the role of food and cuisine in people’s daily lives?

– How did people prepare meals with their families?

– Did people prepare certain types of meals?

– How did food preparation activities differ between Haynie and other communities during the same period of time?

– Did recipes and preferred meals at Haynie change over time?

– Did the preferred raw materials and design of grinding tools change over time to grind certain types of plants, like corn?

– Were tools designed and used for labor-intensive, multi-stage processing, like grinding corn kernels into fine flour using a progression of coarser-grained and finer-grained tools?

In addition to helping answer these questions, volunteer Dave finds the project personally rewarding as well.

“I find it personally interesting,” shares Dave. “I’m a curious person. This work is important in the preservation of our historical markers to remind us that history is important. I put this ground stone work in the larger context of appreciating the lifeways of all cultures that contributed to the world we live in now and trying to use the lessons we learn from history to help build a healthier society.”

The team expects to spend about a year on the analyses and will publish a full report when complete. Watch Crow Canyon’s website and social media for more to come!