January 19, 2000

SMU PROFESSOR FINISHES LATE COLLEAGUE'S 30-YEAR MANUSCRIPT ON THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS OF A NEW MEXICO PUEBLO

Click here to download a high-resolution (300-dpi) black and white jpeg image of the Picuris Pueblo (655 KB)

DALLAS (SMU) - For 30 years anthropologist Herbert Dick exhaustively analyzed archaeolgical materials excavated from the remains of Picuris Pueblo, an 800-year-old New Mexican village. He always planned to finish one day organizing his data and publish his findings of the dig in a book.

But in 1993, shortly after retiring from Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo., Dick was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and died shortly thereafter. He left behind more than 250 boxes of relics, maps and photographs, and several unpublished reports from the various scholars who had helped him over the years to excavate and study Picuris Pueblo.

The Tiwa-speaking community of Pueblo people, south of Taos along the Rio Pueblo, is considered by anthropologists to be one of the longest continually occupied settlements in North America. Some of the significant findings uncovered at Picuris are unique prehistoric painted murals and a rare collection of ritual structures.

When the excavation of the pueblo was finished, the people of Picuris Pueblo, about 400 of whom still live in modern dwellings on the site, covered up the dig so that few traces of the original pueblo are visible. Everything that is known about the ancient site rested in Dick's original manuscripts.

With his death, the Picuris was going the way of other promising archaeological sites in the Southwest: extensively excavated, no published reports, and known only by word-of-mouth. The treasure trove of data that Dick had assembled on the prehistory and history of the northern Rio Grande Valley seemed likely to be lost to the scientific community.

All that has changed now with the posthumous publication of the book, Picuris Pueblo Through Time: Eight Centuries of Change in a Northern Rio Grande Pueblo, co-authored by Michael Adler, an associate professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University and director of SMU's archaeology field school at Fort Burgwin Research Center outside of Taos.

Adler met Dick two years before his death and learned of the wealth of information that Dick and others had brought to light. After Dick died, Adler asked his widow for permission to finish compiling the information in a volume that would honor her husband's work. Adler spent three years "reexcavating" Picuris Pueblo by carefully studying records, photos, correspondence and data compilations culled mainly from Dick's personal archives and manuscripts. The resulting book bears both Adler and Dick's names as authors.

"I never asked Dick's permission to complete the Picuris manuscript. In fact, it's probably a pretty good bet that Herb wouldn't have wanted me or anyone else, for that matter, to synthesize the massive archaeological undertakings at Picuris," Adler says.

Nevertheless the story of the multi-story, adobe Picuris Pueblo is too important to have remained unknown to a wider audience, says Adler. The original four-year excavation in the mid-1960s uncovered broken pottery, stone tools, human and food remains, and other common objects found at prehistoric sites in the Southwest. The evidence suggests that there were as many as 800 rooms in the structure, housing more than 1,000 people, which Adler says was a very large prehistoric settlement.

Most significant to Adler are Dick's drawings and photographs of prehistoric painted murals on the walls of kivas, which are sacred structures used for religious ceremonies. The kiva murals are important to anthropologists, he says, for what they reveal about aspects of the religious beliefs of the ancestral Picuris people. The murals depict animals, plants, clouds, lightning and birds, all of which are central to past and present Pueblo religious beliefs. Unlike other prehistoric kiva murals studies elsewhere in the Southwest, however, the Picuris kivas show no depictions of kachinas, the spirit-beings that are predominant in the religious beliefs of other Pueblo peoples such as Hopi and Zuni.

Also significant was the discovery of 12 unburned prehistoric kivas at Picuris, an interesting pattern given the propensity of ancestral Pueblo peoples to burn or "decommission" these important ritual structures when they abandon their settlements.

To leave them intact in an abandoned building was dangerous, since the unprotected kivas could be defiled by malevolent people and spirits. Adler says this suggests that the Picuris Pueblo was never abandoned. Instead, the old adobe structure melted over time and a newer, more modern community was built over it, one that still survives today.

Compiling Dick's work into a book required a substantial amount of rewriting and editing on the part of Adler. Moreover, in the three intervening decades since Dick began his excavation of Picuris, archaeology has changed its theoretical perspectives greatly.

"Most of the original manuscripts were highly descriptive of how things changed, but not why they changed. I have taken an approach that not only builds on these earlier perspectives, but also presents alternative explanations and interpretations," Adler says.

To complete the book, Adler received some financial support from the Hotel Santa Fe in Taos, which is majority owned by the Picuris Pueblo, and the SMU Clements Center for Southwest Studies.

Picuris Pueblo Through Time: Eight Centuries of Change in a Northern Rio Grande Pueblo is published by the SMU Clements Center for Southwest Studies and sells for $22.50. The book is the first for the center's publishing-on-demand venture. An alternative to traditional academic presses, publishing-on-demand creates inexpensive editions of highly technical or specialty manuscripts aimed at a limited readership. To order Picuris Pueblo, call the Clements Center at 214-768-3684.

The interdisciplinary Clements Center promotes research and instruction in a variety of fields related to the American Southwest. It coordinates undergraduate academic majors and minors in Southwest studies and a Ph.D. in history with a focus on the Southwest. It also brings to SMU leading scholars from throughout the world for conferences, periodic lectures and symposia. Visiting scholars have the resources of the SMU DeGolyer Library, which has a major research collection devoted to Western Americana, Texana, the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico, and railroad history. The center was established as part of a $10 million endowment to the SMU History Department in Dedman College by former Texas Governor William P. Clements.