Public invited to join Puebloan explorations

Indian Country Today (Lakota Times)
02-22-1999
Public invited to join Puebloan explorations: Mesa Verde programs range from overnight to week-long efforts

Crow Crayon Archaeological Center near Mesa Verde National Park has invited adults of all ages and students from around the country to join professional archaeologists to search for understanding in the prehistoric past.

The canyon country of the Mesa Verde region is dotted with abandoned villages of the Puebloan people who inhabited the beautiful but rugged landscape for nearly a thousand years. Over the centuries, entire communities sprang up, flourished for a time and eventually disappeared, leaving only traces of their homes, pottery and tools as clues for the archaeologists who followed. For more than 100 years the area has been the subject of intensive archaeological research.

Crow Canyon Archaeological Center (formed as a nonprofit organization in 1983) is committed to long-term research on the 10th to 13th-century occupation by the ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) of the mesa Verde Region. Programs are designed in consultation with American Indian advisors and led by an outstanding staff of professional archaeologists and educators. High-quality, experience-based learning programs incorporate the center's research findings and involve participants in the research process.

Crow Canyon programs have gained national recognition throughout the years, sponsored in part by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Colorado Historical Society. Books and articles about research results have been published in magazines and covered by television. Data and education programs are available on the Internet.

Public participation in Crow Canyon programs is vital to continued success. Participants experience the excitement of learning and the satisfaction of taking part in innovative archaeological research.

Each year some 3,500 students and adults participate in one of the programs. Students groups come from around the country. Programs range in from overnight to week-long endeavors that allow students to excavate with Crow Canyon's research archaeologists. Students are involved in simulated digs, ecology hikes and guided tours of Mesa Verde National Park.

Adult participants can choose from a wide variety of research and educational programs, most of which last one week. They join in the excavation of Shields Pueblo, repeatedly occupied between A.D. 600 and A.D. 1300. In addition to field excavation, participants analyze and interpret materials recovered from the site.

This intensive course in Southwestern archaeology also includes an introduction to the local ecology, hands-on experiences with ancestral Puebloan lifestyles, and a tour of spectacular Mesa Verde National Park.

The wide variety of adult programs led by research archaeologists, American Indians and other scholars focus on archaeology, American Indian culture, and traditional crafts.

Family members can work and learn together in either an excavation program or an exploration of the Southwest that includes visits to Canyon de Chelly and Hopi Mesas.

Crow Canyon offers several workshops for educators who want to understand the human past in the American Southwest, use the multi-disciplinary science of archaeology in their classrooms and learn more about American Indian culture.

Shared accommodations are provided in Navajo-style long hogans on a pinon-and-juniper covered hillside or in the Crow Canyon Lodge.

Crow Canyon is four miles northwest of Cortez, Colo., 15 miles west of the entrance of Mesa Verde National Park and 400 miles southwest of Denver.

For more information, contact Lynn Thompson Baca at 800-422-8975, ext. 137 or email: Itbaca@crowcanyon.org.

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