Students burrow for artifacts

Beyond the volcanoes near Albuquerque, there is an archeological dig site where UNM students uncovered evidence of one of the oldest cultures in the Americas.

It’s called Deann’s site, named after Deann Muller, a student at UNM, who discovered it in 2001 with professor Bruce Huckell while the two were doing a study of the area.

Huckell said the site was an old campground for the Folsom people, who date back to the ice age.

“We rely on a very distinctive spear point that these guys produced (to identify them),” he said. “They’re the only ones to have made points in this style. They’re distinguished by having these huge central flutes, or grooves.”

Huckell said the people are named after Folsom, N.M., where evidence of them was first discovered in the early 1900s.
“Folsom points have turned up from southern Canada to northern Mexico, from Iowa to the Rockies,” he said. “They were very mobile.”
The class, Southwestern Archeological Field School, takes archeology students to various nearby sites every summer. The students work there for six weeks and learn how to identify artifacts and conduct field work.

Matt O’Brien and Chris Merriman, both TAs with the class, said that hands-on work is important for student archeologists.
“It’s great to be able to spend the school year analyzing artifacts and researching in the library, but nothing beats spending a day in the mountains or desert looking for old stuff,” Merriman said. “It is an important skill for students to master.”
Experience in the field is also critical for students trying to find jobs after graduating, O’Brien said. He said his previous university did not have a field program.

“I ended up doing voluntary work in order to build those skills. … It was a more difficult path to take,” O’Brien said. “But one of our students actually left a week early from field school because he had gotten a job.”
And at Deann’s site, there’s still plenty of work to go around.

Huckell said they have found point tips, tools used for butchering animals and about 150 pieces of bison tooth enamel.
“They appear to be absolutely pathetically small pieces of teeth,” he said. “Those little pieces of tooth enamel don’t only tell us that we had bison here, but we can also … get a sense of the nature of the grass flora that was present there at the time.”
The stone used in the tools also tells a story, Huckell said.

“We found that the most distant raw material we can assign to a source is derived from about 220 kilometers to the west,” he said. “We can follow the path that brought them here.”

Despite repeated trips to Deann’s site, only about 10 percent of it has been excavated.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Huckell said.