El Malpais, Session 2

Our second session out at El Malpais involved much less lava-hiking, but I have to admit that after a few days of sitting around on a site and not moving very much, I sort of started to miss the unforgiving black rocks.  I ended up with about equal time spent between the sandstone bluffs and the lava this time around, and got lots more time to enjoy pretty pottery and hanging out around a PII period great house.  

We spent a few days trying to get a handle on the layout of a large great house which is situated right near the edge of the lava flow.  This site had been mapped and recorded previously, but there were many discrepancies that we wanted to clear up.  A lot of our time was put towards to understanding the features across this site, reconciling previous maps with what we were seeing, and collecting artifact data to go along with our maps.  Man, I love great house middens.  So much neat pottery!  And cool stuff like beads and pendants!

We did go back out onto the lava for the last few days of the session, to finish up some of the trails we had started during the first session.  On the very last day, we came across a very well-defined trail that appeared to have been kept-up pretty well (so maybe it has been recently active).  This trail had a bit of pottery randomly dropped along the path, lots of rock cairns, and eventually led up a rocky ridge directly to a very large shrine.  We recorded the shrine and kept going, but on our way back to the shrine to head in the opposite direction, we stopped to record a large rock cairn right next to a large collapsed lava tube.  There was a pot drop next to the tube, and upon further inspection there was even what looked like a ramp built into the side of the tube.  Obviously people have used this place for some sort of ritual activity- maybe giving offerings, who knows.  After climbing around the tube to look for other artifacts, I just happened to notice the edge of something sticking out from under a large rock slab... it was four HUGE sherds of a beautiful black-on-white jar, hidden out of sight from anyone just travelling along the trail.  What I think happened is that this pot was dropped on the surface (the aforementioned pot drop), which resulted in a bunch of small broken sherds all over the ground, and then somebody picked up these four large pieces and hid them nearby.  Pretty awesome.

 

This was a fun project.  I would happily work in El Malpais again- it's a really neat and beautiful area.  I loved being in the field here, and the work was super interesting... although I also must say that it's nice to be back in Tucson and to know that I don't have to worry about an out-of-town schedule again for a while.

Oh, and by the way... This is what 2 weeks of hiking in lava flows will do to your boots: