RIO GRANDE NATIONAL FOREST — According to Katie Goodleaf, volunteer coordinator with the U.S. Forest Service, a group with Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado (VOC), which usually works on trail-related projects, assisted forest archeologist Price Heiner last month in conducting an archeological search.
After the fieldwork was complete, Heiner spoke with the Valley Courier and offered his assessment of the findings.
"The group conducted preliminary reconnaissance in areas that never had any archeological surveys. This gave us a sense of what was out there. We did pedestrian transect surveys. This was a formal gridding of the landscape in a systematic way. This included marking and recording any archeological material and then recording it formally on state site forms. The idea was to get an idea of what was in that particular area. We picked a 200-acre area that had never been surveyed before and surveyed it. We actually surveyed 125 of the 200 acres.
"We found two archeological sites. One contained culturally scattered material that included ancestral Pueblo and late Archaic. We also found some ancestral black pottery, which is classic Ancestral Pueblo. This pottery dates from 1,200 BP. We also found a projectile point from the Late Archaic that dates from about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.
"The other site was a late 1800s refuse dump with a small prehistoric component. It was probably a small prehistoric campsite that later became a dump for bottles and cans. The point we found is called a San Pedro. That is the style that dates from about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. We also found a gray-on-black piece of pottery on the same site from about 800 years ago. This was a site where people came back and visited again,” he said.
Heiner spoke of the archeological richness of the Valley, "On the Rio Grande National Forest, we have over 10,000 documented archeological sites and they span from 14,000 years old to historic period sites about 50 years ago. We do have a relatively high percentage of early Paleo-Indian sites. That is one of the reasons that brought me here, I'm very interested in those first cultures that came to these landscapes and how they settled. We have a high density of these sites that date to 14,000 years ago."
The group was comprised of about a dozen VOC volunteers. Heiner said this about these and other volunteers value to the national forest, "They are great programs; we usually have partnership coordinators. I enjoy working with the groups because I like to expose different interested publics, people who are interested in archeology. I like people who are interested in archeology and have never experienced doing it or don't have any formal training or education. I like to expose those people to it. People get hooked and run with it. Sometimes, I correspond with them for years. I do a lot of volunteer projects on the forest."
