Archeology

ART TREASURES OF AN ANCIENT WORLD

Consider, for a moment, a bowl that was made by an Indian who lived in Arizona nearly a thousand years ago. It is a small vessel that fits neatly into the palms of my hands, and it is misshapen: when I set it upside down on a table, it looks warped, like the shell of a turtle. Even so, it is an elegant thing.

It is black and white, a sign that it probably was made in the high country above the Mogollon Rim. Its exterior is decorated with black dots the size of fingerprints, and inside it is painted with a mesmerizing maze of lines that seem to turn back on themselves, like the modern illusions of artist M.C. Escher.

In my fingers, the bowl seems fragile, yet it survived hundreds of years buried in the ground until it was found, miraculously intact, by archeologists exploring the remnants of the Salado civilization that lived 700 years ago in the Tonto Basin along the shores of the Salt River. Consider, now, six figures discovered by archeologists 80 miles to the west of the Tonto Basin at Pueblo Grande, site of a large Hohokam village that flourished centuries ago in what now is downtown Phoenix.

The figures are dogs, found clustered like a newborn litter on the dirt floor of a pit house. Each is roughly six inches long and four inches high and made of heavy clay. They once were painted with red stripes, but the markings have faded, and only traces can be seen around the legs of one animal, the rump of another.

TREASURES

They are simple figures, but, when I hold them in my hands, they seem very special. One is distinctive. Its abdomen is gently but unmistakably swollen: it is about to have a litter of its own.

Archeologists have been considering these objects and others like them ever since they were found in two of the most important excavation projects ever undertaken in Arizona.

At Pueblo Grande and in the Tonto Basin, researchers have discovered the art works of an ancient culture. Like all art, they answer some questions and pose others: who made them? How? And why? Did a mother make the dogs for her children to play with, or were they created for some religious ritual?

And the bowl archeologists have not seen another like it in the Roosevelt Lake area. Do the dots symbolize a method of counting, or were they just a whim of the person who painted them, a playful counterpart to the intricate interior design? Did the artist smile when holding up the bowl for friends to see?

In the Tonto Basin, field crews return to their laboratory each day with new finds, everything from stone carvings of birds, dogs, and frogs to shell and turquoise jewelry to bags filled with ceramic fragments. It is rare to Clues to the daily life of ancient civilizations come from the remnants they leave behind, such as handsome McDonald painted corrugated pottery bowls (OPPOSITE PAGE), Hobokam artifacts from Pueblo Grande (ABOVE, LEFT), and a Tonto polychrome jar (ABOVE, RIGHT), Salado artistry at its peak.

recover a pot or jar intact. During the first year of the project, more than 150,000 shards, or pieces of smashed pots, were found and brought to the lab for analysis.

"People assume we have lots of complete pots here, but they're only a small part of the collections," says Dr. Arleyn Simon, laboratory director at Tonto Basin. "Most of the shards will remain as they are, but some broken vessels can be reconstructed. The important thing is that even though the material is fragmentary, we gain a lot of information from the pieces."

When I visited the Tonto Basin lab, pots and jars sat everywhere in various stages of reconstruction. They had been pieced together like jigsaw puzzles, held with clips or strips of bicycle inner tube while the glue (dissolvable, so the pots can be dismantled) hardened.

Sitting in a corner was a polychrome jar, one of the trademarks of the Salado people. Polychromes (so named because of their beautiful, multicolored designs) were the fine serving dishes of the Salado and account for less than five percent of the shards found in the basin.

The jar was 16 inches in diameter and 10 inches tall, and it had been painstakingly reassembled. I counted the pieces glued into place (the smallest was less than half an inch square) and stopped at 70. Two jagged pieces still were missing. Centered against the side of the jar, the holes looked like the eyes of an elaborate jack-o'-lantern.

At Pueblo Grande, nearly 400,000 shards have been recovered, mostly pieces of plain or red-washed pots. Among the reconstructed vessels are "duck" pitchers (each shaped like the body of a duck, with wing and tail feathers and a neck that serves as a spout) and bowls and scoops of all sizes.

Some of the most disarming artifacts allow researchers to speculate about individual Hohokam personalities. Toward the end of their field work, Pueblo Grande archeologists were surprised to find a lizard carved from argillite, a red stone. Argillite beads had been found at the site, but the lizard was the only argillite effigy to surface. Why?

"Maybe it was just a matter of personal taste," says Pueblo Grande archeologist Maria Martin. "Maybe the person who made it was more creative or more willing to do something different from what everyone else was doing. Why he chose to make a lizard rather than grinding the stone and making beads

TREASURES

like everyone else is anybody's guess." Other artifacts hint that the Hohokam were not immune to vanity. Field crews found a stone pendant coated with a curious blue dust. Archeologists suspect that it is a prehistoric version of "fake" jewelry, an attempt by its owner to disguise a stone ornament as a more valuable piece of turquoise.

Workers also found dark beads so small that at first glance they look like poppy seeds. The Hohokam made them by grinding stone into the shape and thickness of a toothpick, drilling a hole through that, then cutting it into beads. Despite the tedious process and the fact that it took hundreds of the beads to string a single necklace they were a mainstay of Hohokam fashion.

Tonto Basin field crews have found pendants ground from laevicardium shells, polished beads from olivella shells, and irregular shapes of turquoise that might have come from mosaics.

Archeologist Carol Griffith looks at each piece to determine the species and genus of shell, its function, and style. As with fashion today, ancient styles changed. Plain bracelets carved from glycymeris shells gave way to a passion for strung beads made by grinding off the spires of olivella shells.

"Look," said Griffith as I sat with her in the Tonto Basin lab. In the palm of her hand was a lizard pendant, delicate and Adornment was important to the Hohokam, who created imaginative jewelry (OPPOSITE PAGE) from a variety of materials, including marine shells.

(ABOVE) Archeologists experience a special excitement when they discover intact artifacts, such as these black-on-white bowls found unbroken at Tonto Basin.

polished, little more than an inch long and thin as a dime.

"Can you see the mark that runs through it, almost like a stripe? Sometimes you can find characteristics of the shell in a finished piece. This is laevicardium. The shell itself is a pretty yellow, but the pieces are bleached out from being buried in the ground for hundreds of years. If you look for these characteristics, you can figure out what these pieces are made of."

Similar scrutiny is devoted to other treasures left behind by the ancient peoples of Arizona: a tiny ceramic bear, a favorite among the excavators at Roosevelt Lake; stone and ceramic discs that Pueblo Grande archeologists suspect might be game pieces, perhaps a Hohokam version of checkers; a huge but fragile pot, packed to its rim with dirt and so heavy that it was lifted from a site by four men and wrapped like a mummy to protect it on its ride to the Tonto Basin lab.

At both the Pueblo Grande and Tonto Basin sites, field crews have found miniature ceramic pots and pitchers that might have been toys for Hohokam and Salado children. And at Roosevelt Lake, excavators recovered corrugated bowls made by wrapping thin coils of clay, then pinching them with a thumbnail that still hold the fingerprints of the people who made them seven centuries ago.

These objects are priceless, not just in their age and beauty but because they take archeology beyond the boundaries of scientific research. More than any other artifacts, they offer a glimpse into the creative and emotional lives of the people who left them behind so many years ago.

"We're excited when we find lovely artifacts like these, but the best surprises come in terms of the overall scheme of things," says Arleyn Simon. "I think that's what sets archeologists apart from people who are just out hunting for pots.

"We learn about people from these objects that we find. And that makes it possible for us to interpret the past."