Field Notebook: Site 14, Rio Grande Valley
1June 3. Our team is digging a trash mound beside the ruins of a Pueblo village in what is now New Mexico. Pueblo peoples, such as the Tewa and the Keres, still live in many communities along the Rio Grande today. A trash mound is a gift to archaeologists, because people threw away food scraps, broken tools and pottery there for centuries. We can see two main layers. The lower layer comes from before 1598, the year Spanish colonists arrived in this region. The upper layer comes from the 1600s. Tree rings in roof beams from the rooms nearby, and pieces of Spanish-style glazed pottery, help us date it.
2June 5. Lower layer finds: burned corn cobs, bean and squash seeds, bits of cotton cloth, turkey bones, and bones of deer and rabbits. We also found stone knives and grinding stones. So far there is no metal of any kind, and no bones of sheep, goats, cattle or horses. Peoples of the Americas had grown maize, beans and squash for thousands of years.
3June 9. Upper layer finds: sheep and goat bones, a few cattle bones, grains of wheat, about a dozen peach pits and part of an iron knife blade. These animals, crops and iron tools came from the Eastern Hemisphere with the Spanish. Corn cobs are still the most common plant remains in this layer, and turkey bones still turn up.
4June 12. Archive day. I read copies of mission records from the 1600s, written by Spanish priests. They describe epidemics that killed many people in the pueblos. Back at the site, we found that several rooms from the 1600s had been left empty and slowly filled with windblown sand. Diseases from the Eastern Hemisphere, such as smallpox and measles, were new to the Americas, and Native peoples had never built up resistance to them. Hunger and violence under Spanish rule took lives too. Estimates vary widely, but many historians think the Native population of the Americas fell by more than half in the century after 1492.
5June 14. Thinking beyond Site 14. The exchange ran in both directions. Maize from the Americas became an important food in parts of Africa and Asia. Potatoes from the Andes became a main crop in parts of Europe, and tomatoes from the Americas changed Italian cooking. Cacao, used to make chocolate, traveled from the Americas to Europe. Horses, which arrived with the Spanish, spread north to the Great Plains, where peoples such as the Comanche and the Lakota became skilled riders.