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POWERLINE SITE
Stephen E. Nash
16 June 1999
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The Powerline Site is a small six to eight room Reserve Phase pueblo and Pine Lawn Phase pithouse village (Figure 1).
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EXCAVATION STRATEGY
One room of the pueblo and a part of one of the pithouses were excavated. It was thought that the pithouse might possibly have been a kiva for the pueblo, but the excavations did not confirm this. Although a Reserve Phase occupation of part of the pithouse was revealed, the floor of the pithouse was not reached and the other evidence was too meager to be conclusive (Rinaldo n.d.: 26). What provenience information is available (see below) suggests that the excavation strategy did not change from that practiced at other sites in the area. |
Excavation Records
Department of Anthropology Archives Box SW 9, Folder "Southwest Expedition 1955: Foote Canyon, Saddle Mountain, Delgar, Perry Lawson, Powerline (#1)" contains excavation record sheets for Pithouse 1, though similar documentation for the pueblo room are not present, though there is a sketchmap of "David's Room - Powerline Site", which may be the pueblo room Folder "Southwest Expedition 1955: Foote Canyon Sherd Summary Sheets" contains partial sherd tabulations for both proveniences.
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Accession Files
Accession File 2535 in the Department of Anthropology at the Field Museum states the following with regard to the 1955 Expedition to the Southwest:
"Archaeological material from
Foote Canyon
Perry Lawson Site
Saddle Mountain Site
Delgar Site
Powerline Site
133 stone, bone, shell, and baked clay artifacts
22 restorable pottery vessels
6 intact pottery vessels
161 flake knives, scrapers, and choppers (of these approx. 1/3 catalogued and
illustrated in report - 53?)
2 fragmentary human skeletons
540 stone, bone, shell, and clay artifacts (not counting pottery vessels) were
excavated. Over 200 of these, including 185 manos, were left in the field.
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Photograph Files
No photographs of the Powerline site excavation exist, but some of the artifacts recovered are probably included in photographs found in volumes 35X and 35Y of the Department of Anthropology photo archives.
Catalog Files
Only three artifacts-- a worked sherd and two whole vessels-- from the Powerline Site were catalogued prior to the Martin Project. Martin Project staff assigned 87 catalog numbers to 333 artifacts, including 4 tree-ring specimens, 1 piece of bone, 249 sherds, and 79 pieces of chipped stone or chipped stone tools. Unfortunately, provenience information is missing on most of the chipped stone: Field numbers are written on the artifacts, but in the absence of the field number list, these data are meaningless.
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PUBLICATION RECORD
The Powerline Site was never published. Rinaldo (n.d.: 26-29) offers a brief descriptive treatment of the architectural details, worked slabs, choppers, "smooth saw" and a couple of flake knives. He concludes that "the pottery complex, the size of the pueblo and the type of masonry and the types of stone artifacts would tend to place this as a typical Reserve Phase Pueblo. This site is of interest primarily because of the stratigraphic situation in the pithouse" (Rinaldo n.d.: 29).
DISCUSSION
The Powerline Site artifact assemblage remains problematic until the field number list is recovered. On the other hand, given that only one of six or eight pueblo rooms was excavated, their remains the possibility for productive excavation of the site in the future.
REFERENCES CITED
Rinaldo, John B.
n.d. Notes on Minor Excavations in the Reserve Area, West
Central New Mexico." Unpublished manuscript on file in the Department
of Anthropology, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. Archives
Box SW 25.
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