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Excavation of Mesa Verde Pit Houses*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

James A. Lancaster
Affiliation:
Mesa Verde National Park
Don W. Watson
Affiliation:
Mesa Verde National Park

Extract

During the autumn of 1941, excavations in Modified Basketmaker sites in Mesa Verde National Park were carried on, for the twin purposes of clearing well-preserved pit houses that could be used in the interpretative program of the park and of adding to the meager amount of information on Modified Basketmaker culture in the park area. Although this period has been studied extensively in adjacent districts, little work has been done on it in the Mesa Verde.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1943

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Footnotes

*

Published with the approval of the Director of the National Park Service. The authors held the positions of Archaeological Foreman and Park Naturalist, respectively.

References

2 Fewkes, J. W., Field-work on Mesa Verde National Park, Smithsonian Institution, Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 72, No. 1, p. 58.Google Scholar

3 Brew, J. O. Preliminary report of Peabody Museum's southeastern Utah expedition of 1933 (unpublished ms.; final report in press).

4 Martin, P. S., Modified Basket Maker Sites, Ackmen-Lowry Area, Field Museum Anthropologist Service XXIII-3, 1939.

5 Morris, E. H., Archaeological Studies in the La Plata District, Carnegie Institute Publications 519, 1939.

6 Roberts, F. H. H., Jr., Shabik'eschee Village, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 92, 1929.

8 The name Lino Black-on-gray has often been used to include iron paint as well as carbon paint Modified Basketmaker painted pottery. Properly, the name probably should be restricted to the carbon-paint form. The only name that has been proposed for the iron-paint, or eastern, form is “La Plata Black-on-white.” On the La Plata, Anna Shepard (Morris, op. cit, p. 257) found the carbon-paint type predominating north of Pendleton, and iron paint more characteristic south of there

9 Morris, La Plata 267.

10 Cf. John Rinaldo, “Conjectures on the Independent Development of the Mogollon culture,” American Antiquity VII, p. 7.

11 Cf. Roberts, Shabik'eschee, p. 118, also Roberts, Archeological Remains in the Whitewater District, Eastern Arizona, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 126, 1940, pp. 48-49. Elsewhere this type has not been separated from the material with brownish exterior such as Forestdale Smudged.

12 An interesting theory has been advanced to the effect that these objects, familiar in Modified Basket Maker Sites, were effigies of burden-baskets: See E. H. Morris and R. F. Burgh, Anasazi Basketry, Carnegie Institute Publication 663, 1941, p. 54.