Elizabeth and Rich

We began our formal program with a morning lecture by Rich: “Introduction to the Archaeology of the Four Corners Region”. In about three hours Rich gave us a wonderful overview of the archaeology of the area beginning with the Paleoindian period of 13,000 BC up to the Pueblo III period and on, ending around 1300 AD. This was a very good presentation on the Chaco Culture extending over time and space. It was excellently done, with a lot of high quality visualizations based on photographs and LIDAR data.

Indian Pueblo Cultural Center

After the morning lecture we then boarded the bus and travelled to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. Getting on to the bus we all had the opportunity to meet Fidel, our bus driver for the rest of the tour. At the Cultural Center we had a nice buffet meal, southwestern cuisine again. I expect we will see a lot more of this over the next week. After lunch many of us took a docent-guided tour of the center–which is owned and operated by the nineteen Pueblo tribes in New Mexico, (There are two other Pueblo tribes, one in Texas and one in Arizona).

As we toured the different center exhibits, a pretty good thunderstorm rolled in with very heavy rain. This appeared to be a problem since our next activity was to visit and stroll around Old Town. Elizabeth said “Not to worry. The rain won’t last long–guaranteed!”. Well, guess what–Elizabeth was wrong. But that didn’t stop us and we went to Old Town as scheduled. Unfortunately, Linda and I had consciously decided that it was not going to rain, so we left our rain gear in the hotel. This wasn’t all bad though; during a break in the rain we made it to the Church Street Cafe where we were scheduled to have dinner. Although we were far too early for the dinner, they did allow us to get margaritas. Better than standing around in the rain.

After dinner we traveled back to the hotel where we viewed a video, The Mystery of Chaco Canyon. This film showed a lot of the amazing lunar and solar phenomena that the early inhabitants were aware of. Many of the buildings were oriented with key structural alignments corresponding to the equinoxes, and most amazing were the buildings aligned with the extremes of the 18.5 year lunar cycles. For a civilization without a written language this seems a little far-fetched to me, but then what the heck do I know?