Day 27: Backyard Views

Day Twenty-Seven: Backyard Views

7/6/11:

Even on my first full day indoors since starting my internship at the KNF, I still managed to get plenty dirty. Yelena and I were helping Margaret preserve Clover Ruin artifacts at the Supervisors Office in Williams. Somewhat less impressive than it sounds, this “preservation” took the form of transferring artifacts from deteriorating paper bags to nigh indestructible plastic ones.

The Clover Ruin site was what I woke up to every morning. Directly outside my window, the site is a rebuilt Cohonina structure about one-thousand years old. A number of years ago, Neil helped with the reconstruction of Clover Ruin and Travis, at age seven, got his first taste of arch work by volunteering to assist (check out the interpretative sign explaining the project).

The arch crew doesn’t collect artifacts anymore, and sifting through sherds, lithics, refuse, feathers, and soil samples, I’m quite glad of that fact. Instead of removing artifacts from sites, we now practice a strict policy of taking absolutely nothing. Nary a sherd or lithic or anything else wanders off its site with us. As Neil and a lot of archies see it, there’s no real point in removing artifacts from their historic settings in order to store them in back rooms. Traipsing through the KNF, anybody who knows what to look for has the possibility of running across sherds or lithics. Removing artifacts from these sites is prohibited (which is why site locations are not made public), but curious folk stumbling across a site can be fairly certain no archies in recent years have altered it.

Cradling handfuls of dirt, picking over tiny rocks, and resettling wood slivers, it was strangely comforting to feel the KNF was still very much with me even in the ill-light rooms of the Supervisors Office.

After a few hours of re-bagging artifacts, we approached Margaret who, understandingly, let me pull out my laptop and some of the films I'd brought from home. Following algunas películas de Pedro Almodóvar (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios y Hable con ella), Yelena and I zipped closed our last baggies, wiped the dirt from our palms, and trucked on back to the ranger district, North House, and the view of Clover Ruin right outside our window.

Photos: 1. Yelena after a few hours at the Supervisors Office 2. Clover Ruin (with North House)