![]() ![]() The washed gravel and artifacts were then transferred into screens to dry and be hand-sorted, when all the items were pulled out by a cultural monitor or one of many Tribal members who volunteered to help recover artifacts on their ancestral land. There they “wet-screened” using water to wash away any remaining clumps of sediment. Archaeologists caught all the artifacts that traveled down the conveyor belt with a wheelbarrow before wheeling it to a wet station. “We had dozens and dozens of piles drying.” Once dried, the soil was passed through a large screening machine, which was fitted with an archaeological appropriate sized screen of 1/8 inch to recover small objects like shell beads. “All of the soil that was recovered or pulled from each 4-by-4-meter unit was then put into piles to dry because the area is wet from the spring,” Garcia explains. Standard excavation units are only 1-by-1 meter square also known as a “unit” or “excavation unit.” The approach of mass excavation would save precious time and recover as much cultural material as possible, delaying the project for months instead of one or more years. Under Garcia’s direction, SRI conducted a mass excavation using modified construction equipment to excavate 4-by-4 meter units. Katie Croft, Agua Caliente’s Cultural Resources Manager in the Historic Preservation Office, utilized a GIS mapping program to create a 3-D model of the project site that was used to inform which areas would require excavation. “So we looked at that and we determined that there may be an intact archaeological site that was deeply buried.”Īlong with Dominguez and Rodriguez, monitors Larry Holleman, Jesse Sandoval, William “Bam” Beyal, Todd Perry, Agua Caliente Archaeologist Lacy Padilla, along with Tribal members Savana Saubel, John Preckwinkle, Briannna Duran, Marisa Ruiz, Kelly Teel, and Council Member Anthony Purnel, worked with SRI on the excavation and data recovery. “I think there were four or five that were visible,” Kremkau recalls. She asked him to come out and look at the site, specifically the stained “charcoal lenses,” or possible hearths, Dominguez and Rodriguez had discovered. Garcia contacted Scott Kremkau, principal investigator with Statistical Research Inc. “We had to know, ‘Was it just a very shallow deposit or was it the beginning of something bigger?’”Īfter initial examination it was obvious the find required further investigation. “We started shovel test pits and shovel scrapes to start to investigate what we actually had there,” Garcia says. Roman Dominguez and Rodriguez contacted their supervisor, Hannah Feeney, Agua Caliente’s Cultural Resources Supervisor.įeeney gathered all of the information from the monitors and immediately contacted Patricia Garcia, the Tribe’s Director of Historic Preservation and designated Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, about the findings. ![]() ![]() Then Luis Rodriguez, another cultural monitor identified a similar feature 20 yards away. Others might say it was more of an ash smear with what appeared to be stone objects and bone fragments lining the inside of freshly uncovered earth. Some would describe it as a darkened stain in the soil. On July 3, 2018, a little less than two months into construction, a cultural monitor saw something. ![]()
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