ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS AT PUEBLO SIN CASAS (FB6273), A MULTICOMPONENT SITE IN THE HUECO BOLSON, FORT BLISS, TEXAS By Michael S. Foster, Ph.D. With contributions by Ronna Jane Bradley and Lorna Lee Scarbrough i/4o,77 73 Publication of this report was supported by funding from the Legacy Resource Management Program of the Department of Defense Historic and Natural Resources Report No. 7 Cultural Resources Branch Environmental Management Division Directorate of Environment United States Army Air Defense Artillery Center Fort Bliss, Texas 1993 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ iii LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... iv ACKNOW LEDGM ENTS ................................................................................................ v EXECUTIVE SUM M A Y. ............................................................................................. vi PREFACE ......................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER I Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 Data Recovery ........................................................................................................... 3 Cultural History ........................................................................................................ 3 Paleo-Indian Period .................................................................................................... 3 Archaic Period ........................................................................................................... 8 Formative Period ...................................................................................................... 8 M esilla Phase ....................................................................................................... 8 Early Pithouse Period ........................................................................................... 9 Late Pithouse Period .......................................................................................... 9 Dona Ana Phase .................................................................................................. 10 El Paso Phase ......................................................................................................... 11 Environment ................................................................................................................. 12 Geology ................................................................................................................. 12 Wa ter ..................................................................................................................... 14 Climate .................................................................................................................. 14 Paleoenvironment .................................................................................................... 15 CHAPTER 11 Chipped Stone Artifacts .......................................................................... 17 Lithic M aterials ......................................................................................................... 17 Technological Attributes ........................................................................................... 21 Decortification .................................................................................................. 21 Bulb of Force .................................................................................................... 22 Lip ........................................................................................................................ 23 Platform Preparation ........................................................................................ 23 Hinge Fracture .................................................................................................. 23 M orphological Types ............................................................................................... 24 Angular Debris .................................................................................................. 24 Cores ..................................................................................................................... 24 Flakes .................................................................................................................... 24 Tools 28 Unifaces and Bifaces ......................................................................................... 28 Choppers ............................................................................................................ 29 Hammerstones .................................................................................................. 31 Projectile Points ...................................................................................................... 32 Summary ..................................................................................................................... 36 ii| CHAPTER III Ceramics, Ground Stone, Miscellaneous Artifacts .................................. 39 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 39 Ceramics ...................................................................................................................... 39 Brown W ares ...................................................................................................... 40 Undifferentiated Brown Wa res ..................................................................... 40 El Paso Brown ............................................................................................ 41 Decorated Wa res .............................................................................................. 41 El Paso Bichrome and El Paso Polychrome ................................................ 41 Intrusive Wa res .................................................................................................. 42 Wo rked Sherds .................................................................................................. 43 Ground Stone ........................................................................................................... 43 Dimensional Data .................................................................................................... 43 Ma nos and M ano Fragments ............................................................................ 43 M etates and M etate Fragments .......................................................................... 47 Pestles .................................................................................................................... 50 Eccentric Stones ............................................................................................... 52 Sum mary ..................................................................................................................... 52 CHAPTER IV Features .................................................................................................. 53 Small Fire-cracked Rock Features ............................................................................. 53 Basin Hearths/Stains ............................................................................................... 54 M idden ........................................................................................................................ 55 CHAPTER V Subsistence ............................................................................................. 57 Fauna 57 ....................................................................................................................... Reptilia .................................................................................................................. 57 Rodentia ................................................................................................................ 57 Leporidae .............................................................................................................. 58 Flora 58 ....................................................................................................................... Prosopisg landulosa. .......................................................................................... 58 Astragalus .............................................................................................................. 59 Amaranth ............................................................................................................... 59 Chenopodium .................................................................................................... 59 Other Plant Remains ............................................................................................... 59 Discussion .................................................................................................................... 60 CHAPTER VI Discussion ............................................................................................. 63 Chronology .................................................................................................................. 63 Site Context and Function ........................................................................................ 64 Artifact and Feature Distribution ............................................................................ 65 M anagement Considerations .................................................................................... 66 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................... 69 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure I-I FB6273 Location Map ................................................................................ 2 Figure 1-2 Site Map of Pueblo Sin Casas ..................................................................... 4 Figure 1-3 Aerial View of FB6273 Looking Northwest and West .................................. 5 Figure 1-4 Chronologies for the El Paso Area .............................................................. 6 Figure I-5 Study Area in a Regional Context .............................................................. 13 Figure II-I Unifaces and Bifaces ................................................................................. 27 Figure 11-2 Choppers .................................................................................................... 29 Figure 11-3 Choppers .................................................................................................... 30 Figure 11-4 Hammerstones ........................................................................................... 31 Figure H1-5 Projectile Points ....................................................................................... 33 Figure 11-6 Projectile Points ....................................................................................... 34 Figure III-I Worked Sherd and Possible Eccentric Stone .............................................. 42 Figure 111-2 Manos ...................................................................................................... 44 Figure 111-3 Manos ...................................................................................................... 45 Figure 111-4 Possible Mano/M etate .............................................................................. 46 Figure 111-5 Slab Metate ............................................................................................... 47 Figure 111-6 Double-sided Metate ................................................................................ 49 Figure 111-7 Metate Fragment Showing Pecked Surface ................................................ 50 Figure 111-8 Pestle ........................................................................................................ 51 Figure IV-I Fire-cracked Rock Scatter, Grids 165, 166, 167, and 168 ........................... 54 Figure IV-2 Fire-cracked Rock Scatter, Grid 169 ......................................................... 55 Aooes.slon For (iR. G_(EN Dc.A - I: 978-5140) s tj fII' &Avwila nd/or Noit Speo lal LIST OF TABLES Table Il-I Raw Material Type Codes by Lithic Artifact Categories ............................ 18 Table 11-2 Flake Attributes ........................................................................................ 22 Table 11-3 Flake Dimensions by Material lype .......................................................... 25 Table 11-4 Projectile Point Dimensions ..................................................................... 32 Table 111-1 Ceramic Type Counts for Pueblo Sin Casas .............................................. 39 Table 111-2 Undifferentiated Brown Wares by Group ................................................... 40 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The field school was supported through the fees charged the students. Fort Bliss provided access and general support for the project, including the donated use of a backhoe for the excavation of several test trenches during later stages of the project. The project was conducted under the guidelines, and as part of, the Historic Preservation Plan developed by the Environmental Management Division at Fort Bliss, Texas. Dr. Glen DeGarmo arranged the project and provided logistical support and general aid. He also urged me to complete this report while I was employed as a staff archaeologist at Fort Bliss. I thank Dr. DeGarmo for his encouragement and support. In my opinion, the archaeological community of West Texas and southern New Mexico is in debt to Dr. DeGarmo for his efforts in protecting and facilitating research of the archaeological record on Fort Bliss. Much of what has been learned about the Jornada Mogollon in the last ten years is a direct result of the research and protection efforts initiated by Dr. DeGarmo. It is fortunate the Fort Bliss program has been able to accomplish as much as it has considering the practical concerns of the U.S. Army and the requirement to protect the archaeological record. I also would like to thank the following students for their efforts: Ronna Jane Bradley, Louis Foix, Tim Graves, Joseph Guinn, Mario Hernandez, Valerie John, Carter Lewis, Lee Scarbrough, Mark Simon, and Vincent Skinner. Ken West served as a teaching assistant for the field school. I hope they learned much from their experience. Certainly this report would not be possible without their efforts in the summer heat of the desert. Finally, I thank the following individuals for various contributions and assistance: Thomas O'Laughlin, Dr. Arthur Harris, and Dr. Richard Smartt. Michael S. Foster July, 1989 vii EXECUTIVE SUMMARY During the summer of 1979, site FB6273 (Pueblo Sin Casas) was tested by students enrolled in an archaeological field school at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at The University of Texas at El Paso. Previous descriptions of the site suggested it contained the remains of an El Paso phase pueblo with substantial subsurface cultural deposits. Controlled surface collections were made, and the subsequent testing quickly demonstrated the site was a deflated surface scatter of artifacts and hearths. The excavations at FB6273 clearly demonstrate the difficulties involved in assessing archaeological remains solely with data recorded during field survey. Cultural remains indicate the site is multicomponent, with components that may date from the early Archaic through the Formative sequence. Different components could not be spatially defined. It is thought that the site represents a series of short-term occupations that probably occurred during midsummer to early fall, when available water and food sources would have been at their peaks Jn the basin floor surrounding the site. The site probably was occupied briefly by mobile social and/or family units foraging in the surrounding area and using the site as a temporary "residence." viii FOREWORD This report describes the results of the first excavation project conducted on Fort Bliss as part of the installation's Cultural Resources Management Program. It was a summer field school sponsored by The Univer- sity of Texas at El Paso and conducted by Dr. Michael Foster, the principal author of the report. The cultural resources staff at Fort Bliss helped examine several sites in the process of selecting this site for the field school, arranged for access to the site, and arranged for various kinds of equipment to support the project. In retrospect, the character of th-s site portended cultural resources management issues that have become of extreme concern in the years since the field school was conducted. One issue is the danger inherent in attempts to evaluate the excavation potential (i.e., the "significance") of archaeological sites in the desert environment of Fort Bliss with only surface data upon which to base the evaluations. Several projects conducted in the region and on Fort Bliss in the late 1980s and 1990s have documented that: (1) a very low density of surface artifacts that might be considered insignificant at some locations often can be the tip of the iceberg for well-preserved, buried sites, (2) a very low density of surface artifacts may be all that exists at other locations; (3) a substantial density of surface artifacts like that at Pueblo Sin Casas may be all that remains (or perhaps all that ever existed) at some locations; (4) a substantial density of artifacts at other locations can be associated with well-preserved, buried sites. In general, the fact that this kind of variability exists probably is no surprise to those who read this report. The variability, however, poses signifi- cant management problems for the cultural resources program on Fort Bliss. About 13,000 sites already are recorded on Fort Bliss, and the results of field work conducted in the early 1990s (reports are in preparation) indicate there probably are at least 100,000 sites on the installation. It clearly is impractical to expect that all, or even a significant proportion of these sites can be tested as part of a program designed to evaluate their excavational potential. The variability also makes it impractical to test a few sites and to extrapolate the results of those tests to other sites with the intent of using only surface archaeological data to partition the sites into significant and not significant groupings. Testing carefully selected samples of sites and extrapolating the results to other sites perhaps can be effective if variables affecting the visibility and the integrity of sites are identified and controlled. Identification of some of these variables can result from intensive investigation, dating, interpretation, and mapping ofgeomorphologi- cal strata and surfaces. Information developed from this kind of study can be used to identify areas where (1) the surfaces have been geomorphologically stable for known time periods, (2) the surfaces have been subjected to various levels of localized or regional deflational and/or depositional processes and when those processes were active, and (3) surfaces of archaeological importance probably are shallowly or deeply buried. This infor- mation, combined with archaeological surface data, clearly can be useful for evaluating the probable excava- tional potential of individual sites and of larger areas with several sites. A report by Dr. Curtis Monger of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico describes the results of the first project on Fort Bliss designed to provide information about geomorphological variability useful for investigation of several issues concerned with archaeological variability. The report, titled ,oil- Geomorphic and PaleoclimaticC haracteristicso f the Fort Bliss Maneuver A(cid:127)as, is being published as Report No. 10 in this series. Another issue results from the original interpretation that Pueblo Sin Casas was a single component El Paso phase site. The site was selected on the assumption that students in the field school could get experience ix identifying and exposing pueblo walls, floors, faunal and floral materials, and perhaps burials. The site was found to have none of these attributes. Further, the data from the site suggest it actually is a multicomponent site of considerable occupational complexity. This suggestion is prophetic, because subsequent chronometric dating of sites on Fort Bliss has demonstrated that most of the investigated sites are, in fact, multicomponent. This subsequent work was intended to be concentrated on "small site" phenomena represented by single isolated hearth features with fire-cracked rock, burned caliche, and associated artifacts. It was assumed that such small sites would have less functional and occupational complexity and that they would represent more easily interpreted chronological and occupational packages than larger sites. Developing understandings of the smaller sites, we thought, would be relatively easy, and the understandings then could be used to partition larger sites into their different components and occupations. This first concentrated work on small sites demonstrates there are few isolated small sites; so-called small sites usually are part of larger, localized groupings of small sites, and the localized groupings have a bewildering mixture of chronometric attributes and occupational debris. The localized groupings represent areas character- ized by multiple, short-term occupations for which chronometric dates often will span 2000 years. Further, so- called diagnostic artifacts such as projectile points and ceramics frequently--too frequently for comfort-are very misleading indicators for the cultural period or phase represented by a site. For example, El Paso phase sherds can be found on sites with no chronometric date after the late Archaic or early Pithouse periods. Reports for some of this work is in preparation, and will be published in this series. This documented occupational complexity probably can be attributed to the several hundreds of years dur- ing which land use and residential systems on Fort Bliss were principally those of hunters and gatherers who frequently reoccupied areas now identified as localized groupings. These results, however, make use of standard archaeological practices to identify the analytical contexts of the localized concentrations of small sites very difficult, if not usually simply wrong. Theoretically, the occupational complexity and the misleading diagnostic artifacts on sites also probably is not a surprise to most readers of this report. It is, however, quite disturbing when the accuracy of the theoretical expectation is documented as a frequent, not an infrequent, finding. It is probable that the same generic chronological and occupational variability will be found to characterize many of the "residential" sites of the late Pithouse and Pueblo periods on Fort Bliss. The variability did exist at Pueblo Sin Casas. Thomas O'Laughlin of El Paso's Wilderness Park Museum and Dr. Michael Whalen of the University of Tulsa have documented considerable chronological and occupational variability at a local pueblo site and at a pit house site on Fort Bliss. This variability was not suggested by the surface data that originally were collected off the sites. Clearly, a significant management issue on Fort Bliss, given the large number of sites on the post, is how to observe, collect, and interpret archaeological surface data that will provide acceptably accurate indicators for the probable chronological and occupational history of sites. However, we do not yet know how to use surface data to identify the occupational history of concentrations of either small or large sites with a high degree of accuracy and cost effectiveness. Clearly, such identifications must be made for regulatory, analytical, and management purposes. To facilitate the identifications, we are working with others to develop more accurate obsidian hydration dating and to evaluate the feasibility of thermoluminescence dating of the ubiquitous burned caliche. Cultural resources staffalso are working to refine and establish better understanding and analytical control over variables that may be useful for relative chronological dating. The results of these studies will be useful for the needs of the Fort Bliss Cultural Resources Management Program and for other archaeologists working in the region. GLEN DEGARM), PNi.D. Cultural Resources Management Program Fort Bliss, Texas IiI