El Paso Phase Site

[rloose]

Here's a photo of an El Paso Phase site being excavated near Orogrande, New Mexico. This was a salvage project sponsored by the Army in preparation for construction of a new troop training facility. The site dates to around 1000 AD. It was a small farming village. Many different types of pottery are scattered around the cleared off area. Photo was taken from a Magpie AP with a Canon SD600.

I made some mosaics by stitching photos together. Resolution is between 6 inches and one foot.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all APers!

Rich

[Tom Harper]

Pretty large ruin, Rich. do you have any details?

Tom

[rloose]

Hi Tom-

Do you mean details about the excavation or detailed shots of the site? I'm trying a new technique. I have been shooting in "continuous mode" with my cameras. My Canons and new Nikon S210 have this feature. I then used panoroma stitching software to create a mosaic. I do have some lower altitude shots which show a lot of detail within the excavation.

The site is in an extremely dry spot now, but it appears that at 1000-1300 AD the occupants were dry land farming corn and probably beans and squash too. There are some "pans' nearby that probably held water at the time. They found the remains of a crane at the site, so it must have been wetter during the occupation. The rooms are shallow with poorly defined floors. They were jacal or wattle and daub type construction that can still be seen in villages down in Mexico. I hope to get a copy of their final report.

By the way, the ceramics included trade ware from the Mimbres area and Casas Grandes in Mexico.

Rich

[Tom Harper]

So, is the photo above stitched? I haven't tried the stitching software yet.

Post some of your detail shots. It all looks interesting.

Contemporary sites around here have El Paso brown ware - these folks couldn't afford Mimbres dinner ware. Also find a dull reddish finish sherd on some of the sites that I consider to be older ~1000.