Hello,
recent exposure of an early 17th-century burial in south-central New Mexico has uncovered a wooden cross (length c. 30cm) in direct association with that burial. Due to the local arid climate we had to cover the cross after only about 30 mins to prevent desiccation breakage and thus had to postpone analysis of the burial context. Given the extreme scarcity of such objects we would really like to preserve the cross as much as possible. Is there anyone out there with experience in applying perhaps a PVA compound (or other stabilizer) to terrestrial wooden objects in situ? Again, the issue is the extreme aridity and resultant rapid fragmentation of the exposed object.
Thanks much for any suggestions, Michael
Wow Michael cool-a-rams!! Would casting the cross and maintaining the pedestal sediment somewhat moist offer an opportunity to transport it back to the lab without gooping it up with PVA? Have you used Johnson & Johnson plaster bandages (plaster impregnated strips)? They come in faster & slower setting types. Slow might allow you to keep the wood in a higher humidity environment to get it out.
Hey Rusty, thanks for the suggestion - this had come up indeed. But I have now decided to place the cross in moist sediment in a container while we finish in-field analysis of the associated skeleton and then put it back in the location (right on the sternum midline) where we found it, and rebury the whole unit. We'll have everything mapped and photographed and that context information, plus analysis of a couple of small displaced fragments of the cross, must suffice. Saludos, M.
Michael, I meant to write "cool-a-rama!" Spell check is such a wet blanket on writing creativity. Was that a big SHPO confab to decide on the best treatment of the burial? Is it suspected to be a Pueblo individual or Spanish? I'll be very excited to see something about such a fun find. I've always wanted to get funded to visit the Archive General de Indias in Seville to look for New Mexico documents. I was there for 2.5 months going every day to research some of the uncatalogued documents about the region of Venezuela where I've worked and to look for last names (the Maya use last names identifying both maori-and patrilines) in some of the Mexico documents to track particular family movements associated with the community where we work. Found lots of wild stuff related to both topics. It is treasure hunt every day there, but it involved honing the search skills in terms of what original source locations tend to have relevant materials, skimming thousands of pages, recognizing abbreviations, and dealing with old ink & paper issues (not as much past insect damage, but some of that too). Archaic Spanish is not as hard to read as the equivalent English would be. I'm in Toulouse right now, my wife has a sabbatical at an Insitute here, but now we are in quarantine. Before all the cafes, restaurants, bars, & shops closed we were touring up a bunch of 10th-13th century locations, visited the village where my wife's great great great grandfather came from when he immigrated to New Orleans, LA (much of the French population apparently came from this Pyrenees-Atlantique region). Un Abrazo, RG
Really nice, Michael. I have found a burial of the same age in Patagonia, but apparently without christian influence although with presence of european items...I would like to have more information on your question since the environment similarity and since we have found wooden stuff also, altough it is no clear if they are associated with the burial.
Hola Rusty, it is not a SHPO issue so much as it is a capacity and, really, "epistemological" issue. We are trying not to get overwhelmed with material (so far, we have found 1,500 metal artifacts, for instance, more than half of it armor frgs and lead munitions), and in the end it seemed to me that collecting the cross would really not add anything to that particular burial context info - the thing is mapped, we have hi-res photos, and I collected a few small frgs for species determination. Interestingly, the individual buried with the cross is a ca. 50 year old male, about 6ft tall, and very robust. Almost certainly a European. His cranium showed severe blunt-force trauma in the right fronto-parietal area. Even more interestingly, there was a second male, ca. 20-25 years old and also 6ft tall, just barely wedged into (on his left side) the grave, aligned head to foot with the older guy. We found a broken arrowhead right next to his right tibia (but not embedded in it). I have a sneaking suspicion we might be looking at father and son, and the context suggests they were killed in one of the many violent episodes in that region which occurred long before the Pueblo Revolt.
Anyway, all the analysis is in-field without any lifting; we are only exposing the burials to document, age/sex, and look for obvious pathologies, then they get buried again. It's the only way to get some useful information in the current research climate. Since starting to work at Sevilleta, I have come to realize that despite that supposedly long history of research at mission sites in the SW, data on everything from site sequence to burial patterns to just plain distribution of Spanish artifacts are really (and I do mean REALLY) sketchy.
Toulouse, eh? Are they still singing "le loup est mort, le loup Montfort" there? Well, maybe stay there as long as you can - I have a feeling the people in charge over here will run us all into the ground in the coming months.
Buena suerte, M.
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