Bibliography Records

This project established a set of standards to be used by anyone conducting fieldwork in the PA area so that sites, features, and artifacts would be recorded in a consistent manner.

The synthesis of data from 116 excavation sites in the Permian Basin MOA area marks the first task in the BLM’s special mitigation program.

The objective of the investigation was to assess the effectiveness of magnetic survey methods for detecting buried archaeological features in this region, where the formation of relatively young sand dunes is thought to have obscured the locations of many archaeological features. Magnetic survey is one of the most commonly used archaeological prospection methods due to its speed, reliability, and cost effectivness. This study was unique in that it sought not only to determine whether magnetic survey could be used to map archaeological sites int his region, but also to more fully understand the magnetic properties of natural soils and sediments as well as those modified by sedimentary rock formed in semi-arid environments that is cemented together by calcium carbonate minerals.

Permian Basin Programmatic Agreement (PA) Task Order Number 10 consisted of collecting 500 samples of soil containing charcoal and other charred material from features in previously recorded sites within the Carlsband, new Mexico Bureau of Land Management (BLM-CFO) field office. With a few exceptions, the samples were acquired from sites located in the Permian Basin PA area and small sites with one or two recorded features were chosen when possible. These samples were then examined in a laboratory to identify charred plant remains, as well as microscopic remains of starch and phytoliths produced by plants when they were alive. Charcoal from each sample was processed for an Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon date. AMS dates require only a small sample size and annual plant remains, for instance, acorn caps or fragments of sunflower plants, were dated if present. This article is focused on the AMS dates from the 500 samples.

Ethnographic records of yucca plants (Yucca sp.) are mostly asssociated with leaf processing to obtain fibert used for cordage. Charred spiny yucca leaf bases have been recovered from shallow thermal features at numerous sites in southern New Mexico and the norther part of Big Bend Country, Texas.

Archaeologists don’t always dig in the ground to study the past. Sometimes they search the walls of caves, shallow rock shelters, and overhangs along canyons. They are looking for rock art, pictures in stone created by ancient humans. A team of archaeologists and rock art specialist explored four rock art sites on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in southern New Mexico’s Eddy County and recorded what they found.

A prehistoric Jornada Mogollon site east of Artesia, New Mexico, was the subject of salvage mitigation. The site is postulated as a campsite used for food processing and lithic reduction. To augment the interpretation of the site, pollen, and macrofloral analyses were undertaken on material from Feature 2, a firepit. The site is located on a rolling plain southeast of Red Lake and immediately east of Bear Grass Draw.,

The task of this project was to inventory and characerize the archaeological landscape in portions of the Permian Basin MOA area tht are under-represented by previous archaeological inventory.

Both prehistoric cultures and historic Native American tribes (most likely Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa) created the rock art at the 21 sites studied during the project. However, it is noted here that the term “deep history” is gaining traction as a way of avoiding the artificial separation of history and “pre” history, particularly when it comes to rick art that often represents a symbolic and narrative account of past beliefs and experiences, or what Carolyn Boyd (The White Shaman Mural, 2016) has called the earliest “book” in North America.

The Carlsbad Field Office (CFO) of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) contracted with Versar, Inc. to re-excavate site LA 43414 (also known as the Merchant Site), which contains a number of surface structures and a few structures in pits, all constructed in the 14th and early 15th centuries. This public brochure draws from the technical report of those excavations.