To understand science and history, learn to read the dirt

This is a fact: You can’t walk around Eldon Pueblo without stepping on a piece of history.

For those who don’t know, Eldon Pueblo is an ancient Native American ruin about a mile east of Flagstaff in Northern Arizona, which is where I spent most of my spring break vacation. It was the home of a people known as the Sinagua, as are the cliff dwellings in the nearby Walnut Canyon and Wupatki national monuments.

Actually, Northern Arizona is an archeologists dream when it comes to ruins with societies that were thriving over 800 – 1,000 years ago. It’s not just the home of the Grand Canyon.

At Eldon, we got to take part in a daylong actual archeological dig, trowels, scoops wheelbarrow, wire-mesh shaking screen and all.

That’s how archeology is done in the modern era, hunched over on your hands and knees and slowly, carefully scraping away the soil — 10 centimeters per layer — then dumping it on the screen to be shaken, and once the loose dirt disappears in a choking cloud of dust, picking through the larger remains for artifacts.

And at Eldon, those artifacts are plenty, mostly pottery sherds.

The word “sherd” is a variant of “shard.” One thing I learned at Eldon is that when referring to glass pieces, you says “shards” and when referring to pottery fragments, you say “sherds.”

At Eldon, and at a nearby unexcavated village site where we did a walkabout in the afternoon, you don’t need to dig to find pottery sherds. They’re lying all over the ground.

Just bend down, pick up some flat pieces and turn them over in your hand. If they bear reddish-brown striations, grooves, they were made at Eldon, but if they have black and white markings, they were likely made by the Hopi people miles to the north.

At its height around 1150 A.D., Eldon was a major trading hub. Obsidian not native to the area but found 120 or so miles to the south has been uncovered, as have seashell necklaces and other artifacts.

Eldon was also big, with about 30-40 rooms currently uncovered from what archeologists estimate is a complex of 70-80 rooms. Each room housed an extended family.

Sinagua is also not what the Eldon inhabitants called themselves. It’s Spanish, “sin” meaning without and “agua” meaning water.

And there’s not a lot of agua around Eldon. The inhabitants carried it in from elsewhere in large jars, storing it for use. The same goes for those living in Walnut Canyon, Wupatki and other ruins we didn’t get to, such as the large complex at Montezuma’s Castle to the south.

There’s much more to write about the ruins we visited, but what was interesting to me was how we are able to know so much about these peoples who are long gone. The same was true two summers ago when I visited the ruins of the ancient Mayan city-state of Tikal in Guatemala.

We know much about these people because archeologists, anthropologists — scientists — are meticulous. Every small fragment of pottery, bone, stone tool or tool-making flake is part of a larger story.

Scientists spend countless hours reading these small stories, searching clues to put everything in context. Even soil layers, which are why sites are meticulously charted and why the digging crawls along 10 centimeters at a time.

“Read the dirt,” Northern Arizona Archeology Society volunteer Tom Woodall told me.

In different forms, “Read the dirt” is used by all scientific disciplines. Read the tree rings, the ice cores, the geological record, the sand ripples, the long-term trends. Put them together in context with known information.

Read rather than refute. Too often today, those who practice the latter unknowingly engage in the archeology of old, the work done in the early part of the 20th century when archeologists used shovel, pick axe and even backhoes to search for what they were looking for – large treasure pieces for collections.

They used the limited artifacts they found to either draw new conclusions about that society, or reinforce what they already believed true. They didn’t understand that in using force where finesse was required, they destroyed or disbursed decades and centuries of information that would have helped them to a more informed, reality-based conclusion.

Read the dirt. It’s a more meticulous, thought-provoking approach we all could benefit from so that we don’t find ourselves consigned to a history that gets stepped on.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.