NEXT MEETING: Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 6:00 PM: Please join the GCAS as we move to our wintertime location - the clubhouse at 2045 Memory Lane in Silver City, New Mexico. Our November meeting is our GCAS annual meeting so bring your questions, opinions, and votes (!) as we elect two new members to our board of directors. No potluck during the winter months but some light refreshments will be on offer. We will follow our typically brief business meeting with our Featured Speaker, NMSU graduate student in Anthropology, Tuesday Critz, who will discuss her ongoing research at Cottonwood Spring Pueblo (LA 175): Ceramic Exchange in a Multiethnic Community during the El Paso Phase (AD 1275/1300 – 1450). Tuesday indicates her research is in its early stages so the GCAS is being treated to a sneak preview. Please join us for our annual meeting and to learn more about Tuesday and her work.

NEXT FIELD TRIP: November 3, 2024: Marilyn Markel will lead GCAS members and their guests on this month's field trip to two sites - a Mimbres site and the nearby Terry Canyon Village pithouse site. Meet at 10:00 am sharp at the Mimbres Ranger Station on Hwy 35 at about mile marker 11. The large Georgetown phase pithouse site is a steep/rough hike but worth it. Those who don't hike to the top of the hill can wait below at the pleasant pine forest by the Mimbres site where we will eat lunch. Please be aware November 3 is the start of Daylight Saving Time when clocks are turned back an hour. As always, in order to protect sensitive archaeological sites we limit our field trips to GCAS members and their guests who can ride in the member's car. See you there and, mind the time!

Twenty Years Missing
Guest Authors and Photographers Welcome!

Paleoindian-Era: Use of Wild Potatoes

Many avocational archaeologists are familiar with the evidence that indicates that people in the Southwest began cultivating and eating a variety of corn during the Archaic Period in about 2100 BCE. In contrast, archaeological excavations in Utah have revealed that people had been harvesting, cooking, and eating wild potatoes as early as 8000-9000 BCE.

The article linked to here is from a year ago, but includes special items of interest for our area in Southwest New Mexico.

image from wnmu.eduArchaeologists in Utah successfully tested manos and metates excavated from a certain Paleoindian-Era site for granules of potato starch. They identified these granules as coming from a species of potato that still exists in the US Southwest: Solanum jamesii, the "Four Corners potato." In Utah, this potato plant can still be found - mainly near archaeological sites. But of special interest to those of us here in Grant County, is the directing archaeologist's observation that the "...small, white-flowered S. jamesii plant is found in shady spots around the Southwest, particularly in New Mexico."

[Photo via WNMU, by Russ Kleinman & Richard Felger, Pinos Altos Range, CD trail above the arrastra, Aug. 18, 2008.]

It appears that certain Pueblo tribes, notably the Hopi and Zuni, used these wild potatoes into recent times. The Hopi have explained that the most reliable way to make these potatoes edible was “...to boil the potatoes in a white clay to draw out the toxins..." The article further notes that this particular white clay the Hopi used is "...similar to the one from which the potteries are made.”

Read all the exciting details here, at Western Digs. It appears we avocational archaeologists will have to approach Kleinman and Felger to help us all become paleobotanists as well, the better to identify a plant that is still with us and may have sustained people in the Mimbres-Mogollon region for thousands of years.

/s/ webmaster

 

 

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