NEXT MEETING: Wednesday, April 19, 2023: the GCAS meets at 2045 Memory Lane in Silver City, New Mexico. Light refreshments provided; OK to bring your own light snacks or handy meal (burrito, etc.) & beverage if desired. Doors open at 5 PM for socializing. Meeting starts at 5:30 PM sharp with a short business meeting followed at 5:45 PM by featured speaker and GCAS member Carolyn O’Bagy Davis, who will discuss Bert and Hattie Cosgrove, avocational archaeologists who were instrumental in documenting and preserving a number of local sites including Arenas Valley's Treasure Hill. Meeting to adjourn about 7:00 PM. In order to offer our members a safe and comfortable experience the GCAS follows CDC and New Mexico Department of Health guidelines for indoor gatherings including masking, distancing, and vaccinations. We recommend all attendees follow the same.

NEXT FIELD TRIP: Sunday, April 2, 2023, beginning 9:00 AM: Regular GCAS field trip to City of Rocks State Park - view remnants of Apache shelters along the Cienega Trail, plus features in other easy-access locations like a rock shelter, Apache petroglyph, kiva, and multiple mortar holes. City of Rocks is about a 1-hour drive one-way from Silver City. At 9:00 AM meet at the Cienega Trail trailhead parking (a few hundred yards from the Highway 61 turnoff to the City of Rocks - look on the left side of the road for a parking area with a Port-o-Let). Walk the 1-mile easy Cienega Trail loop to inspect some off-trail features. About 11:00 AM, non-hikers can join the rest of the group to learn about the kiva site a few yards from the Visitor Center. About 11:15 AM, drive round the park’s perimeter road to the north side to view the rock shelter, Apache petroglyph, and mortar holes (short but moderately steep walk uphill from area near campsite #35). Picnic lunch follows at any convenient unoccupied campsite.

MAREC Progress Report - Phase II
Online Via Zoom: Our March 17, 2021, Featured Speaker: Chris Euler

Old Pueblo Zoom Program of Special Interest

This following announcement of Old Pueblo Archaeology Center regarding one of their regularly scheduled "Third Thursday Food for Thought" programs bears special interest for the GCAS and others in our area. Consider saving the date: Thursday, March 18, 2021.

Old Pueblo describes: “Third Thursday Food for Thought” Zoom online dinnertime program featuring "Mimbres in Context: Hohokam, Chaco, Casas Grandes" presented by archaeologist Stephen H. Lekson, sponsored by Old Pueblo Archaeology Center, Tucson, 7 to 8:30 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Free.

The ancient Mimbres people of southwestern New Mexico were interesting not only for their famous pottery, but also as “players” in the larger history of the ancient Southwest. We consider Mimbres history in context of its times: Hohokam up to about 1000 CE; Chaco from 1000 to 1150; and the run-up to Paquimé/Casas Grandes from 1150 to 1250. Mimbres began as pithouse villages making red-on-brown pottery (much like Hohokam red-on-buff) and developing Hohokam-inspired canal irrigation systems in the Chihuahua Desert. Around 1000 Hohokam waned as Chaco waxed – the “Pueblo II Expansion” of old textbooks.

Color images on some Classic Mimbres pottery bowls
in the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History,
and drawing of a Mimbres bowl from the Saige-McFarland site, courtesy of Stephen H. Lekson

Emil Haury, long ago, identified 1000 as approximately the time Mimbres was transformed into stone pueblos making black-on-white pottery; he insisted that Mimbres (a subset of the larger Mogollon region) essentially ceased being Mogollon and became much more Anasazi-like. Mimbres flourished while Chaco flourished, from 1000 to shortly before 1150. Political shifts after 1125 at Chaco were reflected at the same time by mass depopulation and social change in the Mimbres river valleys. Post-Mimbres people moved south into the desert, and formed new communities in mud-walled-pueblo villages (some of considerable size) with little or no locally produced painted pottery. Those post-Mimbres societies almost certainly contributed substantially to the base population for Paquimé, the Casas Grandes regional center from 1300 to 1450.

To register for the Zoom meeting go to https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SX6CKc5dTxGpCHJEuhfc2g. For more information contact Old Pueblo at info@oldpueblo.org or 520-798-1201.

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