Time Team America

Wow, I see a recording of our history.

JOE WATKINS

They had rabbit-skin blankets, they had turkey capes. This was great! This is called cultural material. That is cultural material.

- A human made that. Where's the water?

WOMAN

This close to the great kiva, it's not impossible that it was special medicine. Awesome! Oh, beautiful. This would've been the largest building that anyone that came here would've ever seen in their lives.

WOMAN

Shot!

JUSTINE SHAPIRO

Joe Watkins... Allan Maca... Meg Watters... Chelsea Rose...

Jeff Brown... and me, Justine Shapiro. Together, we are Time Team America. For three days, we bring together the top scientists with the newest technologies to help solve America's greatest archaeological mysteries.

This program was made possible in part by... a major grant from the National Science Foundation, where discoveries begin.

JUSTINE SHAPIRO

A thousand years ago, the Pueblo people built some of the most dramatic buildings in the world here in the Mesa Verde region of Colorado. But who were the ancestral Pueblo people? And how did they survive the challenges of this stark landscape? How does a complex culture like this begin?

Fourteen hundred years ago, much of Mesa Verde looked like this sage-covered ridge. People lived in small family groups scattered over hundreds of empty miles, eking out a living as hunters and gatherers. They were nomads. They came...

and they went. They lived in earthen homes called pit houses. But then something remarkable happened here. Pit houses began rising up right next to each other, organized around the largest public building ever seen in this region.

Am I standing in the heart of what once was a big, bustling village?

JUSTINE SHAPIRO

Was this desert ridge the site of one of mankind's most revolutionary transitions, the shift from hunting and gathering to farming? Was this a birthplace for the ancestral Pueblo people and a brand-new culture?

JUSTINE SHAPIRO

For the last 30 years, scientists from the nearby Crow Canyon Archaeological Center have been exploring the early history of the Pueblo people in this region. Now Time Team brings our technology, scientific expertise, and muscle to join in the search for what could be the very beginning of the Pueblo culture. But are the three days our resources give us to work here enough time to prove this was a revolutionary village?

MEG

Is this 80 meters? It all depends on what's under the ground. Shoot straight up to 40 meters, and then we'll go all the way across. To get us the best data for where to dig, Meg and her team dive in with remote sensing.

You good, Duncan? They call it geophys. They're using digital technology to make maps of what's under the ground. Bryan has the conductivity meter, and Duncan has the magnetometry, so hopefully we can cover twice as much ground in good time.

Now Joe, Allan, and I get a look at the biggest clue to the mystery here.

MAN

We're coming up now on the great kiva in the center of the Dillard site. Fourteen hundred years ago, this partly excavated ring of stones was a building from the era called Basketmaker III, the period when people first settled into villages and farming. Could this building have been at the center of a large village? And what is a kiva exactly?

Well, today in a Pueblo community, a kiva is a ceremonial building where important village activities take place. And we think that this was a great kiva where the same kinds of activities occurred. How many great kivas from this period, Basketmaker III, are there? This is the only Basketmaker III period great kiva that we have found in all of southwest Colorado.

Wow. This great kiva was 30 feet across, and its floor dug 5 feet into the ground. Big timber supported roof beams that stood 7 feet high. Then dirt and stones were piled back over the top.

Today, the ceremonies the Pueblo people hold inside their great kivas are kept private. But 1,400 years ago, this was probably both a gathering place and a place of ritual, built and taken care of by the community. It would've been large enough to seat 60 people. This would've been the largest building that anyone that came here would've ever seen in their lives.

To even build something like this took coordinated effort. You had to have people who agreed to work for something for the community and not just for a family or not just for individuals. Exactly. Is this kiva a sign of an emerging social hierarchy at this time?

Yeah, it may be. It implies a proposal about how to organize your society that was new. One of the things humans have tended to do is to invoke spiritual concepts in those kinds of transitions. It's probably not coincidence that one of the first public buildings was also a ceremonial place.

Not at all. - Yeah.

MAN

Around 600 A.D., people moved here from nearby regions to escape rising temperatures and drought. Here, they found a mild climate and great farmland. But what's astounding is that by settling into villages, these people were choosing to live in a way that none of them had ever seen before. They invented brand-new tools like pottery to cook brand-new foods.

And for the very first time, they lived in groups bigger than families. And they invented rules and rituals for that. This is a revolution that almost every group of people in the world has gone through, and it's

still how most people live today

in towns and cities, raising animals and farming. Is this ridge a place where we can see it all begin? I want to know what the rest of the team thinks. We have a lot of work to do ahead of us.

So what do you anticipate we're going to find over the next three days? What I'm really interested in is looking at the consequences of that very important decision to stop hunting and gathering on a yearly round and relying on agriculture. It's a very major decision to stay in one place and then to have to figure out how you're going to take care of it and how you're going to get along with that population. Allan?

We're able to see the appearance of village life and agriculture together for the first time in this area. You know, corn and beans coming together to make a complete protein cooked up and served in specialized clay pots. So I'm really hoping we can find evidence for the agricultural basis of village life. I'm excited about this site because it represents a moment in time.

People are making big decisions, big changes in their lives, and it's in response to something -- climate, the environmental pressures that they're under. And anytime you're looking at people really changing their strategy for being successful, that's relevant today.

still how most people live today

Today, the land where this great kiva was discovered is protected by a unique trust. Homeowners move here not just for the desert beauty but to protect the ancient archaeology on their property. A longtime patron of Crow Canyon, Jane Dillard owns the land where we are working. It's called the Dillard site.

Our headquarters are in her basement. We're joined by Crow Canyon site director Shanna Diederichs as Meg gathers us for a first look at the geophys.

MEG

And here's the site, the outline of the site. And that's the kiva right there in the middle of it. Crow Canyon archaeologists have already begun work on the Dillard site, focusing south of the great kiva. They found five pit houses, including a large pit house with an antechamber, or small second room.

For the next three days, Time Team will work with Crow Canyon, searching for evidence of Basketmaker III and to see if this same density of pit houses exists north of the great kiva, making this a large, revolutionary village. Two geophys techniques give us some terrific clues. Gradiometry shows possible pit structures. Resistivity shows possible earth floors.

But keep your eye here. I'm going to toggle between the gradiometry... resistivity. Gradiometry, resistivity.

Wow.

ALLAN

We're getting really consistent data across the different methods to indicate what look like structures. Especially intriguing is what could be a large structure just north of the great kiva. Can you see that there's sort of a southern lobe on it?

MEG

Right here. - But I just wonder if we've got an antechamber on a structure. So the orientation of that lobe is to the southeast, right?

SHANNA

Right, it's to the southeast, which would be classic Basketmaker orientation for a structure. This could be like the pit house we know is south of the great kiva. This and the number of pit houses the data seems to show is just what we'd expect if this is a large village. We only have three days to excavate.

What's our priority? Given what we know with the geophys, I think it'd be good to put a wide area right here.

JUSTINE

North of the great kiva? Just immediately north of the great kiva. We'll put in our first trenches over what looks like a large pit house and the possible structure next to it. Let's go.

Let's get in the field. Let's go dig it.

indistinct conversations

JUSTINE

So they have -- they're just putting the last corner in of our six... If this is a large pit house, the first thing we'll see is evidence of its collapse about 1,400 years ago. Yep, I think we can just get going with our shovels and look for the outline of our structure. To find the outline, we'll only have to go down a couple of inches.

The rubble from a collapsed pit house, called cultural material because it's manmade, will be dark against the native red soil and show where its walls were. A pit house was dug about 3 feet down. When its adobe and wood roof collapsed, it fell into the pit. Any artifacts left will be buried under this rubble.

Okay, so I already feel something different right there. Can you hear that? Is that our bottom of our stratum? It sure looks like it's getting close.

That bottom stuff should be getting a little harder, a little more packed, a little darker. Ooh, look at that. Some dark maybe structure fill from adobe coming up. So we'll take this down across this whole trench, and then we'll be able to really see the outline.

Yeah, precisely.

JUSTINE

Crow archaeologist Kristin Kuckelman is working on the structure next to it. We are definitely in something cultural that has either been filled with refuse all the way up to the top or it was a structure that burned, and this material is the burned structural material that fell into the structure depression after they left. I'd say this is a potsherd, right? That is a potsherd, yeah.

And it is going down into the fill there, so that's an indication that this is a structure of some sort. And you had said earlier that you guys find a lot of burned pit houses, and so potentially people were burning them on purpose? And so if they were burned intentionally, why? There aren't an awful lot of reasons that you would intentionally burn a structure.

We think one possibility, a good possibility, is a ritual kind of closing of a structure. This is a very common thing that we see in many ancient cultures and ancient contexts, is a termination ritual. - Right. Where you actually burn out and finish off a building you used.

It's only the first morning, and we're already finding evidence of structures and ritual. And Meg's geophys is right on target. If this was a large village, this is a great start. And where's the great kiva in relation to this?

Great kiva is just north of here. After the great kiva, the most important structure found before we got here, the southern pit house with an antechamber, would've stood over this huge trench. It's so much bigger than I thought a pit house would be. Is this the full extent of it?

This is the north half of it. There's still a half of it that hasn't been excavated yet. So how many people would've lived in something like this? We could see probably a good extended family, maybe 10-15.

We don't really know for sure. We do know that they had special areas within the house that they used. As you can see, this is a storage area. This, another storage area.

It's lined with adobe to protect it from the rodents and insects. This was where the people slept. This was a domestic portion of the house. There'd be a hearth right about here, heat the whole house.

All the conversations around the fire. They would work a little bit here, they would have tools up in the rafters, there would be bow strings and bone tools. The kids would have their implements back in this corner. They had rabbit-skin blankets, they had turkey capes.

This was great! Fourteen hundred years ago, this would've been the biggest of the known pit houses on the Dillard site. The main entrance would've come through the antechamber, or front room. This was also a work space.

This larger room was the main living area. With its earthen construction, a pit house was warm in the winter, cool in the summer. A well-made pit house had a life of about 30 years. If you were to close your eyes and sort of picture what this place must've looked like around 600 A.D., what do you see?

People coming in and out of the pit house, maybe working in this area in between. Farming, tilling their...? Farming probably beyond the pit houses, on the side. I see kids running around.

I see turkeys on the edge, dogs running and barking, probably a rabbit running through that way, and see some deer moving down the side, too. Was this an easier lifestyle than being a nomadic hunter-gatherer? I think any time we're talking about an agricultural base for life, we're talking about hard work. And, you know, to get up every day, to follow the cycles of weather and plant and harvest, it's very hard work.

JUSTINE

We've just started digging, and we're already finding artifacts. A lot of stuff out of this midden. Lots of pottery sherds, like this one, which is a rim sherd. You can see the kind of curved edge on it.

I would've thought that was a rock. This small bit of pottery would've come from a 1,400-year-old cooking bowl, one of the first tools people were making as they settled here. And then there's also a little projectile point just came out of this screen. Wow!

Is this typical of Basketmaker III? This is classic. This is exactly what we've been finding. This point is another example of a new tool

people here were perfecting

the bow and arrow.

people here were perfecting

Basically a large artifact scattered... The people here 1,400 years ago were changing more than how they produced their food and established their villages. They were changing how they thought about themselves and their world. And we can see it in their art.

A group of us take a trip to a remote canyon in Utah, about 30 miles away. We want to look at an ancient rock art panel that might shed light on our village.

MAN

We're actually walking on fossilized sand dunes now, sand that turned to stone.

JUSTINE

So the whole ridge is that?

MAN

Mm-hmm. Wow, this is really something here, because immediately I see a recording of our history, Pueblo history. And so I'm just mesmerized by this whole panel here. Marvin, is the symbol of a circle that we see here related to a kiva?

The circle and a kiva are similarly related. The kiva and the circle represents a point of emergence. A point of emergence, Marvin says, is part of the Pueblo creation story. It's a place where the first Pueblo peoples came from underground to enter this world.

According to our history, we were instructed to go in all directions, and so this is depicting the routes that they took. They're on their way to leave their footprints throughout the land, so they're moving away. So that means the great kiva at the Dillard site could also represent a point of emergence. That's pretty incredible.

ALLAN

There's a lot about hunting here, isn't there?

MARVIN

Right. The arrows going through the animals, so that tells us that they hunted quite a bit. But we don't see any farming images, so the people who made this panel may still have been nomads. The arrows, though, are a clue that Basketmaker III was at least beginning.

The details that lead us to think this is a Basketmaker III-period panel include the sandals that are depicted over here at the edge of the panel. They're in a shape and style that's characteristic of that time period. Also these little curved staffs. The oldest sites in which these curved staffs appear date to Basketmaker III.

So I feel pretty confident that at least much of this panel was painted probably -- painted; pecked -- in the seventh century or eighth century.

MEG

So in this vast formation, how would they choose just this space to put this picture onto it? Well, that might be a simple choice that they made because it's burned in from the sun. And therefore, it's visible.

MAN

This is one of the few spots where people would have regularly walked across this ridge going between different communities in the past. Okay, so there aren't a lot of highways through the stones. This is one of the highways. - This is one of the highways.

Yeah.

MAN

As day one ends back at the Dillard site, we make one more revealing find. It's in the big pit house trench. Is that loose? Grab that.

Oh,

hey. Look at that. - CHELSEA

Ground stone. For grinding corn on. It's a little fragment, anyway. It's a metate.

How do you know it's not just a piece of rock? Well, you can tell because it's got this pockmarked surface. So obviously it would've been a lot larger, the slab. And it would've had a cylindrical rolling pin made of stone on it, and you'd grind that corn down into flour.

And it's about how old? Well, based on the fact that we've got some dates from the 600s, this is good Basketmaker III material. Wow, so what I'm holding in my hand is about 1,400 years old? Could be.

This is called cultural material? That is cultural material. - A human made that. That's incredible!

- Yeah. Two likely pit houses, lots of ancient artifacts, and a great kiva? This has been an amazing day.

wind whistling

hey. Look at that. - CHELSEA

One of the most important things a village needs is water.

hey. Look at that. - CHELSEA

A few weeks before we came to dig, Meg and Shanna went in search of ancient water sources that could've supported a village at the Dillard site. So are you ready for today's flight? I am, I am. I'm pretty excited.

SHANNA

We know that they've got these great soils that hold moisture, and it looks like, in this century, in that A.D. 600s, it is a wonderful time to be a farmer. And it's still a good time to be a farmer. Beans, corn, and squash are still grown here today.

And farmers use the same technique

the ancestral Pueblo did

dryland farming, relying on the rich soil to hold onto the snowmelt throughout the summer. But we cannot find where their domestic water would be coming from. To help answer this question, Meg pulls a new,

high-powered survey tool out of her kit

airborne lidar. With lidar, one of the things that it fundamentally is used for is mapping paleo channels, so mapping old riverbeds and meanders and water sources. Using lidar, we'll create a three-dimensional topographical map of the Dillard site. A laser mounted on the belly of the plane will scan the ground, and the reflected light will be measured to record minute differences in elevation.

This 3D map can reveal ancient geologic features invisible to the naked eye. One of the interesting things, we really haven't applied lidar to this early Pueblo period, the Basketmaker III archaeology. And we just don't know what we're going to be able to find. I always like a challenge.

- Yeah, good. Why not? You might have one here.

high-powered survey tool out of her kit

Day two at the Dillard site. First, Meg's got new geophys data, and she's got results from the lidar flight. There's one feature right here, and there's another feature here. Both are on the northwest to southeast orientation.

Actually, look at that, it's right on alignment -- one, two, three -- with the pit house we have a trench open over right now. I didn't actually -- I only realized that now. What do you think that indicates, that line? No idea.

You know, I think it might have to do with the actual geology, like where the ridge is running but also that southeast orientation --

ALLAN

Is a sacred direction. And also a very important direction simply in terms of receiving the sun, the sunlight. So there's probably something both ideological and environmental going on. Then Meg adds in the lidar.

Look, one, two, three, all in a line. If you keep your eye focused on that...

JUSTINE

Wow. those line up directly on that ridge. Wow. And we see something else.

Our first evidence of water. We have the drainage feature just here, coming down into this. So was that typical, that they would build their settlements around -- near water? I'm just thinking after yesterday, I was so thirsty out there, I was thinking, "Where's the water?" This is so exciting.

We know that later in time, they start doing water modification. So they start doing canals and sort of impounding water for domestic use and creating wetland sort of situations. But we've never seen this with Basketmaker III before. But they're building at the top of the drainage, so the water was flowing away from them.

It's hard to imagine this was a real water source. But the geophys shows lots of activity just to the south of it, exactly where we've been focusing our work. We're starting to get at least how people are relating to their landscape and what they might be focusing on as important to their world. Whether it's providing them with an actual stable water source or not, it's providing them with a context that they're building around.

So, Shanna, do you have any idea where people went for their water? It might be out of small seeps, they might be hiking over to larger canyons not far away. We really don't know where these people were getting their domestic water. They're definitely choosing their soil, these primary great agricultural soils, over accessible domestic water.

Today, then, we'll keep working on the big pit house and the burned structure next to it. Then we'll expand our search to possible pit houses here and here. We'll use augers to look for rubble from collapsed structures. Down this way a bit.

This feature that's kind of right in the middle of the back section.

WOMAN

That gives you a nice profile. We get going just south of the drainage.

JOE

Oh, that's it. With the auger, we can tell how deep the cultural fill goes. If it goes deep and covers a wide area, it's probably a pit house.

MEG

So what are you seeing there? This is the blown-in soil, very loose. This is caliche, sterile soil, right here.

SHANNA

There's no inclusions, like little charcoal flecks. We're not in a structure. We put a flag in the hole to mark it, and Joe moves a meter down to take the next sample. Oh, there we go.

Those are chunks of burned adobe, so we've got pieces of possible structure fill right there. I think we have a lot more potential to be inside of a structure with this probe than the last one. Let's keep going! One more meter.

Ooh, that's real soft. Soft soil is good because it's probably fill.

JOE

Ooh,

look at that. - MEG

Ooh, nice. We have something... And maybe -- oh, that's still burnt. Again, I see like chunks of what could be roofing in there.

But I think we probably have a structure right here. Okay. That's terrific. But is this a pit house?

To know for sure, we still need to find a wall and its size. While Meg and Joe keep at it, Allan and I visit the Crow Canyon Research Center to see their pottery collection. Pueblo pottery is some of the most beautiful ceramic work in the world. It's still made with techniques handed down for over 1,000 years.

And the Dillard site may be one of the first places it was widely used. This is our curation room, where we keep all of the artifacts that are from previous excavations.

ALLAN

Incredible. This is the place to be. That is amazing! What do we have from the Basketmaker III or from the Dillard site?

We have a number of vessels that date to the Basketmaker III period. This small bowl is one of the early decorated Basketmaker III pots. Oh, beautiful. What do you think that figure indicates?

Is it a symbol of some kind? It's a very common design in this type of pottery vessel, and we call it the walking circle because it kind of looks like a walking circle, like those are little feet. This is the first pottery coming out of this entire region right here at the Dillard site. Yeah, and a lot of the designs, they're basically legacies of basket designs, because baskets were kind of

the earlier containers. - JUSTINE

Oh, of course. I see. So designs that you see on baskets, you're now seeing in the pottery. Exactly.

And designs are often specific to certain areas, so finding designs in different areas is often a sign of trade between groups. Pots with designs were probably used for serving, pots without designs for cooking. This is a small cooking pot that they would've used for preparation of something like beans or corn. Yeah, and one of the amazing things I think about this Basketmaker III period is that we've got corn and beans being cooked and eaten together and forming -- it's a complete protein.

But you can't have bean cooking without these pots. Exactly. So this is an amazing new technology. That's interesting.

So you're calling pottery technology. Absolutely. I mean, it allows us to do things that were -- it allowed them to do things

that could never have been done before

storing seeds, storing food, storing water, cooking food. Completely new ways to store food and use food for food preparation. That's technology. Since we've found evidence of pottery, there should also be evidence of farming.

Can we find this essential piece of the puzzle?

WOMAN

Oh, do you see that dark piece right there? Actually, that's one of the largest pieces I've seen. Botanist Karen Adams is collecting samples to test for early food plants.

JOE

So it looks like we're getting inside the pit structure here? - Oh, yeah. Is this burnt adobe? - Right, that's burned adobe.

And charcoal. - KAREN

Charcoal. We're likely to find some of the fuel woods that people were burning, some of the food products that people were preparing over open fires, and it would include wild plants and it would include corn, squash, probably beans. I can put it under the microscope, see what we've got here. We'll check in at the lab later to see what Karen finds.

And charcoal. - KAREN

This is the area that we were doing the soil probing... Meanwhile, Meg kept going with the auger. She's sure she found a structure, but it's not like any other structure on the site. So check this out.

Look at all these red flags. Look all the way down here. Okay, look what we have. Sterile soil, cultural, cultural, cultural, cultural, cultural, sterile, cultural, cultural, cultural.

We've got kind of a deeper cultural deposit here, and then we have sterile soil. And then we have cultural again, but more shallow. So what does that mean? We have an area where nothing was done.

Nothing was deposited, nothing. Is it a wall? Is it a dividing area? What's the question?

Are you trying to figure out what this structure was? We don't even know it's a domestic structure. I could be some kind of outbuilding, because presumably they would've needed some kind of storage or anything else. Whatever this structure is, it's right next to a large midden, or ancient trash pit.

The narrow sterile section runs right through here. The fill is deeper on the structure side, shallower on the midden side. So we could have the pit house here if we have the same southeastern entryway. They could be coming out of the pit house, dumping their trash here, coming back in.

Is this one structure? Is this one pit house? We noticed this morning that right now the pit houses are on the top of the ridge. This one's not.

This one is off the ridge. They're getting a lot more slope wash; when it rains, they're going to get a lot more water into the pit house. So it could be some sign of social structure. They may be the in-laws, it may be the kids' starter home.

So work structure, pit house, starter home? What the heck is it?

And charcoal. - KAREN

Me, I'm getting out of this wind. I'm going to join Karen in the lab. It's a liter of dirt, about a quart, and I'm going to go ahead and add water. And all the light plant parts that are in there are going to float.

And we're after those plant parts, because they can tell you a great deal about the past. Okay. Now, I'm going to go ahead and decant this, and can you see that there are little pieces of charred material? - Yes.

So, what are you looking for, Karen? I'm

looking for food bits

corn, squash, or possibly beans. Information about subsistence. So this is where it gets exciting, huh? You can really see what you've got, huh?

Yes, this is where we can start attaching names to these black, burned plant bits. I like that you're using a paper plate. Yeah, it's very simple. So let me get a...

Oh, I think I just see a good one. What is called a corn, or maize, cupule, and it's the smallest piece of a corn cob that I can recognize as corn. She puts the corn on a plate of salt so it's easier to see. That is actually a small fragment of a corn cob that has come apart from the bigger cob, and there is a pocket in there.

You can barely see it, and that once held two kernels of corn. So what makes you so certain that the corn is evidence of human behavior? I mean, was there wild corn? Could animals have been eating the corn?

Corn is as dependent on humans as humans are on corn. Corn cannot self-plant. It is so protected by its husks that humans have to peel the husks off and individually plant the kernels. So corn will not exist without humans in the picture.

So another piece of the puzzle falls into place. This is it, this red. - Oh, okay. While I was with Karen, I missed some excitement.

Hey, Joe. I heard something really amazing happened here? While you were away. - What happened?

And you're almost standing on it. Oh, really? What is this? We were working up on the north end, and we finally actually found the southern edge of our oversized pit structure.

This lighter soil is native sediment over here, and back over here, this darker, more organic stuff... It's hard to see, but the pit house wall is where the dark soil and the light soil meet. This whole thing is a pit house? Yeah, now that we've got this southern wall that's pretty near the kiva, and we've already found the northern, we have the limits of this really great -- How big is it?

- We figured it out. It's about 27, 28 feet, which makes it... Close to 9 meters, roughly. And in the context of this time and the region?

Humongous!

Unheard of. - JUSTINE

Oh, really? Seriously, it's like the mansion of pit houses. Yeah, it's the mansion of pit houses. So what went on in here?

Did people live here? Well, I think the idea is, okay, this could possibly be a sign of social hierarchy status for maybe an individual or some individuals, but then there's also the possibility that this is part of the whole community. And its relationship to the great kiva. I think those things, Joe -- This close to it, especially.

- Yeah. Does this pit house help us understand more about the possibility that there was a great density of pit houses around here? I'm not sure it helps us understand about the density. I think it will help us understand more about how the site was used.

Right, and that we might have pit houses with different functions, which, in its own way, is as important as telling us we've got a high density of pit houses. The higher the hierarchy, the bigger the village.

Unheard of. - JUSTINE

It's been a terrific day, but before we're done, I want a closer look at some of what's coming out of the ground. So all of this stuff came out of the dig site today? Uh, yeah. One level of one unit.

So this is just a small sample of all the stuff we found. And why are you putting stuff in your mouth, Allan? You mean, when I do this? - Yeah.

It's because sometimes the stone and the pottery look alike, but you know it's pottery if it sticks to your tongue, because...? - It's porous. I think I'll test this in a scientific manner. Pottery.

How's it taste? - It tastes like pottery.

laughing

Unheard of. - JUSTINE

So this, from what Shanna tells me, is a really typical Basketmaker III type of ceramics, a seed jar. So we have the rim sherd of a seed jar. And what's diagnostic about it is it's kind of crescent-shaped here. The different curves in this piece let us figure out its shape.

An ancient seed jar, not so different from what's in a kitchen today. We've got storage and cooking vessels here. Kitchen tools. Yeah, we've got food processing.

So this is the tangible remnants of life 1,400 years ago. This is the types of things you would use on a daily basis, and it reflects what you needed to be successful here.

Unheard of. - JUSTINE

Day three. The first thing we want to do is get to the bottom of Meg's auger mystery. What I'm really interested in is looking at that outside wall. Put in a 1 x 3 unit down here.

We were talking yesterday that it might be a pit house, it might be a surface structure, something else. This will give us that information to see whether it still ties in with the pit house density or whether it is maybe one of those early above-ground storage features. Confirming that there's a buried wall will help confirm a pit house. But what about the cultural material outside the wall?

There's going to be activity right outside the pit house. You know, they're not going to walk away 20 feet to do something. They're going to lean back against the wall, they're going to have their tools there, so I'm hoping we can pick something up over here. It's the last day, and I can really feel the excitement and the pressure.

It's starting to feel like this was a key site for the beginning of the Pueblo culture. Came down on a mortar.

ALLAN

What you got? - A mortar. I have worked out in the field since 1977, and I've never seen a mortar in the field, so I'm pretty jazzed! Awesome.

So to me, this is -- this is really exciting, and it does indicate that another kind of activity went on here. It could even be ritual in function. Being this close to the great kiva, it's not impossible that it wasn't even ordinary medicine, it was special medicine. Chelsea told me to come over here because she said that you were going to let her pick it up.

I won't touch the inside, I promise. You can touch the edges, yeah. Don't touch the inside. Okay, here it goes.

They don't want to touch the inside of it because it will be tested later for residues to discover what materials were used in it. It's

beautiful. - CHELSEA

Oh, my God. This edge has been shaped. This edge is pretty much fracture edges. And this, of course, is a fracture edge, as it's broken, but, boy, you can see it's quite well used.

Wow, so we've been finding metates across the site. We're associating that with corn. How is a mortar different? A mortar is really different, because the work surface in it is just a little circle, and so it's clear that it's not used for grinding great big things and creating a lot of food.

These very small work surfaces, these little divots, probably were used for crunching up very small things, something special like a medicine. It could mean a really significant kind of activity and behavior and conduct that we really don't have very much evidence of this early in a community, in a Basketmaker community.

beautiful. - CHELSEA

Almost. There we go, one more. All right.

JEFF

All right, so we have a bow. What are we going to do for the arrows? When it's nice and hot, you can pull it off and let it cool. Those are turkey feathers?

These are turkey feathers. I love them. Attach the point, and we're ready to shoot. As people started farming, they needed less meat.

So instead of hunting large game with the old-fashioned atlatl, or throwing stick,

they invented something new for smaller animals

the bow and arrow. The change in the game animals really allow this change in the armament, because if you're hunting bison, you're having to go through a piece of leather that's

like that. - CHELSEA

Yeah. But if you're going to go through deer as the biggest thing, or even elk, the biggest thing you're going through, it's a much, much lighter skin. So you don't need that massive penetrating power of the dart in the atlatl. You can see dramatically going from something that's a spear point all the way down to an arrow point.

It's just that big a change. We had two, I think, points that we've found that looked exactly like that. Yeah, the points that you've found are actually as large as the smallest of these and smaller. This is a pretty distinct technology, something you're throwing versus something you're projecting with, so there's a middle man.

You have the bow, which is the middle man, right? Right, and the bow is really this remarkable departure from normal. And that's one reason why we think it's an innovation that spreads rather than an independent invention in various parts of the Southwest, because you wouldn't think to just take common, everyday string and a carefully shaped piece of wood and turn it into a weapon. What are the hunting advantages of a bow and arrow compared to an atlatl?

I still don't totally understand how -- why is that so significant? Stealth is really one of the most remarkable changes. Because you can be in a blind, waiting for someone, some animal to come through, and instead of having to rear up with an atlatl and throw, which gives your prey a few seconds' notice, instead you can crouch -- a very simple motion -- pull, and release. So stealthiness is a tremendous improvement in hunting strategy.

Pull back, rest the arrow against your hand... What happened? Ooh, wicked shot!

like that. - CHELSEA

Oh! A little left. Okay... Beautiful.

- On paper. Ho-ho-ho-ho! Awesome! One, two...

Back at Dillard, some hard work has finally gotten us the answer to Meg's auger mystery. This is what's happening now, this morning. We had the auger lines coming through here, they showed cultural, cultural, sterile, sterile. Here's that sterile.

This is the outside. Looks like we have a wall. Looks like this is inside the structure. So this is really neat, because what it shows us is that with the geophys, with the augering, and with the excavation, three lines of evidence are giving us the same thing.

Meg's geophys shows the rough outline of the structure. The augering confirms that the structure is large enough, and the excavation confirms the wall. We're finding out about where the pit houses are. This means we've now got five pit houses north of the great kiva.

When we add these to what we know about the area south of the great kiva, we can see what was almost certainly a large village. But we're not done yet. Meg is still pushing, determined to check one more spot before we run out of time.

MEG

So this is a really, really great anomaly of something that appears to be really highly burned, and it's about 6 meters across, about 18 feet.

CHELSEA

Uh-huh, and that is classic pit house signature. It only takes a minute before we get results.

MAN

Burned adobe, burned mortar.

CHELSEA

So a roof collapse? - Right. What we're seeing here is this beautiful sandwich of burned house. We've got the stuff on top, the collapsed roof, we've got the nice burned layer, and then we get down into this subsoil.

MEG

Great, all right. Let's keep going. So has Meg found still another pit house? Just a few steps away, Shanna's got something that will tell us.

We actually found a really large burned beam.

CHELSEA

Oh, wait, the beam is still in the posthole? It is still in the posthole, and I've left it there. I've covered it with dirt to sort of protect it, but I can expose it for you. Yeah, could you?

That sounds really cool. Okay, sure. Is that it starting to come out? Yeah, so you can see that charcoal, and I'm actually going to blow it off.

Okay! Because it's just one of my -- The very low-tech method. One of my little techniques, yeah. Oh, my God!

That is incredible! So you can see how big this is. I mean, it's probably still extending out here, so we're talking a beam probably that big around. This is 1,400 years old, and it looks like it was burned yesterday.

Right, right. Now, with all the roofing material Meg is finding, Shanna says this beam means we've got another pit house. This is a really special moment in time. Big changes are happening, and they are reflected in daily life.

This is material from one single pit house in our excavations. You know, we have evidence of cooking pots for beans, we have evidence of seed jars, we have evidence of corn -- grinding stones that are immensely heavy. So heavy, in fact, they make me think, "Wow, this is a major commitment to staying settled." But there's one more piece to our puzzle. Justine, remember yesterday when we said we had the biggest pit house here?

Yeah. That's changed. That's the nature of archaeology. I mean, our interpretations change certainly every day, and often every hour.

Okay, okay, so what is it? I want to know! All right, well, I'm going to tell you. See, what we thought originally was that, okay, we had a north wall for sure and then we had a south wall.

Right, making this the biggest pit house -- Simply the biggest pit house ever, and that the antechamber was somewhere over in here. What we did is we took that three-inch bucket auger, we screwed it down into the ground, pulled it out, we hit sterile soil. What we found instead was that the pit house comes around this way and then moves back around that way into this antechamber here. So in fact this is the entryway.

The entryway would be... over here. The entryway's there. Come in through here, move across here, then you go into the domestic structure there.

When we look at the density of the other pit houses we're finding, it's a mirror image of what's happening down south. This half could be one series of clans, this half the other series of clans, and they're interacting with each other, but they're separate but part of this large community. And all centered on this incredible, monumental great kiva. These are people who are settled down, they're adopting agriculture, they're staying here possibly year-round.

And this is something that we see in the experience of almost all human groups around the world. Everyone has passed through this sort of cultural or historical stage of life. And these pit house structures represent that kind of settled, organized form of intimate community life. We think it could be the real precursor to Pueblo -- ancestral Pueblo social organization.

It is one of the first villages we're finding in this region.

CHELSEA

Based on our work here and Crow Canyon's continuing research, the village at the Dillard site might have looked something like this. We've identified 14 pit houses and lots of storage and work structures. And for the first time this early,

we found a fascinating cultural feature

a fence that surrounds an entire section of a village. At its height, as many as 70 people may have lived here. Over the next 500 years, the Pueblo people spread across the region and built their beautiful cliff dwellings. Then, finally, in the late 1200s, drought and the pressure newcomers put on this fragile land was too much.

The Pueblo people left Colorado, joining other tribes to the south. The Dillard site is a place where people took a revolutionary step into a new beginning. This program was made possible in part by... a major grant from the National Science Foundation, where discoveries begin.

we found a fascinating cultural feature

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