Excavating New Mexico’s Land Grant Legacy at Cañón de Carnué with Archaeologist Kelly Jenks
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[00:00:00] Dr. Kelly Jenks: There’s no doing this kind of work without working with the community, right? I’m there because they were interested and they asked. This is their heritage, it’s their home. And so much of understanding this site and what people’s lives were like is really becoming familiar with the landscape, and nobody knows that landscape better than the people who still live there.
[00:00:22] I want those stories to be part of anything we contribute for this community, and for all the people like the Land Grant heirs, but also the other people who live in this area too. To be able to have that kind of a connection with the place where they live.
[00:00:40] Emily: ¡Bienvenidos! This is Encounter Culture from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m your host, and editor of El Palacio Magazine, Emily Withnall.
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[00:00:52] Emily: I grew up in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the shadow of the state’s land grant history.
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[00:00:59] Although I never learned about the complexities of land grant history as a kid, I understood that many of the questions about belonging and identity and the Land of Enchantment were tangled up in the history of these parcels that the Spanish and Mexican governments doled out to their colonial citizens, long before New Mexico became a U.S. territory.
[00:01:21] For many Nuevo Mexicanos, land grant history is not something that belongs in the past. Land grants, whether lost or retained, are a part of an active, lived relationship to the land. The history of the dissolution of New Mexico’s land grants is far too complex to dive into in a full podcast episode, let alone an introduction.
[00:01:47] But the very short version is this: following the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which led to Mexico ceding vast portions of the present-day Southwest to the United States, land grantees, both communities and individuals, lost land that many are still fighting to regain today.
[00:02:12] Originally promised their land grants in the treaty, New Mexicans became embroiled in an unclear American bureaucratic system they did not trust. Procedures heavily favored the U.S. government and left land grants vulnerable to speculators. In 1897, the government dealt a death blow to those fighting for their grants in United States versus Sandoval.
[00:02:38] The decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court removed communities’ rights and access to hundreds and thousands of acres of land grants. This decision permitted the legal theft by American settlers, and federal and state entities, of what had been, in many cases, communally held land.
[00:02:58] Millions of acres that once belonged to land grant communities are now largely owned by individuals, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. All of this history is, of course, superimposed over Spanish colonization and the displacement of Indigenous people in New Mexico. These histories intersect in current archeological excavation work.
[00:03:26] In this episode of Encounter Culture, my conversation with Dr. Kelly Jenks of New Mexico State University will help fill in some context for land grant history, which includes the Indigenous and Genízaro residents of many land grants. Primarily, however, our conversation zeroes in on Jenks’ role. Alongside land grant community descendants, and the ongoing excavation of the old Cañón de Carnué Land Grant.
[00:03:54] In 2017, Jenks and Moises Gonzales, a University of New Mexico history professor and Cañón de Carnué Land Grant descendant and board member, had a conversation about the importance of the history of the area and questions that remained about the land grant. This initial conversation led to the Cañón de Carnué Archeological Project, a project which is still underway.
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[00:04:22] Emily: Welcome to Encounter Culture, Kelly. I’m so excited to talk with you today.
[00:04:27] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Thank you for having me.
[00:04:28] Emily: I’d love to just jump right in and have you introduce yourself and what you do at New Mexico State University, and also with regard to your archeological research.
[00:04:38] Jenks: Yeah, so my name is Kelly Jenks. I am a professor of anthropology at NMSU, and I am also director of the university museum here on campus, which is underneath the Department of Anthropology.
[00:04:51] I specialize in historical archeology, and most of my archeological research, and increasingly oral history research too, focuses on Spanish Land Grant communities in New Mexico, particularly those established in the late 18th century, the late 1700s, on sort of what at the time was the eastern colonial frontier, and particularly the land grant communities of San Miguel del Vado and Cañón de Carnué.
[00:05:20] Emily Withnall: I actually just saw that there was a headline in the news this morning about the San Miguel Land Grant. (chuckles)
[00:05:26] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Yeah, it was really cool! We’ve been working with them on an oral history project. It’s really exciting.
[00:05:32] Emily Withnall: Yeah. Yeah. I grew up in San Miguel County in Las Vegas. (chuckles)
[00:05:35] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Oh okay! Yeah. I have been spending—the nearest hotel is in Santa Fe or Las Vegas, so I’ve spent a lot of time in both this summer.
[00:05:42] Emily Withnall: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay, I wanna talk specifically about the Cañón de Carnué Land Grant and just have you kind of fill us in about the many layers of history.
[00:05:55] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Well, and this is the problem with me being a professor, is I tend to be like, ‘Let’s take it all the way back to Roman times.’
I won’t do that here. (laughter)
[00:06:02] The Cañón de Carnué Land Grant—so for starters, it’s east of Albuquerque in what is now known as Tijeras Canyon, but at the time was known as Cañón de Carnué, so that’s why the land grant has that name. And it’s actually got its own complicated history. It was granted twice—or rather, kind of like the same land grant was issued two different times.
[00:06:24] The first grant, the original Cañón de Carnué Land Grant was a grant of community lands made in 1763. So you had a group of families who applied to the Spanish Colonial Government for the right to settle lands in the canyon, in what’s now Tijeras Canyon. And it was a pretty dangerous place to settle at the time, because just through that mountain pass on the plains to the east, that was very much Comanche Territory at sort of the height of their power in the mid-1700s.
[00:06:57] And they were not always on the best of terms with a lot of the settlements in New Mexico—pueblo and colonial. But for the people, the families who are applying for this grants of community land, many of them are of Indigenous ancestry or mixed ancestry. They didn’t have a lot of resources. Most of them didn’t own property, and so they’re largely working as servants or ranch hands, shepherds.
[00:07:23] And so this was an opportunity to kind of improve their lives and the lives of their family, to be able to own land and to be able to keep more of what they grew and what they raised. And so, it was a gamble that they took, that they wanted, and ultimately one that didn’t pay off.
[00:07:41] The land grant was attacked in 1770, and the survivors retreated to Albuquerque, which was kind of the nearest big colonial village/town at the time. And colonial authorities tried to persuade them to go back ’cause it was really convenient from their perspective to have basically a buffer settlement right at that mountain pass. But it was too dangerous. They wouldn’t go, couldn’t be persuaded to go. And so they were ordered to return the following spring to destroy their homes and to forfeit the land grant.
[00:08:14] Emily Withnall: Can I just pause you real quick and ask, because I know a lot of New Mexico listeners know what a land grant is, but we do have listeners outside of New Mexico who might be a little confused. (chuckles) So—
[00:08:27] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Yeah, and the land grants are a little confusing too. In some ways it’s similar to thinking about later in the American Period, right? Through the Homestead Act, families could apply to the government for title to a homestead.
[00:08:41] And if approved, if they had done certain kind of improvements to that land, after usually five years and demonstrating those improvements, they would get title. This, during the Spanish Colonial Period, families could apply for individual grants of land. Usually that was kind of wealthy families wanting a lot of land for ranching.
[00:09:00] But also there was a process for getting a group of families together, multiple heads of households—they all had to be married. All the men who applied had to be married, or else they wouldn’t get approved. And they could apply for a, a sort of large area, usually somewhere where there was, you know, like, defined by natural boundaries oftentimes, but not always in a river, where they could settle a community, like a whole village.
[00:09:26] They were usually instructed to build a defensible, fortified kind of plaza-centered community. And in exchange for building that village and all the infrastructure, the irrigation, all those things, and self-governing and defending it from any external attacks, they would be granted sort of rights to the property, so they would become landowners.
[00:09:51] So it’s kind of a corporate construct. Families would get individual allotments for their house and for their agricultural field. But then the ejido, the common lands, were managed communally by the land grants. And so they were responsible—they could, you know, get timber from the mountains, they could fish in the river, and all of that was sort of managed by the land grant community, which then paid taxes, essentially directly to the colonial government.
[00:10:17] So it very much came out of sort of medieval history, like medieval sort of legal frameworks. But it’s kind of like thinking of the little fiefdom, but without the lord, right? Like it’s a corporate structure.
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[00:10:39] Emily Withnall: So was it the Spanish Colonial Government that ordered the survivors to go destroy—
[00:10:45] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Yeah. It was actually the alcalde in Albuquerque was ordered to take them out, because they weren’t willing to resettle. He was supposed to take them out, I think it was in April of 1771. They were supposed to destroy their homes, and then that was sort of part of the process of them forfeiting the Grant and then that was it.
[00:11:03] Decades later, the situation has settled down somewhat. You had a peace treaty with the Comanches in the 1780s. The colonial population is growing a bit and expanding, and in 1819 another group of families apply for, and are granted, basically the same territory in the Tijeras Canyon, and so that is the second Cañón de Carnué Land Grant.
[00:11:27] Some of the applicants were members of the same family as the original grant, and that’s the land grant community that’s still there today. So Moises Gonzalez, who’s also a professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at UNM—but is, was at the time, president of the land grant heirs ,and is from and lives in Carnué, was the one who actually contacted me initially, curious to see if I was interested in looking at the archeology of that land grant community.
[00:11:55] So they’ve been really involved and interested in learning more about their heritage, and sort of the early archeological resources connected with the Land Grant and actually also connected with previous occupations.
[00:12:09] And the site that he pointed me to as something that was interesting to them was actually a site connected with that first Cañón de Carnué Land Grant, the one that was occupied 1763 to 1770.
[00:12:21] Emily Withnall: And I do wanna ask you, because I’m aware that Moises has a book about Genízaro identity and we’ve done an episode on Genízaro identity on Encounter Culture in a previous season. So I’d love to know if there’s a connection between that history and this land grant community.
[00:12:39] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Yes, there is. A lot of these late 18th century land grants, in particular, mid- and late-18th century land grants—the community land grants were being awarded more by the colonial government because they were part of sort of an effort on their part to consolidate their frontier, right?
[00:13:00] So they were looking for establishing these fortified settlements in peripheral areas to try to protect the colonial core from attack, and also to kind of solidify the frontier. But, because these were pretty dangerous lands that they were looking to settle, and because they were really concerned with them being defended, they were actually, in some cases, specifically recruiting people who were identified in records as Genízaro people who had Indigenous ancestry, but oftentimes had been raised within colonial society.
[00:13:33] And so these could be, most oftentimes we think of people who are taken as captives, or their children who would be born to captives, but really lacking any sort of status within colonial societies. So they’re born in colonial society, but probably don’t have property. And so they were being sort of recruited in many cases to apply for and join these land grant communities with the idea that they’d be more willing to say yes, more willing to take it on, because it was even though dangerous, it was an opportunity to improve their situation to get more resources to help take care of their families.
[00:14:12] And probably to a certain extent too, because from the perspective of colonial authorities, they were treated as more expendable.
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[00:14:18] So that is definitely in part this, the 1763 land grant community were definitely, Genízaro men lifted among those initial applicants as heads of households.
[00:14:28] Of course, those initial applicants—it’s only identifying the men who are heads of households. So it’s really through the land grants’ genealogical research that there’s a bit more information about who the women were and the children, but they were definitely many Genízaro families, not exclusively Genízaro families, but many Genízaro families among that initial settlement.
[00:14:48] Emily Withnall: And so do some of those descendants today who live there, identify that way?
[00:14:52] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Moises as an example, right? And so some are really interested in and really connected with, or looking to reconnect with, those histories and those stories.
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[00:15:11] Emily Withnall: We covered the 1700s, the first land grant, and then the second one in the early 1800s. Is there any other history between then and now, or anything else that’s relevant to know about this site?
[00:15:25] Dr. Kelly Jenks: The sort of later land grant, that early 1800s land grant, they do resettle the area, although they don’t reoccupy this particular site where I’ve been doing archeological work.
[00:15:35] When they move back to the canyon, they’re largely settling further east. The biggest change that really happened for this land grant community, for San Miguel del Vado and others, was kind of the fallout from the Mexican-American War, right? And being essentially conquered and then annexed into the United States as a Territory, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in theory, was supposed to protect the sort of property rights of people who prior to that war were Mexican citizens.
[00:16:11] And so that included these land grant communities. But there was a lot of interest, especially from American immigrants moving in, to acquire what were seen as unoccupied lands. Up in San Miguel del Vado, where I’ve worked, you had a lot of land speculation around the railroads, right?
[00:16:28] Like the people in Philadelphia trying to send agents out to buy up property via means that were not entirely legal, so that they could be the ones who would benefit from the railroad. And so, there’s, there’s a lot of that happening, and the land grant communities are often trying to challenge that, trying to protect their rights to the land grant, and ultimately it ends up going to a Supreme Court decision.
[00:16:55] That’s the Sandoval versus United States Supreme Court decision, where they rule that the common lands, the ejido, that were not specifically occupied, so didn’t have a house on them or or currently maintain agricultural fields on them, were not in fact the belongings of the land grant, but that they were held in trust by the Spanish Colonial Government and the Mexican Government, and so therefore, they were federal property.
[00:17:20] I’m not a legal scholar, (laughs) but this is a decision that—there are people who are legal scholars who argue that that was a bad call, like a bad reading of, sort of the nature of these land grant communities.
[00:17:32] Those common lands were not held in trust, but that was a decision that was very impactful because it meant those common lands were stripped and became largely federal property, which then meant those properties could be made available for homestead claims. And so for Cañón de Carnué, for example, the initial grant of lands that supported those communities from 1819 was about 90,000 acres. The confirmed portion after that decision of essentially occupied lands of the people who had still managed to stay there was about two thousand acres. So it’s a massive loss.
[00:18:11] Emily Withnall: Yeah
[00:18:11] Dr. Kelly Jenks: And it was hugely consequential for those communities because they were surviving—this is sort of a mixed economy, right? Like you, you farm where there’s water, you raise livestock, especially sheep, maybe cattle. You rely on the timber, you rely on the resources from the river—like, those are the things that made it possible to actually make a living in these places.
And when those lands that were your grazing lands and your timber harvesting lands and all those are stripped, a lot of people can’t survive there.
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[00:18:42] And so it drives the heirs, the land grant heirs, many of them, into wage labor, into the cities and to different states. And it’s been pretty devastating for those communities.
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[00:19:04] Emily Withnall: So what are some of the things that you’ve been finding at this original land ground site?
[00:19:09] Dr. Kelly Jenks: There’s kind of the remnants of room blocks built around a plaza that we have mapped, and done some test excavations. The other things that we knew about, but we have been able to learn more about too, is that you can still see where the room blocks were.
[00:19:26] So the first season we went out there, we were just looking at the surface and trying to map everything and figure out where it all fit. Because it’s a canyon, there’s only so many places where people can find enough flat ground to sit on, right, let alone farm. And so there’s layers of occupation and use even within that property.
[00:19:46] So you can see the rooms kind of in linear blocks around an open plaza. It’s complicated because the Interstate’s pretty nearby, and in the process of sort of dynamiting out, (chuckles) a space for the Interstate and then the frontage roads and all that, there’s a bunch of boulders. It’s already an area where boulders roll down the Sandias, but then you have like these extra boulders that just got blown and scattered over the top of the site.
[00:20:10] So, kind of picking, imagining them out of the way ’cause they’re real big, and trying to sort of see how things were, um, set up before. But also it was really clear that there had been previous excavations there, and other sort of archeologists before us. And the local community, like, remembered there was a UNM field school that was done at the site, around that land grant component, and it was in 1946. The people remembered that the project had happened. They remembered the site as the “Silva Site” ’cause there was a dance hall nearby where sort of open spaces—Bio-Zone. Tijeras Bio-Zone building is now—it used to be a kind of Italian-run bar and dance hall, that was for a time like, the Silva Saloon.
[00:20:56] And so, it was remembered as the Silva Site. But nobody knew what happened to the artifacts, to the notes, to anything. They hadn’t been able to track them down. And so, partially through kind of the research we were doing in our surveys and trying to find anything that had been written about that project, working with the Maxwell, we were also able to relocate the artifact collections from that 1946 field project.
[00:21:23] We have not yet relocated any of the notes, or maps, photographs, things that would be really helpful. But we do have the artifacts, and so in addition to sort of identifying where that plaza was, where the rooms were, we did some test excavations as part of my field school in 2022. So we have some rooms that we were able to sample to kind of see how were the rooms built, what kinds of features were in the interior, did they seem to build upon existing structures, or was this the first time?
[00:21:53] Like what kinds of pottery did they have? Animal bone? Are we finding all those things? But also we’ve been able to then work with the Maxwell to do loans of those 1940s collections. And even though we don’t have maps, because we know what we were finding in 2022, we’ve been able to try to then reconstruct as much information as possible from the collections from those earlier excavations.
[00:22:19] And so we’ve been building a picture. One of the things that we think we know at this point, and sort of the nature of archeology is you learn one thing and you have five million more questions, and so I’m always hyper fixated on the things I don’t know yet—
[00:22:32] Emily Withnall: Right. (chuckles)
[00:22:32] Dr. Kelly Jenks: One of the things though, that’s kind of interesting, is that it’s a small plaza surrounded by rooms. Some of those were habitation rooms where people were living. Some of them were rooms that were basically animal pens or barns. I don’t think it was ever actually fully enclosed and fortified, which is what they were supposed to do.
And that’s not totally surprising because one of the things you find in a lot of the colonial accounts from this time period, like, you know, when they would send out surveyors, is colonial authorities complaining that they’re not (laughs) building the defensible plazas that they’re supposed to be. I also don’t think it’s big enough to have held all of the people who received that initial link grant.
[00:23:13] So I think there probably were a few of these kind of little plazuelas down the canyon, and this is one of them. So that’s, that’s kind of interesting in terms of giving us a sense of what life was like. And then, there’s some things we’ve been able to figure out too by like looking at the specific material culture, the artifacts that we’re recovering.
[00:23:33] So we look at the pottery, for example, that’s broken on the floors or in the trash middens, things just kind of, that broke, got thrown usually into the plaza and then sort of washed down. And so, a lot of the local pottery they have is especially being produced kind of between Bernalillo and Isleta, basically.
[00:23:53] Like a lot of it is from Santa Ana and Zia Pueblo, and so that suggests that the people who settled here in the 1760s came from those areas where were connected with those communities.
There’s also kind of, surprisingly, a pretty small amount, but more than I was expecting, of traded, like, non-local items.
[00:24:11] So there’s pottery fragments, there’s some majolica that would’ve come from Central Mexico. There’s some painted pottery that was probably produced in Jalisco, in western Mexico, and there’s even a little bit of Chinese porcelain ’cause you have at that time, through the Manila Galleons, like the Spanish Colonies included basically the Philippines. And so you had porcelain being imported to Acapulco and then Mexico City and some of that apparently making its way up there.
[00:24:37] Emily Withnall: That’s so interesting. The ghost town in La Liendre also has a bunch of that pottery.
[00:24:42] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Yeah, it’s always kind of surprising ’cause there’s such a strong pottery tradition in New Mexico that mostly what people are using is what’s being produced in the area, especially by Pueblo communities, but also by Jicarilla Apache. And sometimes as these communities became pretty intertwined, they’re making their own. So it’s always kind of interesting when you find the non-local stuff to think about what that means about where people have maybe certainly are trading, but like also where they might have family, where they’re connected to.
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[00:26:52] Dr. Kelly Jenks: So, if you imagine, and some of this is very conjecture, based on what we’ve found, this community, it probably, if you came upon it, you would see adobe, flat-roofed houses. I think adobe. They definitely had stone foundations. It might’ve been entirely built of local rock with adobe mortar and plaster, but it definitely would’ve looked like adobe from the outside.
You would’ve had single-story flat-roofed homes built on this little rise above Tijeras Creek, so the base of the canyon, this is where the water is still running. In this kind of boulder-y canyon, you would’ve had these flat-roofed homes built around a central plaza, and some of them you would’ve had rooms that would’ve had some kind of a chimney on top from the corner fireplace, so maybe smoke coming out of the rooms.
[00:27:48] And then some of the rooms would’ve actually, instead of having roofs on them, would’ve probably been open-top and they would’ve been animal pens because one of the things that we found too when we were looking at the animal bonus, they’re relying really heavily on domesticated animals that they were raising.
[00:28:05] So lots of sheep and goat, some cattle, some horses. We don’t really see like, deer bone and the mountains on all sides definitely have deer. We don’t see a whole lot in the way of bunnies. Your cottontail rabbits of things. They don’t seem to be hunting much, and I think that’s because they were afraid.
[00:28:24] I think it was really dangerous to leave the settlement because of where they were. Because you don’t want to eat your own livestock if you don’t have to. Like you will some, but mostly if there’s animals to be hunted, you’ll do that. I think they were keeping their animals really close at this particular settlement in pens next to the structures or in the plaza when they weren’t out grazing them and not venturing terribly far a lot of that time.
[00:28:51] And there probably would’ve been gaps in the wall. Certainly there would’ve been at least some gaps to allow people to bring wagons in and out, but there might’ve actually just been undeveloped spaces in that. The doorways would’ve all faced the interior, the plaza. So you would have to go into the plaza and then people could go in and out of their homes, and they probably used that plaza space for a lot of activities.
[00:29:17] So that’s probably cooking, right? Like you might’ve had hornos in the plaza. I think actually they probably did. There’s definitely something real burned (laughs) that we would like to go back and actually sort of excavate around ’cause we found the corner of it and it, I think it might be an horno.
[00:29:31] And then in terms of the pottery, like when they’re cooking, there’s corner fireplaces built into the corner of rooms. It’s a sort of a Mediterranean style of architecture, building your fireplace into the corner, that is introduced to New Mexico with kind of Spanish colonization and then becomes more common.
[00:29:50] But they’re building little, small corner fireplaces, probably small ones in the room for heat, and then larger ones for maybe cooking in the winter. And then big cooking is probably happening in the courtyard, and they’re cooking mostly in earthenware pots. We haven’t found any evidence that they’re making pottery at this site.
[00:30:07] Although, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. And so they’re cooking a lot of stews in those pots, and we’re finding the fragments of ones that break in the process and get dumped into the courtyard, along with the ashes from the stove. And sometimes, some of the things that we find seem to be the things that were probably left behind, either at the time of the attack or when they came back, and were made to destroy their homes too.
[00:30:35] Those things are a little different and more curious. So we have like large bowl fragments just left on a floor that if they were still living there probably would’ve gotten thrown away. But this is more likely something that happened at the end, where nobody needs to go back and sort of sweep out.
[00:30:52] But we also have a cow skull sitting on the floor of one of the rooms right by the fireplace, upside down, juvenile, just the skull, just the head would’ve been placed on the floor, was covered up really quickly by the collapsing walls. Quickly enough with the kind of small bones, like a lot of the bones in the cranium. If you leave a cow skull on the surface, right, like the fine bones all break and blow away.
[00:31:17] This was still intact, so it was placed on the ground and the walls collapsed on top of it pretty quickly. And that is curious. And there are other artifacts from that 1940s excavations that are curious as well. So, there was a seashell, a Kona shell. The tag that came with it says it was recovered on the floor, which sounds like something you might expect in Pueblo context, but wouldn’t necessarily expect in a 1700s colonial community.
[00:31:46] Though of course, plenty of the people who lived there were probably had Pueblo ancestry, or may have been from one of the kind of local Pueblos themselves. There was a horse skull that was recovered in the forties, and I’m pretty sure it came from a room floor, and that’s a weird thing. There were a few other cow skulls that were recovered too.
[00:32:06] They also recovered a effigy pot. It’s about maybe six inches. Pueblo-made pot, probably from Santa Ana Pueblo, but maybe from further north, decorated with black and red and white paint in the shape of a sheep. It’s the cutest thing (chuckles) and it’s intact like it’s a little worn. You can see like some of the back legs probably broke and then were still used, and so they worn kind of flat.
[00:32:34] It’s got little stubby legs, but it’s whole. And the likelihood that they would’ve found it in a trash midden in the forties when they were excavating and it be whole is really slim to none. So it’s probably something that they found in a room, probably on a floor. These are some of our big mysteries that we’re trying to think through.
[00:32:55] Now, putting together that bigger picture of, you know, what were people’s lives like? What were they eating? How were they living? Who were they interacting with? What does it mean to potentially be this kind of multi-ethnic Genízaro community? Like it doesn’t tell us what their lives were like, right?
[00:33:09] Like what they did, how they worshiped, what they ate. Archeology gives us some clues about that ’cause we’re literally seeing their houses in their trash. But we’re also seeing some of these things that seem to be connected with what happened when they were attacked or when they were made to destroy their homes that look really purposeful.
[00:33:27] But largely because this community has this varied ancestry it’s hard to know how to interpret those behaviors. Like if this was definitely sort of a pueblo room and there’s a Kona shell, then at least there’s some context for that. But we don’t know that, and so we don’t really know what the context is for a lot of these things that we’re finding that seem to be purposefully placed on the floors, and a lot of them are Eurasian domesticated animals.
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[00:34:00] Emily Withnall: In the winter issue of El Palacio, there’s gonna be an article about the excavation that’s happening at Acoma Pueblo in conjunction with the Office of Archeology. The article talks about how, in that particular case, they’re using what’s called the Acoma Method that’s very community led. And when I talked to John Taylor Montoya, he mentioned you and your work and saying that the community of this community land grant is also involved, and so I’d love to hear what the community involvement is, and why that’s important to this project.
[00:34:33] Dr. Kelly Jenks: Yeah, absolutely. For me, there’s no doing this kind of work without working with the community, right? I’m there because they were interested and they asked. This is their heritage, it’s their home. And so much of understanding this site and what people’s lives were like is really becoming familiar with the landscape, sort of how people moved within that landscape, how they understood it, and nobody knows that landscape better than the people who still live there.
[00:35:02] And nobody’s gonna have more insight into some of the things they were doing, right, like the ways they were responding to that landscape, but also why their floors are a little bit lower than the stone foundations of the walls. And it’s like, well. I can tell you they did that.
But it’s talking to the people in the community to be like, does this, do you do this? Do you know why they might do this? Do you know it might have been challenging about it because this is a place talking to Moises. And he is like, yeah, you can’t dig anywhere here without hitting a boulder. And I’m like, you know, that is really interesting and helpful and essential. And so, I wouldn’t have been doing this project if it wasn’t for them.
[00:35:40] I wouldn’t have come up if it wasn’t something they wanted me to do—even, I’m interested in land grants, but I don’t wanna work where I’m not wanted. I want people to be interested and to have some use for things that I can provide. I’m good at the archeology of it.
I know how to do an excavation. I know how to document the service, and how to kind of work backwards in time ’cause that’s what archeologists do. Like try to see what’s there now and then understand how construction and development and erosion and all those things have changed to get back to what it would’ve looked like. But there’s so much more context that I’m always gonna need more than I have, more than my students have, to understand and make sense of and care about that site.
[00:36:20] And so working with the community has been everything. One of the women, it’s one of the land grant heirs. Who came to visit us both summers that we were out there doing field work. Her name is Barbara Pohl. And it was great. She’d come, she’d be curious to see, you know, what the students were doing; have them tell her sort of what they were finding.
But also her mother grew up, like, right in that area, that part of the canyon. And so, she would be telling us about, you know, stories that her mom, when she was young, about how quickly the flash floods hit this area ’cause you’re in a canyon. So the second you know, it starts raining, you start hearing a rush, you gotta get out of there fast ’cause it’s gonna come tearing down.
[00:36:59] And she’d be pointing across the canyon, and there’s a little spot where like the green is the brighter green. It’s more of a lime green, and that’s where the springs are. That’s, that’s everything. I want those stories to be part of like, anything we contribute for this community and for all the people like the land grant heirs, but also the other people who live in this area too, to be able to have that kind of a connection with the place where they live, right?
[00:37:27] Emily Withnall: Well, and I’m curious if you know to what extent community involvement or community-led archeology projects are happening? Because I know historically that has not been the case, right?
[00:37:40] Dr. Kelly Jenks: So I think it depends on the context of it.
Working in the more recent history, like you wanna talk to anybody who knows anything and you wanna know if they are interested. So I think it’s pretty common, or certainly more common in certainly this area of research of the kind of thing that I do, and especially in historical archeology. I think it’s becoming more common in archeological research, in particularly the United States, especially in the Southwest, working with Indigenous sites and working with Indigenous communities and descendant communities to make sure that any of the research that’s happening is what they’re interested in. That it benefits ‘em in some way.
[00:38:22] So I think that’s becoming much more common. Most archeological work that happens now, far less of it is kind of like research-oriented, you know, communities or universities or museums that are wanting to learn about a particular time period. Far more of it is actually kind of compliance work. There’s a lot of developments, right?
[00:38:42] Any time there’s highway construction, building developments, even there’s forest fires always, right? It’s New Mexico in the mountains, and anytime their blading breaks in the forest to slow the spread of fire. All of that has the potential to expose or destroy archeological sites from the entire history of occupation in this area.
[00:39:08] And so a lot of archeological work is actually done in compliance with state agencies, federal agencies, in advance of construction. And that, there is usually sort of a process for reaching out to landowners, maybe stakeholder meetings, things like that, but it’s much more governed by those agencies and those processes.
[00:39:30] There’s not always the same freedom, like if I’m working, and I have as a contract archeologist, I’m not necessarily able to, as I show up for my, I would say nine-to-five, but it never is. It’s always like camp six days at a time and track across the landscape the entire time. But like I’m not necessarily able to do the things I can as a researcher of like going out and talking with the communities and learning more and making sure they’re more involved in the process ’cause it’s not my project. I don’t have the funding and the legal rights and all that. So, right. I think within research it’s happening more. And then on the compliance side, it’s like a whole different animal that you’re dealing with there.
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[00:40:16] Emily Withnall: Is there anything about this project, as you continue to work on it, that’s especially exciting to you or like a specific question or mystery, that’s really the one that keeps you thinking about it the most?
[00:40:31] Dr. Kelly Jenks: There’s probably three things. So the obvious mystery coming out of the archeology, that is driving me nuts right now, is this, what seems to be, at least at this point, to me, this unusual pattern of items being left on the floors of structures very shortly before they were destroyed. And so the cow skull, the Kona shell, probably a horse skull, probably a sheep effigy pot. I don’t focus on ritual. I’m much more into like the social identities and multiethnic context, but this looks very purposeful.
[00:41:08] Like there’s a reason for doing it and because of the multi-ethnic context, I also am at a bit of a loss. It’s not unheard of or uncommon to find patterns like this, or behaviors like this of, you know, like deliberately leaving a shell or placing skulls in, in particular locations, or having a representation, a pot that’s, you know, in a particular form, that you leave in a place maybe as thanks, maybe to encourage success and fertility of your sheep.
[00:41:36] Maybe ’cause it’s cute, (laughs) I don’t know. But a lot of those things, like when you’re working in a particular cultural context, you can find the patterns like, “Well, we oftentimes find this kind of thing in these sites, so it probably was the same. They’re probably doing the same thing here.” One of the things that’s so interesting about this time and these kinds of communities is they’re really an eclectic mix, and that also means it’s a lot harder to kind of know how to interpret the patterns when we see them. So that’s something that is keeping me up at night a little bit. The horse skull especially was sort of like a man, this is very godfather-esque. (laughter) You don’t find a lot of horse bone in archeological sites. They’re big animals. You’re not gonna keep them anywhere near the settlement.
[00:42:22] It’s just an odd thing to find. I think, for me personally, and this is part of what draws me to archeology, I’m really enjoying working with the collections from the 1940s. And a lot of this was the bulk materials, bags of broken pottery, things that were left behind, but because of that, they have the cutout paper tags that the students would’ve written, where they were recovered and what they were in 1946.
[00:42:48] And I hope we find field notes and maps and those things, but even without that, trying to kind of reconstruct the logic and figure out where they were and what they were finding. I love that kind of thing. That’s sort of archeology in a nutshell, is working from relatively little information and trying to like, logic your way back.
[00:43:06] So I’m really enjoying that and I’m hopeful that we can kinda learn a lot more from a collection that otherwise wouldn’t see a lot of use, right? Because initially when we were able to track it down with the Maxwell, the site name that it was assigned was not one that anybody remembered. It wasn’t called the “Silva site.” It had a random code. And so the more we learned from that, the more other people can potentially do with it too. And it’s been really cool, like, when we found the sheep pot, one of the coolest things was then calling Moises at the land grant and being like, “You guys need to call the Maxwell and go look at this thing. Like, this is great!”
[00:43:43] So they got to go down and like see all the, what had been rediscovered within the collections, now that we had a context for it. But I’m also just excited.
You mentioned the article in the Santa Fe paper today about sort of the San Miguel del Vado, and they’re sometimes called the Sandoval Seven, like these land grant communities, a lot of which really suffered because of that Supreme Court decision.
[00:44:05] Having kind of worked in these communities for a number of years now, like, it’s really fun to see how many people are reconnecting with, or connecting differently with that history, and are excited to learn more, and are energized to try to do more to help those communities succeed, and to help spread the word about the history and the heritage and everything we’re doing.
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[00:44:31] Emily Withnall: To learn more about the Cañón de Carnué archeological project, check the link in our show notes, and if you are interested in doing a deeper dive on land grant history in New Mexico, the show notes provide excellent resources for further research. Thanks for listening.
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[00:44:40] Emily: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Our producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios.
This season is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler with additional editing by Monica Braine.
Our recording engineers are Collin Ungerleider and Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe.
[00:45:00] Technical direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz.
Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann.
Thank you to New Mexico artist “El Brujo” D’Santi Nava for our theme music.
For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app.
[00:45:52] I’m your host, Emily Withnall.
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