Archaeologists are racing the clock to learn as much as they can about ancestral Puebloans who lived in the Ridges Basin before the area is flooded or affected by construction of the Animas-La Plata Project.
Three summers of excavation are already providing some information, archaeologist James Potter said.
"We're starting to get a better sense of what went on," he said. "We have one more season of field work and then three years to analyze data and write a report."
About 100 ancient inhabited sites have been found in the basin, southwest of Durango.
Leading archaeologist retires
FOR Stanley West, archaeology has always been more than the painstaking scraping away of layer upon layer of history to piece together the past.
The eminent archaeologist, who marked his retirement from the Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow yesterday with a farewell party, was fascinated by the struggle faced by the people of the time and used what he found to build up a picture of their life.
Dr West, who led the reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon village using the archaeological finds of the 1950s and 1960s as a guide, said: "We're talking about people and their struggles – not just artefacts. I had the opportunity to bring our Anglo-Saxon forebears into focus from the fifth Century AD.
Check your basements Remains of Colonial teen pose a 'history mystery'
Archaeologists digging in one of their favorite kinds of pits -- a trash cellar -- figured its mix of coins, pottery shards and pipestems would tell them about one of the earliest European settlements along the Chesapeake Bay.
But a unique and mysterious discovery along a cellar wall promises to be the most telling of all, offering insights into the difficulty of forging a new life in the New World settlement of Providence in the 1600s.
"We did not expect to find this dead guy," said Anne Arundel County archaeologist Al Luckenbach.