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City Urged To Avoid Building on Indian Village Site

Posted on: Friday, 18 February 2005, 15:03 CST

A city committee of archaeologists has recommended that Santa Fe leaders avoid building a new civic center on a downtown site because of concerns that construction could ruin an undisturbed Indian village buried there.

The group's recommendation Thursday follows the same recommendation from Museum of New Mexico archaeologists this week, who, during excavations last fall, found what appears to be a relatively undisturbed village dating to between A.D. 1350 and 1400. The settlement, possibly a Tewa village, is concentrated in the area around the Sweeney Convention Center, City Hall and federal buildings across the street to the north.

The team of archaeologists found human skeletal remains during its dig, upsetting officials from at least one local pueblo, the Tesuque Pueblo.

On Thursday, during an Archaeological Review Committee meeting, Tesuque Pueblo Gov. Mark Mitchell urged Santa Fe leaders to leave the human remains alone.

"I'm sure all of you in this room can trace your ancestry back to Mexico, or Spain or Europe," Mitchell said. "For me and my pueblo, these remains are our history, these remains are our pueblo. When you pull these remains up, you are taking my history away ... the site is sacred, and those remains should stay where they are at."

Mitchell said his comments weren't meant out of disrespect, nor were they designed to disrupt any plans "because I know Governor (Bill Richardson) has supported" building a new civic center in Santa Fe, he said.

Disappointed that his pueblo was not contacted sooner, Mitchell said, "We found out about this through the newspaper," and added that pueblo leaders want the opportunity "to speak our minds before any development happens -- before any earth is moved or dug."

Tim Maxwell, a state archaeologist and a principal investigator with the Museum of New Mexico's team of archaeologists, told Mitchell that, upon finding the human remains, "we covered them up right away."

Despite the concerns expressed this week, city officials are moving forward with their convention center plans.

The next step, local leaders said Thursday, is to hire an archaeology firm to perform further excavations to recover any remaining artifacts for carbon dating and analysis.

But the matter of what will be done with the human remains that were found has not been decided.

Even the archaeological review committee, comprised of experts in the field, provided no answer to that question.

Committee chair Janet McVickar said that decision will likely be made by city officials in conjunction with pueblo leaders and the state's Historic Preservation Office.

Another question raised Thursday is how to preserve the cultural remains that are dug up in the process of constructing the 68,950- square-foot, $42 million civic center.

One idea floated during Thursday's meeting was to build a section of the civic center that keeps intact any unearthed pueblo village remnants in a public viewing area.

Santa Fe's design plan for a new civic center, while calling for preserving the integrity of cultural remains, does not specify exactly how to do that -- an issue city officials agree will likely become a focus of future discussions.

Stephen Lentz, a museum archaeologist who prepared the 82-page report on the team's findings submitted to the committee on Thursday, said future excavation work will likely include taking digital photographs of unearthed pueblo sites, structures or other cultural remains, and mapping the area out for future reference when, or if, other excavations in the downtown area are performed.

Source: Albuquerque Journal

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