Mesa Grande Annual Open House, 2011
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Photos from the Annual Open House at Mesa Grande held 19 March 2011, hosted by the Arizona Museum of Natural History, the Mesa Grande Neighborhood Alliance, and the Southwest Archaeology Team.
This event is the one day each year that the Mesa Grande site is open to the public.
- Archeology
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An archeologists tool kit, in front of a shallow test pit.
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Sifting frames belonging to the Southwest Archaeology Team (SWAT).
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A member of the Southwest Archaeology Team excavates matrix materials from a test pit. The square hole is not a room, and the edges of the pit are not actual walls. The material removed from the pit is where artifacts are recovered from, and the partitions between the pits are where the archaeological stratification is exposed and left in situ to preserve the archaeological record. The pit is dug until sterile subsoil is found.
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Another bucket waits to be sifted, next to the one which was just emptied into the sifting frame.
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A member of the Southwest Archaeology Team holds in his right hand a prehistoric pottery sherd that was excavated from one of the test pits behind him only one day earlier. The artifact was being temporarily stored in the paper bag in his left hand, which has tracking information written on the outside. Notice he is very careful in keeping track of which bag this belongs in, by holding the bag the whole time he is displaying the artifact to visitors.