Aztec Ruins Administrative History

Excavation of the Aztec Ruin had a significant impact on a few of those hired in the opening season. One whose life was altered was Oscar Tatman, owner of a poultry farm and apple orchard south of the ruins. Through many years of association with Morris, Tatman gained a fund of practical archeological and ruin-repair knowledge that qualified him to be hired as caretaker and guide at Aztec Ruin on occasions when Morris was away. Oley Owens was another local farmer supplementing his income at these and other digs. [15] Sherman Howe, raised on a farm just across the Animas River from Aztec Ruin, was one of the schoolboys who broke into the North Wing rooms in 1881. [16] He felt a special enjoyment at being part of the excavation team and later blossomed as a well-informed volunteer guide. During the lean Depression years, when he was fearful of losing his farm, he was especially grateful to be employed on the restoration of the Great Kiva. Finally, as a parting gift to the place he had known all his life, Howe donated a personal artifact collection gathered through years of pothunting about the valley. [17] Jack Lavery, in addition to being a fair carpenter and blacksmith, was an expert mason. "Prehistoric Grandfather," as the Zuni Indians working along side him in Chaco Canyon knew him, was critical to the task at hand at Aztec Ruin. Morris acknowledged that more than half the repair work accomplished at the site during his association with it was done by Lavery. [18]

The years from 1916 to 1922, when Morris was most active in the exploration and interpretation of Aztec Ruin, represented a learning period in the new discipline of Southwestern archeology. Morris and his crew had to experiment with basic procedural and preservation techniques. Aztec Ruin also became a testing ground for new intellectual concepts that determined the future course of Southwestern prehistoric studies. Tree-ring dating, stratigraphically-controlled digging, and comparative architectural and ceramic analyses undertaken at Aztec Ruin became part of the fund of archeological skills applicable to the entire gamut of Anasazi sites. Interpretation of the prehistorical progression made possible through these diverse avenues was constantly reevaluated as the database expanded. To Morris's credit, he kept pace with the science as it evolved in his time.

Near the end of the Aztec project, Morris's activities expanded beyond mere digging and reporting on the site. He erected a small, unobtrusive house in front of the exposed western house block for himself and his mother (see Figure 2.1). He also served as the on-site museum agent in the purchase and transfer to the federal government of the ruins and surrounding land.

Figure 2.1. Earl Halstead Morris in front of the house he built adjacent to Aztec Ruin, ca. 1920.
(Courtesy University of Colorado Museum).

With the American Museum funds for work at Aztec Ruin depleted in the early 1920s, Morris turned to related research across the vast sweeps of the Colorado Plateau. Earlier, he purchased a Model T Ford of 1917 vintage for $104.95. He loaded the open-sided touring car with extra gas and food, a bedroll, water bags, cooking gear, pitch-covered floor boards that could substitute as fire wood in barren wastes, and a kit of tools and a shovel to keep the vehicle operating over virgin terrain. As son of a rough-and-ready frontiersman, he relished such adventure. Slowly Morris tracked down widely scattered and unknown traces of the ancients, from the rugged slick rock ledges bordering the Colorado River to the craggy Lukachukais separating New Mexico and Arizona. From 1923 to 1929, he explored caves sheltered within the inner recesses of Canyon del Muerto, Arizona, where he found structures and deep trash deposits spanning a millennium of human presence. [19] He dug sites representing several stages of Anasazi development in the mountains south of the San Juan and near the massive igneous spire of Bennett Peak at their eastern flanks. Often, he returned to clusters of house remains piled along the mesas bounding the La Plata River, which he had explored with his childhood shovel. Throughout all these excursions, he was constantly on the alert for tree-ring samples to help fill gaps in the temporal chronology being established by tree-ring scholar Andrew E. Douglass.

As more or less a footnote to his preferred areas of concentration, for five winter seasons during the 1920s, Morris also worked for the Carnegie Institution of Washington in excavations and repair of the huge Maya site of Chichen Itza on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.

During the 1930s, Morris was called upon for important undertakings, which reinforced and enhanced the cultural heritage of three Southwestern national parks or monuments. This came about because he was known for having a unique combination of archeological and engineering expertise. Morris secured the Mummy Cave tower in Canyon del Muerto, Arizona, and the multistoried tower in Cliff Place in Mesa Verde, Colorado. Both structures were precariously cracked and likely to come cascading down the canyon talus if not soon repaired. He threw up wing dams to keep lower units of White House, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, from being washed away. Probably the project with which he was most emotionally involved was the restoration of the Great Kiva at Aztec Ruin to demonstrate to modern observers both the architectural abilities and the religious base of the Anasazi. More than 50 years later, these monuments endure for the benefit of future generations.

Toward the end of the decade of the 1930s, Morris's active field work came to a triumphant end. The significant excavation of a Basketmaker village north of Durango, Colorado, took the human drama as it had been played out in the northern Southwest back to days before the Christian Era. Attainment of these dates was to Morris the culmination of a 20-year hunt for wood samples that provided a scaffold of time for the cultural evolution of the Anasazi. Having supplied examples of the last-gasp era as represented at Aztec Ruin, it was only fitting that he also supplied those defining the beginning.

The final sixteen years of Morris's life were spent in the work room of his home in Boulder, Colorado, and basking in honors bestowed upon him for his lifetime dedication to unraveling Southwestern prehistory. He completed a series of technical reports resulting from the prodigious gathering of raw data. Patiently he advised younger men coming up through the ranks and responded to their questions about the opening of Aztec Ruin. He contributed an assortment of well-worn hand tools for a museum display at the monument, and he sent a photograph of himself (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2. Earl Halstead Morris, ca. 1950.

At age 67, death took Morris back to the place where his notable career began. His ashes were distributed by Homer Hastings, monument superintendent, within a portion of the Aztec Ruin which Morris had cleared exactly 40 years before. A decade later, the precise location of the burial could not be positively identified. [20] A bronze plaque noting his contributions was installed in the part of the visitor center at Aztec Ruins built by him as the Morris home. The excavator of the principal attraction at the monument, the West Ruin, had indeed become one with the great house and its long-departed inhabitants.