Ancestral Sites Tour - The Trash Mound

Here the trail is built over trash and debris accumulated over centuries of people living in Pecos Pueblo. These trash deposits attracted archaeologist A. V. Kidder to Pecos, and his excavation of the pueblo began here. He found trash deposits over 20 feet high in this location. The deep trash deposits were useful for establishing a regional cultural chronology based on changes in pottery style, which Kidder called the Pecos Classification. 

 “It was obvious that we were digging in the greatest rubbish heap and cemetery that had ever been found in the Pueblo region . . . the same sort of slope stretched away to the south on the east side alone for nearly a quarter of a mile . . . The beds of rubbish were repositories for ashes, house sweepings, table leavings, broken pottery, and discarded implements; they served, as well, for the burial of the dead . . . caused, apparently, by no disrespect for the departed, but rather by the fact that the heaps offered as a rule the only soft earth for gravedigging in a land of bare rocks and hard-packed clays.”  

—A. V. Kidder, An Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, 1924