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(Brad Traver) In archaeology, the park was expanded in 2004 by congress to
include
125,000 new acres. We aquired 26,000 of those
in 2011
and so this last summer in the first summer we've been able to get out there to see
what we bought. We continue to find sites that fill in the story from
13,000 years ago all the way up to the current time there's a
13,000 year period of unbroken presence in this park and there are not a lot
of places in the Southwest can say that.
(Bill Reitze) As the park Archeologist, my job is kinda focused on managing the
archaeological resources in the park.
So we have archaeology uh... everything from large Pueblo structures like you
might see the park, Puerco Pueblo,
uh... to small lithic scatters to historic structures, roads, trails, things
like that.
And uh... my job is to go out and uh... first of all make sure that they're in
good condition or that the Park Service is doing everything that we can to maintain them in good
condition,
to try to encourage research and to do research of my own, as well as to go out
an inventory for new archaeology.
Primarily what we've been doing now is looking at areas of high potential
or high-impacts, so places where you might have erosion coming through that might
be washing things out
or large uh... ridgecrests or overlooks that are high potential for archeological science.
Well I think that there's some pretty incredible petroglyph signs that are in the
expansion lands.
Uh... i think it's a really interesting resource that we can then go out and try
to to learn more about. This is one of the examples of
some of the many petroglyph panels that we are starting to find in the expansion
lands of Petrified Forest.
Uh... this, we've known about this site for just over a year but it's just one
of many
and almost every day that we go out we'll find uh... new sites and new
petroglyph sites out here.
Lately we've been calling it the ripple site. It's a large petroglyph site.
It's got I think about twenty five different petroglyph panels.
The petroglyphs themselves have a lot of different design elements that we see throughout
the park but we also have some earlier design elements that we might link with
earlier groups as well as some later stuff that we might link with
Pueblo groups that are around today.
One of the really unique things are archeologically at Petrified Forest is the
petrified wood.
The petrified wood has for ten thousand years been a source of raw
material that people have used in the production of stone tools.
Uh... we have
arrow heads that are actually made out of petrified wood.
The wood itself is actually a good material to chip into
stone tools. So one of things that we see is these beautiful projectile points
that are actually made out of
petrified wood.
Northern Arizona's had a long history of occupation.
Uh... since the last ice age people have been living here.
What's special about Petrified Forest is that we've managed to preserve this record.
So for the last thirteen thousand years we have a record of people living
and working and surviving here at Petrified Forest.