Paul Minnis

Thoughts on the Arroyo Hondo Project, April 2019

Over the past four decades, I have worked throughout the Southwest and adjacent areas, from Mesa Verde, to rolling hills of the Mogollon Rim country, to the foothills of the Phoenix Basin, to the Mimbres Valley, and most recently twenty years in exile south of the border in the Casas Grandes region of Chihuahua.  Each has been rewarding and edifying in its own way. 

My one summer at Arroyo Hondo was an important and much appreciated chapter in my professional life. I had just started graduate school and a senior graduate student, Wilma Wetterstrom, had just earned a faculty position at MIT starting in the fall of 1974.  She needed to spend the summer finishing her dissertation before her Cambridge rat race began.  I was Wilma’s replacement at Arroyo Hondo, although nobody really could replace Wilma!

While only a single summer season, my experiences were most helpful to me in two major ways.  First, I got to observe a superbly organized field project, some lessons from which I was able to adapt for many of my own projects.  More importantly, perhaps, it was the first time I was able to integrate my long term interests in paleoethnobotany and archaeology.  An unfortunate reality for much “specialist” research is that it is divorced from the field project.  Archaeobotany is in the lab, and archaeology is in the field.  The Arroyo Hondo project integrated the two, and it also integrated other analytic specialists in the field.

Of course, there were many other benefits. One always meets interesting people on projects, some of whom become life-long friends. Being near Santa Fe was also a plus.