An archaeological survey of southern Utah's Comb Ridge is documenting a huge number of sites, from Ice Age camps and 800-year-old Anasazi cliff dwellings to historic artifacts of Anglo settlers.
The field crews are finding "substantial" sites, says the project director, Winston Hurst, a Blanding resident, "real interesting sites that I didn't know existed."
Comb Ridge is a huge sandstone feature extending from west of Blanding to the vicinity of Bluff, San Juan County. Among the areas covered by the study is Butler Wash, one of the places where Anasazi Indians lived in cliff dwellings.
"Our project area's about 25 miles long," said Hurst. "We have 48,000 acres approximately in our survey area."
The study was launched in 2005 under a contract between the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, administrator of most of the land, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Hurst is a subcontractor. The principal investigator is Catherine M. Cameron, associate professor at the University of Colorado.
Ancient remains "have been impacted by off-road vehicle recreation, surface artifact collecting, and accidental damage by visi-
tors," Adrienne Babbitt, spokeswoman in the BLM's Utah headquarters, Salt Lake City, said in an e-mail. "The Comb Ridge Survey is an unprecedented effort to document the remaining surface artifacts and work with the community to protect these places."
Hurst said the archaeologists have divided the study area into grids of 500 by 500 meters. However, he is not certain how many of the blocks can be surveyed in the time left.
The five-year project is in its second year, he said. After two additional years of field work, a year will be spent to "crunch numbers and get everything together and get reports done."
So far, the team has found a great many archaeological sites, and unexpectedly interesting ones.
"We've got Anasazi roads," Hurst said. These are strange lanes from eight to 10 yards wide "that they were carving across the desert for miles and miles and miles, connecting places of significance.
"We call them roads, but we don't know what they were used for." They probably weren't roads in our sense of routes to transport supplies.
"They don't behave like a road that's designed to facilitate transport and traffic," Hurst added, "They seem to be lines carved into the world."
Such lines have been found in Chaco Canyon, a large Anasazi settlement in New Mexico.
"They're very subtle," Hurst said of the Utah features. "Sometimes you can see them when the light is at a low angle," and then they're hard to see when the sun is at its zenith. Some are easier to see during certain seasons.
They can be easy to miss. "They're subtle enough that when you're walking around on the ground, you don't see them, you look right past them."
Among other discoveries are Hopi-style pottery fragments on trails crossing Comb Ridge. They date from a period after the Hopi's ancestors, the Anasazi, had abandoned settlements in Utah.
"We get these stray pieces of 14th, 15th century Hopi pottery," Hurst said. The scientists find "just enough to indicate they were back there on a small scale.
"We're not really sure what they were doing — maybe revisiting old ancestral shrines."
Every Pueblo settlement with significant material "has been looted to some degree, and often to a considerable degree, especially the trash middens where the burials are." These sites have been "really hammered" by looters hunting for pots and other material to collect or sell.
Also, Hurst said, "the surface collection has been just horrific. . . . That place out there has been just collected to death."
All-terrain vehicle traffic also has caused destruction. So have horseback riders. "They're out there in droves these days," he noted.
The horse is a heavy animal, and when a person is on board while it walks through soft sediments, with five or six horses in a line, they can badly damage archaeological remains.
"They can tear up a midden on an archaeological site as much as a bunch of looters out there for a weekend," Hurst said.
Still, the survey is gleaning important information. Although sites that are looted and picked over are not as easy to document, by crawling through sagebrush for hours and carefully studying the bits that remain, crews are starting to piece together the story of Comb Ridge.
"Despite all that," Hurst said, "we're squeezing interesting stuff out of it."
E-mail: bau@desnews.com