The site as a whole is quite complex, consisting of
multiple historic and cultural features which include Native American
ruins, an 18th century catholic church, the western most battle field
of the Civil War, and a historic ranch, the Forked Lightning, which was once the home of the
movie star Greer Garson. Two sites within the park, the pueblo and the
Glorieta Pass Battlefield, are National Historic Landmarks.
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| Originally designated a New Mexico state monument in 1965, it was established as Pecos National Monument by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. 25 years
later the park was greatly enlarged and renamed to Pecos National Historical
Park. |
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The
main unit of the park preserves the ruins of Pecos Pueblo, also known
historically as Cicuye. The first Pecos pueblo was one of two dozen
rock-and-mud villages built in the valley around AD 1100 in the
prehistoric Pueblo II Era. Within 350 years the Pueblo IV Era Pecos
village had grown to house more than 2,000 people in its five-storied
complex. The main unit also protects the remains of Mission Nuestra
Señora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula de los Pecos, a Spanish mission
near the pueblo built in the early 17th century. A 1.25-mile (2 km)
self-guiding trail begins at the nearby visitor center and winds
through the ruins of Pecos Pueblo and the mission church.
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| The Forked
Lightning was added to Pecos after actress Greer Garson sold the
property to the Conservation Fund, in 1991, which then donated the land
to the National Park Service, increasing the area of the park by 5,500
acres.. |
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| While
the cultural history of the site is diverse and complex, so is that of
the site’s conservation. The largest feature, the mission, was
constructed of adobe, a material which was used extensively in the arid
climate of the American Southwest, but which has fallen into disfavor
for a variety of reasons which include building code, lack of skilled
labor, and cost of construction. In order to protect the historic
adobe, in some cases Pecos has followed the same approach which Fort
Union has employed, applying a thin layer of modified mud over the top
of the bricks to “shelter” them from the elements. In addition to using
shelter coats, the park has also employed a second approach to
protection, using veneers. New exterior walls are constructed from new
adobe blocks. These veneers, shelter the delicate original material by
encasing it in new, sacrificial adobe walls. Both approaches offer
protection, however each method has drawbacks. |
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The records which detail the excavation,
stabilization, and maintenance of resources at Pecos PNP span more than
a century. The development of the site, as it continued to be excavated
and stabilized for interpretation, is detailed in The Spanish Colonial
Architecture of Pecos, (Ivey 2005). However, the types of documentation
methods used by cultural resource managers and archaeologists has never
been formally reviewed or assessed.
Since the beginning of excavation and stabilization work at Pecos by Jesse Nusbaum and Alfred Kidder
in the early20h century, many archaeological projects and
stabilization efforts have occurred on the resources at Pecos. In
several instances, documentation of these efforts is confined to
narrative notes and archaeological drawings (plan, profile, etc.) These
tend to be either incomplete or unclear. Bill Witkind, who was the
director of excavation activities between 1939 and 1940, famously
created a very complex numbering system, which made him prone to
referencing incorrect room identifiers in his notes. Later, the
excavation work performed under Jean Pinkley from 1966 to 1969, was
found to be substantially lacking in documentation at the time of her
untimely death. Notes and field note books, while easy to complete in
the field at the time activities are being conducted, tend to be
disorganized, lacking in completion, and not easy to reference.
Thankfully, James Ivey mined these archaeological notes for critical
information, which were then organized into a narrative in The Spanish Colonial Architecture of Pecos; Courtney White also included these in Convento Room Histories (date).
Making
sense of original fabric, and what interventions were made when and
where and by whom, has been of interest to park staff since the
mid-1970s. Over the course of twenty years, several park archaeologists
and outside consultants put significant effort into organizing the
archaeological and maintenance records for prehistoric and historic
structures. The most useful of these are: the stabilization history of
the entire site, A Stabilization History of Pecos National Monument:
1974 and Before, by Larry Nordby, Gary Matlock, and William Cruetz in
1974; several reports written by James Ivey in the 1980s focusing on
the evolution of the Spanish colonial architecture of the site,
leading up to his magnum opus A History of the Establishment of Pecos
National Monument and The Spanish Colonial Architecture of Pecos
Pueblo, New Mexico in 2005; and Convento Room Histories, a compendium
of references to stabilization by rooms in the Convento written by
Courtney White in 1994 which builds upon the efforts of Nordby et al.
to update the narratives with work completed in the elapsing twenty
years. These documents provide an essential guide for cultural resource
managers to reference the standing walls and features by location, and
access an entire past history containing stabilization and condition
records.
Conditions and Stabilization Documentation (1974-present)
In
the 1970s, cultural resource documentation shifted away from
archaeological records to documentation about the condition of the
walls. The first instance is Nordby, Matlock and Cruetz’s report from
1974, which describes in narrative the condition of each wall face or
elevation by room, along with the present dimensions of the walls.
After this, the only documentation consists of field notes from Nordby.
Into the 1980s, documentation is sporadic. A brief document was
prepared in 1985 which contains a list of preservation activities and
in 1986the only documentation consists of reports for emergency
stabilization, including work on the North Transept wall in the 18th C.
Church. Some information from this period between 1974 and 1987 was
recovered from interviews between maintenance crew members and Courtney
White, and their recollections are included in Convento Room Histories.
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| The products of this project phase, including the
Conservation History Database, represent yet another moment in which
knowledge is consolidated. Descriptions of the work carried out since
the mid-1990s will serve as an “update” to the room chronologies.
Departing from the conventions used in the past, however, is the
addition of photography to aid in illustrating conditions and
interventions. The increasing reliance on photography as a tool for
recording, encouraged by the introduction of digital methods, means
that the amount of information to be potentially gleaned from picture
records is substantially greater than written forms or descriptions. By
making photographic metadata queriable, the Conservation History
Database is thus a more potent and sustainable tool for the cultural
resource managers at Pecos NHP. |
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