SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) – Archaeologists have discovered one of Santa Fe’s earliest streets and a possible plaster pit dating from the 1600s.
New Mexico’s Office of Archaeological Studies recently found the cobbled surface near the existing Santa Fe Plaza, The Santa Fe New Mexican reported.
No one knows the street’s name or where it started and stopped, but it is believed to shadow today’s Otero Street and may have led to Santa Fe’s first parroquia, or parish church. The street does not appear on the first known map of Santa Fe in 1766.
Amid the cobbles were bits of Pueblo Indian pottery, some of it glazed ware from Galisteo Pueblo and other villages from the south, that ceased to be produced in the early 1700s, and types of majolica pottery from Puebla, Mexico, that also were discontinued after the 1600s. That means the road was used during Santa Fe’s first century as a Spanish city.
A 2008 excavation turned up a cobbled surface about four feet below today’s ground level – proof of how much earth has been added over four centuries to what once was a marsh fed by springs around today’s Cienega Street.
A second dig, which began in September and ended last week when the site is to be reburied, has determined that the cobbled surface was a street running generally north-south.
Drury Southwest, a hotel chain that paid for the dig, plans to redevelop the area around former St. Vincent Hospital complex where the cobbled surface was found.
Archaeologists exposed about half of what they believe was its standard Spanish width of 7 1/2 varas, or 21 feet. Although the route of Palace Avenue is believed to have been in existence early in the 1600s, the newly discovered path could be Santa Fe’s first paved street.
“We’re not talking about cobble being placed carefully like they did cobblestone” in Europe and some Spanish colonial cities, archaeologist Jim Moore told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “It just looks like somebody brought in a couple of loads of gravel and dumped them on the road to create a nice solid surface.”
Guadalupe Martinez, an archaeologist on both digs who has handled questions from a never-ending parade of locals and tourists at the site, joked that the finds prove New Mexicans have been throwing their trash on the streets for centuries. “It’s a tradition,” he said.
Another excavation a few yards from the road surface dug into a garbage pit. It may have started out as a hole from excavating earth for adobe bricks, Moore said, but soon was filled with dirt plus bits of pottery, bone, wood, ash and a few metal objects like nails.
One of the most intriguing of the artifacts from this fall’s dig is a piece of Chinese porcelain from the garbage pit. The archaeologists say it may have been made a century before Santa Fe was founded, then was acquired in the Philippines, taken by Spanish galleon to Mexico and hauled by wagon up the Camino Real to Santa Fe.
“It was an heirloom piece when it was brought,” said Patricia Rogers, another archaeologist working on the dig. “It was something highly prized.”
Drury Southwest is expected to keep some of the artifacts to display inside its new hotel.
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Information from: The Santa Fe New Mexican, http://www.sfnewmexican.com
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AP-WF-10-20-11 1708GMT
