ABQjournal: Pueblo San Marcos Once a Thriving Trade Hub By Patrick Miller, For the Journal
From about 1350 to 1680, more than a half-dozen similarly sized pueblos spanned the basin. San Marcos was the largest, and its 2,000-room village was probably the valley’s economic powerhouse, according to Mark Michel, president of The Archaeological Conservancy, an Albuquerque-based organization that now owns most of the site.
Spread over about 60 acres on a bluff overlooking the San Marcos Arroyo, the pueblo thrived thanks to its lucrative trade in turquoise and distinctive lead-glazed ceramic pottery.
“San Marcos is only one of two places in the New World where it was developed. The other was Honduras,” Michel said. …
Passed by Congress last year, the Galisteo Basin Archaeological Sites Protection Act is the first step toward what Michel hopes will be a long-range plan to preserve the Galisteo Basin’s most important sites, most of which are on private land. …
The new law designates 24 sites in the basin. “It sets up a framework for protecting them in a public and private partnership,” Michel said. “It does allow the federal government to acquire sites from willing landowners.”
But Congress has yet to fund the bill. Michel said his group is asking for $2.5 million to fully implement the act. …
Regardless of how the pueblos withered, there is no doubt the Galisteo Basin is a national treasure unlike any other, Michel said as he stood on a recently excavated mound of earth. The pueblos were among the largest in what would become the United States far surpassing the size of settlements in the Chaco Culture National Historical Park or Mesa Verde National Park.
To schedule a free tour of Pueblo San Marcos, contact The Archaeological Conservancy at (505) 266-1540.
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UNM – Quantum Fall 1999 – San Marcos Pueblo
The Secrets of San Marcos Pueblo by Michael Padilla
UNM archaeologists use old and new technologies to uncover answers to questions about an ancient Pueblo.
http://www.unm.edu/~quantum/quantum_fall_1999/san_marcos.html