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Next Speaker

April 6, 2026

Tom Windes

Tom grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and received his anthropology degrees from the University of North Carolina (BA-1965) and the University of New Mexico (MA-1967) before being drafted in 1967. He spent his early years working on two huge PIV sites (Sapawe and Tsama; 1969-1970) in the Chama River Valley with the UNM Field Schools. After a year with the US Forest Service in SE Utah (1970-1971), he joined the Chaco Project in its beginning field year of 1972. He has worked on Chaco-related archaeological projects ever since, doing site inventory surveys, excavations, and publishing over 100 articles and monographs of his work in Scientific American, American Antiquity, New Mexico Historical Review, Kiva, Journal of Archaeological Scienceand other journals as well as monographs by the National Park Service. His most extensive works include excavation reports of Pueblo Alto, the PII Spadefoot Toad, and the BMIII-PI sites in Chaco Canyon, covering occupations between the AD 500s and 1100s.

He continues to do inventory and sampling of architectural wood in prehistoric and historic buildings notably in the Albuquerque area, in Hispanic villages along the Upper Pecos River Valley and in Taos (NM), Chaco Canyon (NM), Aztec Ruins (NM), Mesa Verde (CO), Grand Canyon (AZ), Montezuma Castle (AZ), Tonto (AZ), Canyon del Chelly (AZ), Manti-LaSal National Forest (SE Utah), Cedar Mesa/Beef Basin in Bears Ears National Monument and Natural Bridges (Utah), early Navajo sites in the Chaco vicinity, and many others.

For the past 19 years, Tom has also worked in SE Utah documenting, mapping, recording, and taking tree-ring samples from intact or nearly intact cliff ruins in Natural Bridges and the new Bears Ears (Cedar Mesa/Beef Basin) national monuments. Tom's interests include ceramic analyses, ground stone, Chacoan architecture and greathouse communities, architectural wood, dating techniques (i.e., tree-ring, radiocarbon, and archaeomagnetic dating), the Chacoan shrine communications system, ant studies, and turquoise craft activities.

TOPIC

"This talk covers 25 years of field work in the Bears Ears National Monument in SE Utah, an area of controversy since first established by President Obama, mostly eradicated by President Trump, and restored by President Biden. Our focus has been in recording historic and prehistoric sites with structural wood there because of the impacts by the greatly increased visitation and looting, largely sparked by the controversy and outside recognition of its natural and cultural resources. For the first time, a group of Native American tribes have worked together for years to protect this culturally sensitive area.

As a volunteer group, the Woodrats have detailed mapped and tallied many of these widely visited sites within the Bears Ears to establish a baseline record for the BLM, NPS, and USFS, and more, for these intact and semi-intact sites, primarily located within the many canyons of the area. This work has particularly helped refine the chronology of the Puebloan occupation of the area in the Thirteenth Century when the region was largely de-populated by the late AD 1200s. Although several causes have been marked as primary movers of this population movement out of the Four Corners, our work establishes new possibilities that helped prompt the massive movements of peoples across the Southwest and world-wide in the late 1200s."

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History of Taos Archaeological Society Project

 An effort is currently underway to build a historical timeline of TAS events and history! We need your help!

The Taos Archaeological Society has operated for 34 years. In that time, many documents have been produced. Unfortunately, TAS does not have a complete record of documents produced and distributed.

 We are in need of documents/publications that date from September 1999 through February 2014. 

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Past bulletins, meeting minutes, financial statements, member lists, and other communications. 

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