The Pueblo itself consists of several architectural components: the North Quadrangle, a large rectangular roomblock; South Pueblo, a long linear roomblock; and several smaller adjacent roomblocks. These roomblocks contain approximately 1020 rooms, 26 kivas and one enclosed plaza (Kidder 1958). Between 1915 and 1929 Kidder excavated roughly 200 rooms, 12 kivas, and a number of large trenches through the refuse middens. The artifact collection, with more than 25,000 artifacts, has not been analyzed since Kidder's original work.
Kidder published eleven books or articles on Pecos but in none of them did he include a map of the entire Pueblo. His published map showed only the North Quadrangle. During the course of excavation Kidder and the archaeologists working with him constructed at least 20 excavation drawings, each of these maps portrayed a section of the Pueblo as it was excavated.
Kidder had deposited his fieldnotes and maps at the Museum of New Mexico, in Santa Fe. Twenty of these drawings were digitized in ARC/INFO on a Calcomp digitizing board. 17 of these 20 digitized coverages were then used to produce the composite excavation map.
Before excavation began at Pecos a surveyor laid out a grid across the entire site, and wooden stakes were placed every 50 feet along the baseline and along the East and West boundaries. After figuring out the coordinate system utilized by Kidder, this grid system provided the common points necessary to append the 17 drawings. Fortunately, Kidder and his associates had drafted the excavation maps on graph paper and had consistently marked the site grid corners on the drawings. Using these grid corners I was able to develop a technique in ARC/INFO to transform the digitized drawings into the original excavation coordinate system and join all the maps in their correct position.
The individual drawings were appended into one covering the entire site. Since no modern topographic map of Pecos exists, a topographic map of the site was needed. During an 8-day period in August 1996 I remapped Pecos using a Sokkia SET4B Total Station, with an attached data collector. Mapping the entire site required 1872 3-dimensional locational points and 22 mapping stations. The points were then ported to Surfer, a PC-based package for surface modeling, to produce a topographic map of the site. These points encompassed an area of about 38.5 acres.
The final product, a topographic map overlain by the excavation units, was achieved thorough a series of transformations in ARC/INFO. The next step was that of matching the topography to the excavation areas, using the corners of the defensive wall that surrounds the site. The two maps closely overlaid each other.
These maps of Pecos can be used not only to look at errors in the original maps but more importantly to address questions of spatial distribution of artifacts that would have previously been difficult to answer. Since all the excavation information is now on one map, artifacts can be efficiently and quickly plotted. In addition, this project has given me insight into how the 1958 map, produced 20 years after Kidder worked at Pecos, reflects how Kidder saw the Pueblo Pecos.