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Site Report for 5MT3

Site 5MT3 is the largest of the three sites investigated in the Joe Ben Wheat Site Complex. It is a multicomponent pueblo with occupation components dating between Basketmaker III and Pueblo III (or A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300). Joe Ben Wheat directed seventeen University of Colorado Museum field schools at 5MT3 between 1961 and 1991. The site's earliest component dates to approximately A.D. 630, or Basketmaker III, and consists of four pitstructures with associated storage rooms. After an abandonment of three centuries the site area was reoccupied in mid-Pueblo II. The site became quite substantial in Pueblo III, with almost 60 surface rooms and nine kivas built in this period. The final abandonment of the site appears to coincide with the movement of the ancestral Pueblo people from north of the San Juan River to the south by A.D. 1260 or 1280. The final occupation components at the site are contemporaneous with the last occupation of an immense village, Yellow Jacket Pueblo (5MT5), just to the northeast and across a small secondary drainage of Yellow Jacket Creek. The collections and site records for 5MT3 offer a wonderful resource for future research on household organization and life during the last major Pueblo occupation of the Mesa Verde region.

The summary site report for 5MT3 is a PDF text consisting of seven chapters. The introductory chapter outlines the site's archaeology and offers a short history of the excavations and a description of supporting documents. The site setting chapter places 5MT3's occupation into the context of the surrounding sites and natural landscape. An overview of the occupations at 5MT3 summarizes the three major periods of occupation and is followed by chapters summarizing the Basketmaker III, Pueblo II, and Pueblo III architectural data. The concluding remarks suggest why this report is only the beginning of reporting the work at 5MT3. It should be emphasized there is still considerable background work to be done to make the fieldwork at 5MT3 readily comprehensible. A complete site report will require a much more extensive document the length of a dissertation. There is already one dissertation that draws upon the site collections and data to address important household ceramic production and community interaction issues (Mobley-Tanaka 2005Mobley-Tanaka, Jeanette L.
2005 Community from Within: Intracommunity Interaction and the Social Formulation of the Yellow Jacket Community, Southwest Colorado, A.D. 1200-1300. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe.
) and no doubt there will be many more, because of the many research issues that could be addressed with these collections.

The PDF file is 831kb in size. Only basic site maps are included to allow for a relatively manageable file size. We anticipate incorporating more detailed maps as well as photographs into the site report in the foreseeable future.

Download the 5MT3 Site Report (requires Adobe's free Acrobat Reader).