And another thing I wrote. This was an amazingly fun piece, about an archaeological site on Albuquerque’s west side that dates back to Folsom times. Marquee archaeology is all fancy ruins at places like Chaco, and that’s fun for sure, but the old hunter gatherer cultures that didn’t leave much stuff behind are pretty interesting too. (Unfortunately web readers miss the terrific graphic Carol Cooperrider made to go with this.)

Amid abandoned appliances on Albuquerque’s West Mesa, archaeologists have found evidence of some of the earliest humans to live in the middle Rio Grande Valley.

Some 10,000 years ago, these visitors set up a hunting camp on the edge of a tiny, shallow lake. They probably stayed no more than a few days, but when they departed, they left behind a bit of trash.

For that, Bruce Huckell is eternally grateful.

Picking through the West Mesa soil over the past four summers, a team lead by Huckell has found a window to a time, a place and a people that are very different from what we see here today.

(It’s not that I’ve been extraordinarily busy, it’s just that a bunch of stuff that piled up over the last month or more all got flushed out to fill newspapers for the long holiday weekend.)