Shanna Diederichs will speak about her work excavating an ancestral Pueblo village in the Indian Camp Ranch subdivision northwest of Cortez on Thursday, Aug. 7, as part of the Four Corners Lecture Series.
Diederichs’ presentation, at 7 p.m. at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, is titled “Big House on the Prairie: Results of Excavations on the Basketmaker Communities Project and the Dillard Site Great Kiva.”
The Dillard site has the only known Basketmaker III great kiva in the central Mesa Verde region.
Diederichs is the supervisory field archaeologist for Crow Canyon’s Basketmaker Communities Project, including excavations at the Dillard site, which will be featured on the PBS series, Time Team America. Local viewers can see the Crow Canyon episode, “The Lost Pueblo Village,” on Rocky Mountain PBS or New Mexico’s KNME at 8 p.m. Mountain Time on Tuesday, Aug. 26.
Diederichs, who has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, has been on the Crow Canyon staff since 2011. She has worked in the Southwest for 17 years, serving as a field and laboratory supervisor for numerous cultural resource management surveys, testing, and mitigation projects in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. She was the project director on the Bircher, Pony, and Long Mesa Post-Fire Archaeological Assessments in Mesa Verde National Park between 2001 and 2007. She has written or contributed to numerous resource management planning, reporting, and recommendation documents and has recently contributed to Crucible of Pueblos: The Early Pueblo Period in the Northern Southwest edited by Rich H. Wilshusen, Gregson Schachner, and James R. Allison.
The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center is at 23390 Road K, Cortez. All Four Corners Lecture Series presentations are free to the public.