Edward F. Berger and the Cherry Creek High School Programs 1968–1977

In 1968, Ed Berger, a history teacher at Cherry Creek High School (CCHS) in the Denver metro area, began bringing small groups of students to the Cortez area every summer for educational programs (Berger 1993, 2009; Berger and Berger 2016). These were designed to help students become self-motivated learners through participating in a variety of activities, including community involvement, tutoring other students, developing a personal understanding of the area’s natural environment, and immersing themselves in understanding the area’s history, with emphasis on visiting and interpreting archaeological sites. In 1970, Berger purchased a house in Arriola, Colorado, which he called the “Cherry Creek House,” to provide accommodations for the students who participated in his summer programs. In 1972, Berger incorporated his educational initiative as a nonprofit organization called Interdisciplinary Supplemental Education Programs, Incorporated (I-SEP).

In 1969, Berger was introduced to prominent southwestern archaeologist Arthur Rohn, who agreed to help Berger and his CCHS students gain hands-on experience in archaeological excavation. Thus, participation in archaeological fieldwork was added to the supplemental and enrichment programs offered to students. During the summer programs of 1971 through 1973, the CCHS students assisted in excavations alongside Rohn’s Wichita State University graduate students at the Lee Scott site near Arriola. The results of this work were never published, and apparently a report of the excavations was not written. In the summers of 1974 through 1977, I-SEP employed Ronald Gould, a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin who had been one of Rohn’s graduate students at Wichita State University, to work as an “archaeo-educator.” His responsibilities included directing CCHS summer program students in the excavation of the Mustoe site in the Goodman Point area. Gould’s (1982) dissertation, which used neutron activation analysis of pottery from the Mustoe site, is available from the University of Texas library and is the only report of the excavations.

In 1974, Ed Berger purchased 80 acres of land in Crow Canyon, where he began to develop a permanent home for his I-SEP programs. The following year, he completed his doctorate in education at the University of Northern Colorado based on the educational concepts that he had developed and put into practice in his CCHS programs (see Franklin, chapter 8 in this volume). Ed began operating his CCHS summer programs from the new Crow Canyon property. In the spring of 1975 Ed moved three state-surplus trailers to the property, linked them together, and remodeled them to provide classrooms, a kitchen, and student housing. The cluster of trailers was covered on the outside with rough-cut lumber, which gave it a rustic western look, and it soon became known among the students as “The Fort.” Ed set up a large water storage tank, which had to be filled with water hauled from town, to provide gravity-fed water to the buildings. He also installed a septic system for sewage treatment. During the summer of 1975, Berger continued offering his summer programs for CCHS students housed in their new accommodations at Crow Canyon. In 1976, Ed married Joanne Hindlemann, and the couple moved into a travel trailer on the property, where they stayed until they built a small apartment adjoining the Fort in 1979. Ed Berger resigned from the Cherry Creek High School faculty in 1976 but was contracted to continue offering summer programs for the school during the summers of 1976 and 1977, which included excavating at the Mustoe site. After the 1977 program season, there were no more archaeological excavation programs conducted by I-SEP until after the merger with CAA was completed.

The I-SEP / Crow Canyon School Programs 1976–1982

Between 1976 and 1981, educational programs offered by I-SEP and what was by then known as the Crow Canyon School diversified and increased in enrollment. Ed Berger began offering continuing education programs for teachers through an agreement with Colorado State University (Berger 1993, 2009). From 1977 through 1979, job training programs for students from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe were implemented with funding through the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA); one emphasis was preparing students for anticipated jobs with the newly formed Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park. In 1979, a new set of field programs, in what was called the Interpretive Services Division, was added to the Crow Canyon repertoire; prominent rock art researcher Sally Cole led river trips on which groups from the Denver Museum of Natural History visited and helped record the San Juan Canyon’s outstanding petroglyph and pictograph panels. Fred Blackburn, former head of the Bureau of Land Management Grand Gulch Ranger program in southeastern Utah, led groups on educational expeditions to a variety of natural history and archaeological locations in the Four Corners area. In 1979 and 1980, with funding from the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, fourteen public seminars led by archaeologists and cultural resource managers were presented in venues in surrounding local communities. A 120-page book containing a summary of each presentation and titled Insights into the Ancient Ones was published with Jo Berger as the senior editor (Berger and Berger 1981). A second edition in 1984 (Berger and Berger 1984), which also included statements from E. Charles Adams and Bruce Bradley, was distributed free to libraries. Enlisting community support for the preservation of archaeological sites was also promoted through “Chuckwagon” dinners and evening stage shows that involved talks by Ed Berger about local history and the value of the area’s archaeological resources, as well as musical performances by Jo Berger and other local musicians.

Stuart Struever and the Center for American Archaeology

Stuart Struever was born and raised in central Illinois and had a lifelong interest in archaeology. Stuart was a student of Lewis Binford at the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in 1968. After a brief stint on the faculty of the University of Chicago, he took a position at Northwestern University, where he was allowed to pursue his vision of establishing a network of privately funded nonprofit institutions that were positioned to conduct long-term regional research in archaeology (Struever 1968). While at Northwestern, Struever developed a long-term archaeological research program in southern Illinois, centered at the small town of Kampsville, owned and operated by the nonprofit Foundation for Illinois Archaeology (FIA). Excavations, supported by National Science Foundation and other grants between 1969 and 1978, revealed a long sequence of prehistoric occupations at the deeply stratified Koster site near Kampsville (Struever and Holton 1979). Fieldwork and discoveries at Koster promoted the growth of FIA’s scientific capabilities and also attracted much public interest through well-attended interpretive tours of the excavations and public speaking engagements by Struever. At Koster, Struever developed the model of using public educational programs to generate funding to support a large multidisciplinary archaeology research center. The education programs included field programs for K–12 students and adults, as well as a university-level field school operated in conjunction with Northwestern University. In 1979, the FIA began publishing a magazine titled Early Man, composed of articles about archaeology that were oriented to general audiences. In 1981, the FIA board developed an affiliated satellite campus at Fox River near Chicago and changed the organization’s name to the Center for American Archaeology—a move that set the stage for adding new campuses beyond Illinois.

The Merger of I-SEP and Center for American Archaeology

Also in 1981, Struever met with Ed and Jo Berger to discuss the possibility that Crow Canyon might become affiliated with CAA as the home of its next campus—one in the American Southwest (figure 2.1). Negotiations continued in 1982, and the Bergers spent much of that summer attending educational programs at Kampsville, while Washington State University (WSU) rented the Crow Canyon facilities to house a WSU field school being led by William Lipe and Tim Kohler (see Kohler et al., chapter 3 in this volume); it was conducted in conjunction with the nearby Dolores Archaeological Program. Jo Berger worked on a master’s degree in planning and community development from the University of Colorado, which she completed in August 1982.

On the face of things, a merger between the two organizations was an ideal match. Both organizations were conducting outdoor experiential education programs involving archaeological themes. CAA’s education programs were integrated with a fully developed multidisciplinary archaeological research program in Illinois, and the Bergers were interested in once again offering archaeology excavation programs that contributed to I-SEP’s educational goals. Ed Berger perceived that an affiliation with CAA offered the possibility of much-needed funding, national recognition, and the opportunity for the growth in his Crow Canyon School programs. Struever perceived that the Crow Canyon School’s proximity to Mesa Verde National Park with its well preserved and visually appealing ruins was the ideal place to locate a regional research center in the American Southwest. In late 1982, an agreement was reached in which the two organizations merged, establishing Crow Canyon as an affiliate of CAA. At first it was named the Crow Canyon Campus of the Center for American Archaeology. CAA acquired 70 acres of the 80-acre campus owned by Ed Berger, and Berger donated $101,000 of the appraised value of the land and improvements to help launch the success of the new merger.

Establishing the New Research and Education Center at Crow Canyon, 1983–1986

The merger of I-SEP and CAA at the end of 1982 set in motion a series of changes at Crow Canyon that amplified the goals of creating a major independent archaeological research program and integrating campus-based education programs with the research. By early 1983, a new lodge—with a kitchen, dining hall, and dormitory rooms—replaced one of the old trailers in the Fort (figure 2.2). PhD archaeologists E. Charles Adams and Bruce Bradley were hired to develop and lead a comprehensive research program based on current archaeological method and theory, as incorporated in Struever’s research and the goals of the Center for American Archaeology. Ed Berger became the Center’s executive director with Jo Berger as associate director. In the spring of 1983, excavations were launched at the Duckfoot site under the direction of newly hired Crow Canyon staff archaeologists Adams and Bradley (Lightfoot 1994; Lightfoot and Etzkorn 1993), and by the summer of 1983, a detailed multiyear regional research design was written (Adams 1983). Several hundred students and adults participated in nationally advertised education programs built around fieldwork at the nearby Duckfoot site and analyses of the artifacts from those excavations (see Kohler et al., chapter 3 in this volume). Also in 1983, Bradley and Adams mapped the large Sand Canyon Pueblo, located approximately 12 mi. west of Cortez. In 1984, an excavation program that would ultimately last twelve years was launched at Sand Canyon Pueblo, led by Adams and Bradley (Kuckelman 2007), and DAP veteran archaeologist Lightfoot was hired to lead the excavation program at Duckfoot (see Kohler et al., chapter 3 in this volume).

Between 1982 and 1985, Ed Berger oversaw the construction of the new lodge and ten new cabins, styled after Navajo hogans, to accommodate more adult program participants on campus. Ed and Jo were hands-on leaders in directing the developments and transitions that emerged from the merger with CAA, but by the winter of 1985–1986, the differences in the visions of Struever and the Bergers began to strain the leadership of the organization. CAA was also finding it difficult to manage a satellite campus in Colorado from its offices in Illinois. Developing, maintaining, and operating two major research and education centers created a serious financial strain. The board and staff in Illinois perceived that Struever was putting more energy and resources into developing the facilities and programs at Crow Canyon at the expense of the campus and programs in Illinois. By the end of 1985 the merger between CAA and the Crow Canyon School began to deteriorate. Rather than allow the developments he had worked to build at Crow Canyon to collapse, Struever recruited his lifelong friend and Denver entrepreneur Ray Duncan to chair and populate a new Colorado-based board of trustees.

Expansion of Facilities, Programs, and Staff at Crow Canyon, 1986–1996

In early 1986, further dramatic changes at Crow Canyon were underway. Ed and Joanne Berger resigned to focus their attention on the needs of their newly growing family and to pursue new professional opportunities in educational consulting, planning, and community development. Adams moved to a new job at the Arizona State Museum, and Professor Bill Lipe of Washington State University took on Adams’s research director position part-time. Struever severed his relationship with CAA and retained the title of president of Crow Canyon, but his principal responsibility was fundraising. At Duncan’s request, Struever also resigned from his tenured position at Northwestern to devote his full attention to continue building Crow Canyon. Writer, editor of the Durango Herald, and former mayor of Durango Ian (Sandy) Thompson, a longtime friend and associate of Crow Canyon, was appointed as the new executive director.

Under the leadership of Thompson as executive director and Lipe as research director, the research and education programs continued to grow and diversify. In 1986, former DAP staffers Megg Heath and Angela Schwab were hired as full-time directors of education and the laboratory, respectively. Karen Adams was hired to launch and lead a new environmental archaeology program focused on analyzing plant and animal remains from the excavations. Mike Adler and Carla Van West were brought on to conduct archaeological survey in the Sand Canyon and Goodman Point localities, which provided data for their dissertations, as well as moving Crow Canyon Research out of the single-site excavation mode and into broader studies of the locality and region (see Kohler et al., chapter 3, Adler and Hegmon, chapter 16, and Glowacki et al., chapter 12 in this volume). An internship program for university undergraduate and graduate students was launched, including internships in archaeological excavation, survey, laboratory analysis, environmental archaeology, and education.

As executive director, Thompson profoundly shaped the continued development of Crow Canyon for the next decade. He believed that Crow Canyon had a moral responsibility to engage in dialogues with American Indians living in the Four Corners region, and particularly the Pueblo Indian people, who were the descendants of those whose settlements were being studied archaeologically. He traveled to the Indian Pueblos of New Mexico to meet with Tribal leaders to tell them about Crow Canyon and invite them to visit. As a result, anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz, a member of the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh, brought a group of Pueblo Indian leaders to Crow Canyon in 1989 for a meeting in which they visited the sites and lab and talked with Crow Canyon staff. In 1986, Thompson recruited Rina Swentzell, a member of the Pueblo of Santa Clara with a doctorate in American Studies, to lead a weeklong seminar at Crow Canyon. That same year, Crow Canyon launched the Cultural Exploration program led by archaeologists that increasingly included American Indians as lead scholars alongside archaeologists to present multiple ways of knowing the past. Thompson led the effort to create the board of American Indian advisors, and with the help of a grant from the Dr. Scholl Foundation, a Native American Advisory Group (NAAG) was formed in 1995. The advisory group members reviewed and commented on all of Crow Canyon’s education and research program activities. This oversight led to an increase in the inclusion of more information regarding the connection between the archaeological sites being studied with the modern descendants who still live in the Southwest.

Also in 1995, Thompson led an initiative to host the first Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) consultations in Colorado between the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and American Indian tribes throughout the Southwest. Crow Canyon had conducted excavations from 1990 to 1994 in which human remains were found at Castle Rock Pueblo, a site on BLM land. NAGPRA, which was passed by the US Congress in 1990, required federal agencies overseeing archaeology projects on federal land to consult with American Indian tribes regarding the treatment and disposition of human remains. By 1995, the law was still not being enforced, so Thompson secured grant funding to host the BLM consultations at Crow Canyon. From that time forward, Crow Canyon staff made a commitment to comply not only with the letter of the law but also the spirit of the law, regardless of whether the sites they worked on were on federal or private land. A detailed policy statement on treatment of human remains was adopted by the Crow Canyon board in 1998, and a revised and updated version was adopted in 2013.

Summary

This volume celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. Some might say that the organization has a much deeper history based on the origins of the two organizations, the Crow Canyon School / I-SEP and CAA, that merged in 1982. Although the organization maintained the same location where the Crow Canyon School had operated since 1975, the mission, programs, staff, and vision of the program changed dramatically in 1983 and the years following. While Ed Berger’s CCHS students had participated in summer programs between 1969 and 1977 that included site excavations led by qualified archaeologists, those excavations were not a part of any larger I-SEP research design or project, and I-SEP did not assume responsibility for analysis and reporting the results. Unfortunately, these excavations were never adequately reported. For Berger’s CCHS students, archaeology was one of many subjects taught in the summer school programs. Ed Berger correctly perceived that archaeology was a valuable educational theme because it crosscuts the natural sciences, such as biology and geology, with the social sciences, such as anthropology, sociology, history, and geography. Also, Ed Berger could see that hands-on participation in archaeology could inspire students and cause “accelerated learning,” to use his phrase. But neither he nor I-SEP were ever positioned to initiate and conduct large-scale regional research projects and follow through with the analysis, reporting, and curation that are the ethical obligations that go along with excavating sites.

Through the merger, CAA and Struever brought to Crow Canyon a vision of developing a world-class archaeological research center that could sustain long-term interdisciplinary research in the region. Therein lies an important distinction between an organization that provides interdisciplinary education programs versus an organization that initiates and conducts interdisciplinary scientific research projects. Struever was one of the academic leaders in changing the paradigm in American archaeology from a single-scholar approach to an interdisciplinary scientific-team approach. That shift is a key part of the transformation that began to happen in 1983. CAA provided an infusion of capital that allowed Crow Canyon to build new facilities and expand its staff to include, for the first time, two full-time PhD archaeologists, E. Charles Adams and Bruce A. Bradley. In subsequent years, the facilities and the research staff continued to grow, and the diversity of the research team expanded.

From 1983 forward, Crow Canyon has maintained a commitment to long-term archaeological research, including excavation, survey, and environmental studies to address problem-oriented regional and interregional research designs. Crow Canyon has consistently fulfilled its legal and ethical obligation for analyzing the artifacts, faunal remains, and botanical remains, as well as soil, pollen, and other environmental samples; curating the collections and records in federal repositories; publishing descriptive reports and databases; and presenting the methods of field and laboratory data collection from all its projects. In addition, Crow Canyon has progressively included all its field and laboratory data in larger problem-oriented studies at regional, national, and international scales.

The Crow Canyon website now provides public access to an unbroken chain of detailed research reports and databases for a dozen multiyear projects conducted in southwestern Colorado, starting with the Duckfoot site (https://www.crowcanyon.org/index.php/access-our-research/site-reports-databases). These site reports and databases are accessible free of charge to anyone in the world with an internet connection. In addition to the online reports and databases, numerous books, journal articles, and chapters in edited volumes have been published by the Crow Canyon staff and its research associates over this forty-year history.

The Bergers and the Crow Canyon School / I-SEP laid a foundation for Native American involvement at Crow Canyon by developing programs for local Ute Mountain Ute youth and with their individual relationships and friendships with members of other Southwestern Indian tribes. As executive director, Ian Thompson greatly expanded Crow Canyon’s deeper and more focused partnerships with American Indians from many tribes and invited their participation in detailed and formal reviews of the Center’s education programs, collaborative involvement with the research programs, and contributing Native interpretations of the past alongside archaeological understandings. His efforts paved the way for even stronger relationships and partnerships that are presented in many chapters in this volume (see Ermigiotti et al., chapter 4, Kuwanwisiwma and Bernardini, chapter 5, Ortman, chapter 6, Suina, chapter 7, and Perry, chapter 23, in this volume).

While the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center emerged from deeper roots that were established fifteen years earlier in two different organizations, what resulted in 1983 and after was profoundly different than what came before. The transformation that happened after 1983 at Crow Canyon was influenced by the fact that one of the largest interdisciplinary archaeology projects in America was taking place at the exact same time about 10 mi. away. The Dolores Archaeological Program required that hundreds of professional archaeologists be deployed each year from 1978 to 1985 to conduct excavation, analysis, special projects, report writing, and publication (Breternitz 1993). The impact of that synchronicity is the subject of chapter 3 in this volume by Kohler and others.

References

1. Adams, E. Charles. 1983. “Archeological Research Design.” Unpublished report on file, Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, Cortez, CO.
2. Berger, Edward F. 1993. Crow Canyon: Pioneering Education and Archaeology on the Southwestern Colorado Frontier. Sedona, AZ: Southwest Research and Educational Services.
3. Berger, Edward F. 2009. Crow Canyon: Pioneering Education and Archaeology on the Southwestern Colorado Frontier. 2nd ed. https://millennialbooks.com.
4. Berger, Edward F., and Joanne H. Berger. 2016. Crow Canyon Education and Archaeology Research Center: The Early Years, 1968–1986. https://millennialbooks.com.
5. Berger, Joanne H., and Edward F. Berger, eds. 1981. Insights into the Ancient Ones. Cortez, CO: Cortez Printers.
6. Berger, Joanne H., and Edward F. Berger, eds. 1984. Insights into the Ancient Ones. 2nd ed. Interdisciplinary Supplemental Education Programs. Cortez, CO.
7. Breternitz, David A. 1993. “The Dolores Archaeological Program: In Memoriam.” American Antiquity 58 (1): 118–125.
8. Gould, Ronald R. 1982. The Mustoe Site: The Application of Neutron Activation Analysis in the Interpretation of a Multi-Component Archaeological Site. Unpublished PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin.
9. Kuckelman, Kristin A. 2007. “The Archaeology of Sand Canyon Pueblo: Intensive Excavations at a Late-Thirteenth-Century Village in Southwestern Colorado.” https://www.crowcanyon.org/ResearchReports/SandCanyon/Text/scpw_contentsvolume.asp.
10. Lightfoot, Ricky R. 1994. The Duckfoot Site. Vol. 2, Archaeology of the House and Household. Cortez, CO: Occasional Papers, no. 4. Cortez, CO: Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.
11. Lightfoot, Ricky R., and Mary C. Etzkorn, eds. 1993. The Duckfoot Site. Vol. 1, Descriptive Archaeology. Cortez, CO: Occasional Papers, no. 3. Cortez, CO: Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.
12. Struever, Stuart, 1968. Problems, “Methods and Organization: A Disparity in the Growth of Archaeology.” In Anthropological Archeology in the Americas, edited by Betty J. Meggers, 131–151. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington.
13. Struever, Stuart, and Felicia Antonelli Holton. 1979. Koster: Americans in Search of Their Prehistoric Past. New York. Anchor Press / Doubleday.