2004 Most Endangered

Most Endangered Places in New Mexico 2004

• Albuquerque Locomotive Shops, Bernalillo County
  
• Motel Blvd. / Old U.S. Highway 80
  
• Aztec Ruins National Monument
  
• Marked and Unmarked Cemeteries Throughout New Mexico
  
• Mesa Prieta
  
• The Hoyle House
  
• Traditional Village of Agua Fria
  
• Folsom Hotel
  
• Lake Valley Ghost Town
  
• Valle Vidal Unit
  
• St. John's Methodist Episcopal Church
  

Marked and Unmarked Cemeteries Throughout New Mexico

Nominated by Glenna Dean, State Archaeologist, Historic Preservation Division

SIGNIFICANCE Ritual farewells to our dead loved ones are a near-universal human practice, as is marking the landscape where they are laid to rest. Those places are remembered by Native Americans as places where their ancestors lived, died, and are buried. A burial site and its landscape setting remain a part of living culture through songs and oral history, even after accidents of history have caused legal ownership to pass into the hands of others. Grave and cemetery markers, ritual architecture, and ordered use of space or plants are some of the counterpart European practices that the living bring to the Cities of the Dead. There is no more poignant essence of a people, whether as an archaeological site or European-style cemetery with graves marked by fallen wooden crosses, plastic flowers, or marble slabs.

THREAT In recent years the State Archaeologist has found herself "acting as a spokesperson for the dead?lots of them?entire cemeteries of them." Burials are looted for grave goods by robbers or are damaged or destroyed by development. "Old cemeteries," including those not so old, have come to be abandoned, sold, built upon, and "rediscovered" during construction.

To paraphrase Archaeologist Dean, how can aboriginal burials continue to be disregarded at best?looted at worst?and even 20th century cemeteries be so conveniently "forgotten" and sold for development without at least moving the burials first? How can title searches and sellers? obligations of disclosure fail to note former uses of property that were once believed to have been solemnized in permanence? Why aren?t available records being used? Almost everyone believes it wrong to rob a grave. Why, then, is it acceptable to casually treat an archaeological site or cemetery as a development-in-waiting?