If every picture tells a story, then Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe told a lot of stories. One of the most popular exhibits the Palace of the Governors has had, the photographic journey through Santa Fe’s visual history was accompanied by a book and a well-attended lecture series. Though the exhibit has been replaced by Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time, the lectures just recently became available online. (And you can still buy the book.)

We decided to check in with the exhibit’s curator, Mary Anne Redding (that’s her, at left, in a photo by Karen Kuehn), to talk about putting it together as well as what’s next for displaying her Palace of the Governors Photo Archives fabulous collection.

With more than 20 years experience as a curator, archivist, librarian, educator and arts administrator, Redding has written and published numerous essays on photography and contemporary art. Along with Krista Elrick, she co-wrote the book version of the exhibit. Her degrees are from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana; and Arizona State University.

Pour a cup of coffee and join us for a little chat.

Where did the idea of the exhibit come from and what happened when you started the search for images?

The idea for Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe started years ago. Before Dr. Frances Levine became director of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors, she worked at the Santa Fe Community College where she was instrumental in building their Visual Arts Building. She was also teaching and team-taught a class on Visual Anthropology with the guest curator for Through the Lens, Krista Elrick. Both Fran and Krista are very community-minded and began discussions about working on a project that would involve the photographers in Santa Fe.

Over the years, ideas were batted about and, when Fran became the director of the New Mexico History Museum, she brought the idea of a community project and exhibition with her. Krista was still teaching at SFCC. She was working with her students to research images of Santa Fe in our archives as well as archives across the country. When I started as the curator of photography at the Palace in March 2007, I was happy to step into the project as the lead curator from the museum as it gave me two opportunities: 1) to look in-depth at our collection of images on Santa Fe; and 2) to do studio visits with photographers with a commitment to place – to Santa Fe.

The exhibition was both historical and contemporary in scope as history did not end 50 years ago or even yesterday. The Photo Archives collects images that tell the story of our past but in another 50 or 100 years, today will be past history and the archives will need to tell that story too so we actively collect work that is being down now.

In the process of working on the exhibition, I came up with the title for the show after months of looking at images and thinking about the structure the show would take. We settled on three themes or “lenses” from which to look at each photo – place, identity, and history. This exhibition was not a chronologically arranged visual history of Santa Fe. Rather, these three themes intersect and overlap, showing the spherical rather than linear nature of history.

Photographs can be interpreted or understood in many ways. Therefore, the images are not necessarily wedded to the section they are displayed in. For example, just because an image is hung in the history section, it does not mean that you can’t understand it when viewing it through the “lens” of place or identity. We hope viewers will use each theme as a place to begin to understand a particular image while recognizing that the fields of visual history, visual culture, and visual anthropology are rich and deep and that there are many ways of understanding a single image – sort of the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. (Click here to browse photos that were selected.)

Any surprises? Wonderful discoveries?

What was so wonderful about working on Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe was that, when I began working at the Photo Archives, I was relatively new to the city different and this was a great opportunity to call people up or send them an e-mail and say this is the show we are working on, can we come for a studio visit? Everybody said yes, and we were off.

When people open their studios to you, they are giving you a gift of themselves – their time and their creative energies. Most especially, they are sharing their thinking about their artwork and this place – Santa Fe and what it means to be a part of the creative community here right now and how they see themselves fitting into the history of place.

We did videos with about 10 of the artists in the show. You can still see those videos online. They provide a tiny glimpse into what our studio visits were like. Through the Lens took over 18 months from the time I started until the exhibition was on the walls in the Palace and an additional four months before the book came out. The entire process was full of discovery – great images and great photographers.

This exhibit had one of the strongest lecture series we’ve featured. What were you aiming for in developing the topics and selecting the speakers?

The 11-month lecture series was designed to bring scholars and the public together in an ongoing dialogue from museum wall to lecture hall and beyond that would add to the understanding of the rich cultural history of Santa Fe through the visual resources of the Photo Archives and through the work of contemporary image-makers committed to documenting this place. The photographic record of Santa Fe reflects the cultural diversity and traditions of northern New Mexico over the past 160+ years.

The lecture series expanded the educational component of the exhibition by providing audience members not only with the opportunity to see documentary photographs in the historic Palace of the Governors but also to attend 12 free events and participate in a panel discussion and question-and-answer sessions related to the architecture, urban development, water rights, cultural diversity, tourism, and photographic history of Santa Fe. The technical and scientific aspects of early photographic processes up through the digital age were also addressed. Photographers involved in the project presented their individual philosophies about making place-based work and why it is important to understanding history both as a personal creative exploration and as a tool for future research through archival collections of visual materials.

All the public programs related to Through the Lens expanded the understanding of photographs beyond the realm of the museum by articulating how images are connected to the humanities through the voices of scholars and artists knowledgeable about how history is understood visually.

Photographers are an interesting entity in the communication field – intrinsically tied to the way we tell stories with words but unique in what they bring to the experience. Talk about that fraternity and the drive to document our experience through images.

Photographers approach their work through various muses: some through the aesthetics of fine art, some as documentary photographers, some merely to record their family, friends, and the places in which they live, work, play and visit through snapshots and personal mementos.

So many people think that anyone with a camera can be a photographer. Well, certainly anyone can push the button and take a picture but that does not mean they are a professional photographer. Many people have pianos and take lessons and play for their own enjoyment or for the pleasure of their family and friends or perhaps they belong to a band, but it takes years and years of dedicated work before they can call themselves a virtuoso in any tradition. Going to medical school doesn’t make someone a doctor: After the coursework is down, how many hours of internships and residencies are required before the doctor can make their first cut with a scalpel to remove an appendix?

The Photo Archives collections work from all genres of photo history. We have work by many noted artists like Laura Gilpin and Ansel Adams, both of whom where in the exhibition. We also collect work by photojournalists like Tony O’Brien, and we also collect family snap shots which can reveal so much about family like and fashion.

Many of those images you will see now in the current exhibition upstairs in the New Mexico History Museum – Fashioning New Mexico. You will also find other wonderful examples form the collection throughout the Palace and in the permanent exhibits in the New Mexico History Museum.

Part of Through the Lens addressed the deliberate re-staging of Santa Fe’s image and what photographers did to accommodate that. How can people learn more about that?

The two best lectures to watch to gain an understanding of how photographers were involved in creating Santa Fe’s popular image are the first lecture of the Through the Lens lecture series present by art historian and critic extraordinaire Lucy Lippard, and the last lecture in the series by author and educator Chris Wilson. We thought these talks would the ideal way to bookend the lecture series which was underwritten by a grant from the New Mexico Humanities Council.

Were those photographers playing a documentary role or did they allow themselves – wittingly or not – to become accomplices in a kind of deceit?

Deceit? No, I don’t think there was anything deceitful about it at the time – we tend to look back critically from a comfortable distance and bring our current thinking to re-examine what was done in the past when the answer is much more complicated. Chris Wilson’s very smart and readable book The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating A Modern Regional Tradition attempts to answer questions like yours in 418 pages with images. The essays in the book, Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe published by the MNM Press in conjunction with the exhibition, also has answers from multiple perspectives. Read the books, both of which are available at the museum shops!

What’s next for sharing the Photo Archives’ bounty?

Visitors to the Palace of the Governors and the New Mexico History Museum can see hundreds of images from the collections at the Photo Archives in all the exhibits. The Book, Print, and Photo Archive shop at the Palace also has hundreds of images from our collection for sale at very reasonable prices. Another option is to go to our Web site and click on Photo Archives. There are more than 10,000 images online and new images are added every week. The Photo Archives runs a rights-and-reproductions service and many, although not all, of the images from our collections are available.

The Photo Archives preserves and provides access to photographic materials of enduring historic value. The collection contains an estimated 800,000 items including original and copy prints, cased photographs, glass-plate negatives, film negatives, stereo views, postcards, panoramas, color transparencies, lantern slides, albums, framed materials, as well as a large library of books, journals, and other printed materials related to photography. The Photo Archives maintains the largest collection (excluding pot sherds) in the State of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs museum system.

Collections of historic photographs provide a visual legacy of the past. Dating from the 1860s to the present, subject matter in the Photo Archives focuses primarily on the history and people of New Mexico, the greater Southwest and the Western United States; anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology of Native American and Hispano cultures; with smaller collections documenting Europe, Latin America, the Far East, Oceana, and the Middle East. While its main emphasis is on historical subject matter, the collection is rich in the work of significant documentary and artistic photographers of the past one hundred and fifty years. The collection should never be regarded as merely a regional archive as its holdings reflect the changing cultural and social roles of photography both technically and aesthetically. The primary purpose of the Photo Archives is to collect, preserve, interpret, and disseminate the cultural history of New Mexico and the Southwest through visual records of historical and aesthetic significance.

But enough about that – what about you?

I love my job – every day is a visual treat – it’s great to work with so many photographs and photographers.

I am working on a new exhibition, The Contemplative Landscape, that will open concurrently with St. John’s Bible on October 21, 2011. The Contemplative Landscape will feature black-and-white photographs of sacred locations or landscapes in New Mexico dedicated to ceremonial purposes, either paying tribute to an ascendant ritual authority or for the purposes of individual contemplation. Many of the images will explore the idea of a sacred community performing in landscape.

The New Mexico History Museum’s jewel box is the exhibit you don’t even have to come inside to see. (But it’s so much neater if you do.)

A large, windowed area next to the main entrance at 113 Lincoln Avenue, the jewel  box has featured old crates, a Christmas tree and, now, a lithographic press that did its heaviest duty in 19^th-century Florence. We asked Tom Leech, curator of the Palace Press, to fill us in on its background. Here’s what we learned.

Likely made by the French manufacturer Voirin, the press is similar to one shown in an 1893 poster by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. It was used for many years in what was described as “an ancient commercial printing shop” in Florence, Italy, and was featured in the 1965 International Antique Exhibition in Florence as an example of 19^th-century printing.

Alas, in November, 1966, it was caught up in the devastating flood of the River Arno in Florence that threatened so much of that nation’s patrimony. Still, it survived, and its owner, Mayor Piero Bargellini, loaned it to the Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Arts for use in 1968-1970. (Thanks to the mayor’s onetime ownership, we’ve dubbed it “the Bargellini Press.”)

In 1971, it came to the United States, where it stood in unused storage until its donation to the museum – then the Palace of the Governors – in 1989. The Palace Press had been established in 1972 to preserve the history of the state’s printing traditions. Newspapers, books, wanted posters, dance-hall fliers. You know, the kinds of things that people at one time actually held in their hands and read (and then, perhaps, washed the ensuing ink off their hands).

Its emergence into the jewel box marks the first time it’s been on display in this nation.

In the 19^th century, images created via lithographic printing were the latest technology – the Apple Tablets of their time. Invented in 1796, the process soared in popularity and importance in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Here’s how it works: You make an image on a polished limestone with grease crayons, pens or pencils. Since grease and water repel each other, you then wipe the stone with a damp sponge, then roll ink on top of it. Where the image was drawn, the water didn’t stick, but the ink did.

You could then transfer the inky image to a piece of paper using a press.

From before the Civil War through the 1920s, popular uses of lithography included “bird’s-eye views.” Nearly 2,500 cities and towns in the United States were represented in these imaginative but highly accurate panoramas. The museum’s exhibit includes an 1882 bird’s-eye view of Santa Fe, depicting the town’s layout and surrounding landscape in what is, let’s just say, a highly idealized manner. (St. Francis Cathedral was still under construction, but the image includes steeples that were never built.)

Lithography also carried the world to the viewer. Easterners of the 1800s era loved hearing about Southwestern travel and exploration. An account of the 1849 Navajo Expedition included illustrations by artist Richard Kern. Marvels such as Inscription Rock (at today’s El Morro National Monument) were depicted in print for the first time.

On the press in the exhibit is a stone depicting abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). The image was created by Chicago lithographers Kurz & Allison a year after Douglass’ death. The print was commissioned for this exhibit and printed from the original stone by the Landfall Press of Santa Fe.

Kurz and Allison prided themselves on “originating and placing on the market artistic and fancy prints of the most elaborate workmanship.” Portraits of influential Americans were popular, but most of their prints were of historical scenes, especially Civil War battles featuring dramatic (and at times contrived) action. Another of the company’s specialties was printing religious images for “ethnic” markets. Some of those prints can be found in New Mexican votive tinwork.

Come on by and check it out. You can even come in and see the exhibit without paying the entrance fee. We’re pretty sure that, once you do, you’ll want to see more – including the Palace Press, just off the courtyard. Besides serving as an exhibit area for other antique presses (has that term become redundant yet?), the Palace Press is a working print shop, still pumping out those “other” hand-held reading devices so many of us love.

The reappearance of Juan Correa’s 17th-century painting The Nativity in the Palace delighted many of us. (See the original post, below.) But a few of us were puzzled by something in the painting. And it didn’t help that our Latin runs a gamut from rusty to non-existent.

Two cherubs hover near the top, holding a banner bearing a Latin phrase. The words? Most of us could make out “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” but were then stumped by what appears to be “E Tinti” or “F Tinti” or maybe “E Tinto.” “F Tinto”?

Here’s a closeup of the painting’s upper half, you take a look:

Was it someone’s name? A colonial version of dead-language name-calling? A 1600s version of Pantone color names?

No one knew. Until Curator Josef Diaz did a little digging around. His answer:

“The text reads Gloria in Excelsis Deo Et In Terra Pax, which translates to Glory in the highest to God and on Earth peace — although in the painting, the banner only reads up to Et In Te, and the rest is cut off. It is the beginning of a hymn known as Gloria. The piece begins with the words that the angels sang when the birth of Christ was announced to shepherds, as seen in the painting. The hymn goes on to say Homnibus Bonae Voluntatis Laudamus Te Benedicimus Te, or To men of good will, we praise thee, we bless thee.”

Ah. Thanks, Josef. Handel wrote a version. So did Vivaldi. For the meditative enjoyment of all, here’s J.S. Bach’s version of the hymn from his Mass in B Minor.

Early craftspeople couldn’t pick up a baseball cap with a cute logo for protection. They had to rely on what they could find lying around. For those working in print shops, where the air turned into an inky, messy mist when the presses rolled, the one thing they had plenty of was paper.

Hence, the printer’s hat.

Made from a mysterious maze of about, oh, 20 folds, the hats protected at least the tops of their heads from those hard-to-wash drips and drops.

Each year, the Palace of the Governors’ Press, with volunteer help from the Santa Fe Book Arts Group, makes a few hundred of the hats to delight children and adults alike during the annual Christmas at the Palace event. This year, Xmas@Pog, as some of us short-hand it, celebrates its 25^th anniversary on Friday, Dec. 11, from 5-8 pm.

Besides snagging a hat, you can tour the Press, which was closed for renovations last year, and print your own holiday card on one of the antique, hand-operated presses.

And, thanks to a new video made by Leech and Museum Resources Division Graphics Director David Rohr, you can learn how to make one of your own.

Who made the first printer’s hat is shrouded in mystery, Leech says. There’s a chance they were originally made as boats to ferry hand-mixed inks to the presses. Eventually (and likely as a joke), a worker turned the boat over and plopped it onto his head. (We’re seriously hoping it wasn’t filled with ink at the time … though the vestigal Stooge living in a frighteningly large number of us kind of hopes it was.)

The hats weren’t the sole province of printers, as an admittedly lazy bit of Internet research tells us. Carpenters, stonemasons and painters may have also used them.

An illustration by Sir John Tenniel for Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter shows said carpenter with a printer’s hat atop his head.

One blog we found says you can use your handmade hats as “an outstanding promotional tool that costs you almost nothing.”

Something called The Hat Museum in Portland, Ore., has an example of one.

And if you’d rather have a printer’s hat that looks suspiciously like a bishop’s mitre, you can fold it that way, too.

For those of raised on twice-a-day newspapers, who love the feel of newsprint and the snap it makes as you reverse its fold to get to the crossword puzzle, printer’s hats are something of a delicacy, one we’ll decidedly miss should our cherished dead-tree news ever completely give way to our newly beloved blogs.

A beautiful example of 1700s fine art came out of the closet this week for a special holiday showing at the Palace of the Governors. This week, movers placed Juan Correa’s painting The Nativity (otherwise known as THE mother and child) on a wall in the main entry of the Palace.

Part of the New Mexico History Museum’s Iberian Collection — 70 paintings and three bultos from 17^th- and 18^th-century Mexico and South America — The Nativity was one of several canvases that once formed an altar screen dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The screen itself was probably 25-35 feet high and 20 feet wide.

Its painter was one of the masters of the Baroque painting period in Mexico. He was born to a prominent mixed-race physician from Cádiz and a free black woman from Mexico City. He and his workshop were extremely productive and produced countless pictures. He had several prestigious commissions that spanned the Spanish colonies.

Altogether, the Iberian collection includes master artists such as José de Páez and José del Castillo from Mexico, and Diego Tito, an Incan painter from Peru.

The paintings were once in the private collection of Charles Wood Collier and Nina Perera Collier, who collected the pieces while in South America and Mexico. In 1958, they founded the International Institute of Iberian Colonial Art to preserve their growing collection, which had decorated the walls of Los Luceros in northern New Mexico. (The couple purchased the property in the 1960s and entertained the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe at it.)

Several years ago, the collection was donated to the Palace of the Governors. The needs to conduct conservation work on the pieces, as well as the Palace’s comparatively tight spaces, have delayed their display.

But, for now, and at least for awhile, Correa’s Nativity spreads its rich warmth. Enjoy it during Dec. 11’s Christmas at the Palace event. Combine it with a quiet, meditative visit to the Tesoros de Devocion exhibit, also in the Palace; Tesoros celebrates the artistry of New Mexico’s own santeros.

The holiday season can be rough-and-tumble and too often focused on spending and shopping. Feed your soul instead. We have a few ways up to do so – and you deserve each and every one of them.

Every year, a few weeks before The Big Day, Santa and Mrs. Claus carve out an evening when they can whisk themselves from the North Pole to the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. There, Santa hears New Mexico children’s wish lists while Mrs. Claus spreads her own spirit of comfort and joy.

This year, they plan to visit from 5:30-8 pm on Friday, Dec. 11, as part of Christmas at the Palace — a free, family event. In honor of their presence, the Palace will open its doors for free, serve hot cider and cookies and invite local musicians to spread the holiday cheer.

In anticipation, Mrs. Claus graciously agreed to a little Q&A.

Q. How long have you and Mr. Claus been married?

A. Mr. Claus and I have been happily married for many, many years, too many to count.

Q. You’ve been doing this job for hundreds of years, and for millions of children. What keeps the two of you going?

A. I would not call it a job. Mr. Claus and I have been making children happy for hundreds of years it warms our hearts. It all comes from the joy of our surroundings – of course, not to exclude our hard-working elves.

Q. Every year, you and the Mr. visit the Palace. Tell us some of your memories of past visits.

A. Yes, we do come to visit the Palace every year and are looking forward to this year.

When the children come to the Palace to visit Santa, they usually do not expect to see Mrs. Claus. The warm `hellos’ and smiles that I receive from children and their parents are so heartwarming when they see me.  Most children like to touch me to make sure that I am real. I am asked if I am the real Mrs. Claus.

One year, Mr. Claus was very tired from a long night at the Palace and one young boy was following us to make sure that we got back safely to our sleigh and reindeer. Mr. Claus went ahead of us and was clear out of sight. A few minutes later, the young boy looked up to the sky and noticed that the sleigh and reindeers had already left with Mr. Claus – and left me behind!

The young boy saw Rudolph’s red nose way up in the sky and was very concerned, wondering what I was going to do for the night. I let him know that Santa would notice that I was not in the sleigh and come back for me. The young boy was so excited and ran off to tell his parent.

Q. Do you have a message for the children of New Mexico?

A. I would like to welcome the children of New Mexico back to the Palace again this year for another wonderful and exciting time of the year.

I first met Tom Chavez in the early 1990s. He was director of the Palace of the Governors.  I was a lowly reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune. The Palace still stands, but lately stands in the shadow of the far larger New Mexico History Museum. The Tribune? Well, let’s just be glad we still have the Palace.

My memory of our first encounter includes the dark and aged offices that Chavez’s staff worked in, a motherlode of archival photographs that put my newspaper’s library to shame, and an undeniable excitement about a faded scrap of painting.

Chavez told me the scrap was part of something called the Segesser Hides and, needing only a cub reporter’s curiously raised eyebrow for inspiration, launched into a tale of what it took to bring them back to their North American birthplace. Long held by a Swiss family named Segesser, the hides depict the 1720 Pedro de Villasur expedition against the French and their Native allies in present-day Nebraska.

To folks like Chavez and the many, many volunteers who joined him in the quest to acquire the hides, it just seemed right that they should be displayed at the launch site of that expedition. And thus ensued years’ worth of international diplomacy that occasionally produced a huge segment, occasionally a scrap, occasionally nothing.

Notable for their efforts along the way were Meriom and Howard Kastner, who lent their time to translate correspondence between the state and hides’ owners, and who ended up leading even more volunteers – the members of Los Compadres del Palacio – in a Save Our Hides Campaign. (Those Compadre, btw, didn’t give up after obtaining the hides. In recent years, they worked their magic on the massive museum-building plan and even served ice cream to visitors on opening weekend this summer.)

The Segesser Hides are on display today at the Palace, and the New Mexico History Museum has an interactive exhibit about them. (Teacher alert: You can find it online here.)

But one big chunk is missing. It’s still in a vault, still in Switzerland, still under the ownership of someone still thinking it over. Way back when, Chavez promised me, time was on his side. He was, after all, younger than the owner of the missing piece (insert your own version of a knowing glance here).

I liked his attitude. The sense of adventure, the air of mystery, the shadow of a scheme. Who knew that, one day, I’d be working at this same place (the dark and aged offices now replaced by bright, modern ones), walking past these same hides, sharing that same desire to someday see the hides made whole once more.

This Sunday, Chavez will share some of his memories as former director of the Palace and retired executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center. The talk is called Chasing History: Quixotic Quests for Arts, Artifacts and Culture. It’s the kickoff to the Telling New Mexico Inaugural Lecture Series, a five-part collection of speakers versed in everything from Blackdom to Japanese internment camps to Navajo women.

Tickets cost $10 and are still available. Buy them at the museum shops or outside the History Museum Auditorium before the lecture at 2 pm. Come early, at 1 pm, for a special reception. I’m betting Chavez talks about the hides and shares a few other behind-the-scenes tales of the people, personalities and adventures that lie behind the exhibits.

Kate Nelson

Josef Diaz of the New Mexico History Museum is co-curator of Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time,  in the museum’s Palace of the Governors. We asked him a few questions about the exhibit.

How did you come to be a Spanish colonial curator at NMHM?

I received a masters degree UNM in 16^th century Spanish Colonial/Postclassical Mesoamerican Art History. I worked at both the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe and Casa San Ysidro, a historic house museum in Corrales. From there I was hired as the curator of Spanish Colonial Art and History at the New Mexico History Museum.

As you sifted through the history of the early colonists and the Native peoples, what struck you about their lives?

They had many hardships they had to endure and often their daily interactions with one another were not that different from ours.

The exhibit includes what we’ve been calling Vargas’ cookbook. Tell us a bit about it and how it managed to survive 400 years.

The cookbook in the exhibit is Arte de cozina by Francisco Martínez Montiño, a cook and writer of the Spanish Golden Age. His book was printed in 1611 did not belong to Governor Don Diego de Vargas.  He did, however, have the same title in his personal library that he brought to New Mexico. The cookbook and the food fragments in the exhibit will help tell the story of the types of meals that were undoubtedly created within the walls of the Palace of the Governors during his tenure as governor. Montiño was chef to Philip II, and the book illustrates some of the luxurious dishes that were prepared in the royal kitchens.

Some people take strict black-and-white, good-vs.-bad sides when assessing Spain’s early colonizations. What’s your take?

When assessing Spain’s early colonizations, you must remember that it Spain was one of many European countries that colonized around the globe. Yes, early colonizers are guilty of unspeakable behavior but where they really worst than any other colonizers or conquering people in history?

What do you hope people take away from this exhibit?

Even though Santa Fe exemplified geographical remoteness and was thousands of miles away from any seaport, many people did possess luxury goods. Many of these items were from the Manila trade route, sometimes called “the other Silk Road,” and from other Spanish colonies that spanned the globe. Santa Fe was not as remote as many people think.

Stephen Post is deputy director of New Mexico’s Office of Archaeological Studies (OAS) and has co-curated the New Mexico History Museum’s newest exhibit, Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time, opening Nov. 20. We interrupted the tail-end whirlwind that always seems to accompany exhibit mountings to pester him with a few questions about the past that’s always beneath us, about some amazing tree rings, and about himself.

How did you come to be involved in New Mexico archaeology?

I moved to Santa Fe in 1977 and got a job washing artifacts at the Laboratory of Anthropology. Three weeks later I was working on the Chaco Wash and fell in love. History in the great outdoors; it couldn’t get any better.

You were involved in the dig on the New Mexico History Museum site, which yielded something like 90,000 artifacts. Tell us about what was in that bounty, including a key find or two.

Actually, the excavation team recovered about 800,000 artifacts and samples, and about 90,000 were from the 17th century. From the 17th century, we found the furrows of the governors’ earliest gardens, a light-duty metal working pit, and a lot of butchered sheep, goat and cow bone mixed with Native-made pottery sherds, mayolica from Mexico, and precious personal objects, such as earrings, crosses, and higas that had been lost for more than 300 years.

What surprised you about the finds?

Frankly, the volume of artifacts from the History Museum site was a bit overwhelming. Archaeologists often dig 2 by 2 m squares in levels 10 to 20 cm thick. In some these units, we were recovering more than 1,000 artifacts per level.

There’s going to be a cross-section of a Ponderosa pine on display in Santa Fe Found. What’s significant about it?

It’s amazing. The tree was in the yard of an OAS employee, Robert Turner, south of Santa Fe. The tree had died in 2004. So, Robert and Eric Blinman, our director, cut slices out of the stump. Eric matched the tree-ring pattern with known samples from Glorieta Mesa and estimated the time of tree birth. OAS volunteers counted the rings and learned that the tree was born in 1670. That means it witnessed 334 years of Santa Fe’s history before its death.

Lots of people are interested in archaeology, and there’s so much to be found in New Mexico. What tips – and cautions – do you have for people wanting to try a little backyard exploration?

If you have an archaeological site in your backyard, you want to leave everything in place. If you pick up an artifact, put it back where you found it. Where artifacts are found relative to one another is important. If you can’t preserve your site, call a professional archaeologist. Finally, if you want to learn more about archaeology and do it with fun people, join the Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s Friends of Archaeology.