Created: Thursday, 10 July 2014 13:09

BLOOMFIELD, NEW MEXICO—Road workers widening the highway near Salmon Ruins in northwestern New Mexico uncovered pieces of charcoal, pottery, burned corn fibers, and fragments of a grinding stone. “I could see the reddish color with hand-painted black lines [on the pottery] and knew this was something,” laborer Hector Beyale told The Farmington Daily Times. Larry Baker, executive director at Salmon Ruins, thinks the site may have been a trash deposit dating between 1100 and 1300 A.D., due to the diversity of the shards recovered there. “I’ll be cleaning them up a bit and identifying the origins of the pottery fragments, if we can, to see whether they come from nearby or far away,” added ceramic specialist Tori Myers.