Church Construction Sequence at Guevavi

In this case, with respect to this image presented above, we have evidence from the Spanish documentary record. These are hand-written letters, journals, and the like, written between the 1690s and the mid 1700s, and later. This is how we know there were so many churches. The work currently underway including this dating effort is focused on attempting to actually locate each of these distinct churches on the ground. We have several adobe buildings identified, the goal now is to date the walls so we can say when they were actually built. If you date what's inside (artifacts, charcoal, etc) then you are dating activity that may have occurred much later in time, such as when someone reused the building after an extended period of disuse. Many adobes, in fact most, were reused repeatedly after initial abandonment. Also, because adobes are made from the surrounding soil, builders may have scooped up older material to incorporate into the walls that then melt and deposit the earlier material in the fill, potentially misleading researchers as to the date of construction and use. The dating technique we are using avoids these problems and will tell us fairly accurately when the walls were constructed. Dating the walls means we will know when the structure was actually built and will be able to distinguish between churches, and between religious structures and later residences built by ranchers and miners. Often the standard deviations come back that are small enough that we should be able to tell which if any of these churches these adobes are.