Staff
Stephen Lentz, Project Director
Stephen Chastain Lentz
Project Director
505-982-1375
stephen.lentz@state.nm.us
B.A., M.A., University of New Mexico
I developed an early interest in archaeology growing up around the Paleolithic and Neolithic caves, Roman ruins, medieval castles, and battlefields of southwestern France. My first anthropology class at UNM, with Lewis Binford, influenced my research with processual and middle-range theory. My interests have led me to sites all over the world, including Europe (Abri-du-Faure), Africa (Oldevai Gorge, Masai Mara), Macchu Pichu (Peru), Ankor Wat (Cambodia), Bagan (Burma), and most of the Mayan sites in Mexico and Central America. I have lived and worked with the Lacandon tribe of Chiapas. However, ever since my first field school at Tijeras Canyon, my heart lies with the archaeology of the desert Southwest.
I joined the Office of Contract Archaeology at UNM in 1977 and the OAS in 1987, allowing me to work on many sites in Arizona and New Mexico. Recently, excavation of High Rolls Cave, a dry Archaic cave site in southeast New Mexico, revealed early corn, the earliest cultivated amaranth and tobacco, and the first cigarette recorded in North America. Currently, I've been the project director El Pueblo de Santa Fe, a multicomponent site in the Historic District of downtown Santa Fe. The remains of 1,600 years of successive occupation are being investigated, yielding materials from the prehistoric, Spanish Colonial, and Fort Marcy periods.