Staff
Yvonne Oakes, Project Director
Yvonne Oakes
Project Director
505-827-6495
yvonne.oakes@state.nm.us
M.A., Anthropology, University of New Mexico, 1982
Having worked at OAS for over 30 years, I have been part of many interesting projects that have allowed me to contribute to our knowledge of the prehistory and history of our state. Two projects that come to mind are the Luna and Glorieta Burial projects.
Between Luna and Reserve, in the Mogollon Mountains, I led the excavation of 25 sites ranging from Archaic and Apache through all phases of the Mogollon sequence, including the Hough site, which contained a great kiva within a 50-room pueblo dating to ca. A.D. 1300. Glorieta Burials involved recovering the skeletal remains of 31 Civil War Confederate soldiers from Texas who fought and died at the Battle of Glorieta in 1862. Through forensic analysis, three of the soldiers were positively identified, and we were able to identify seven others with a high degree of probability. The casketed remains were afforded a military procession before being interred in the Santa Fe National Cemetery.