smith: richard wetherill. he's broadening out from mesa verde. he wants to make people aware that we have such a treasure such a heritage here and yet here's this cowboy. a cowboy, and we all know what cowboys are. we read in our dime novels. they can't be doing anything scholarly. coyote: despite his lack of formal education, richard wetherill wanted to be taken seriously as an archaeologist. he had left mesa verde and began scouring the southwest in search of other ruins. his journey took him from colorado to utah and arizona and finally to new mexico, to a place called chaco canyon. another eerily silent set of ruins left behind by the ancient puebloans. with walls of remarkable workmanship, some rising 5 stories, pueblo bonito, the biggest ruin, contained remnants of an enclosed plaza 35 circular kivas, more than 2 acres honeycombed by 650 rooms connected by small passageways and doors. the religious and cultural hub of the civilization that had dominated the surrounding region between 850 a.d. and 1200 a.d. by itself, pueblo bonito was sever

cowboys who discovered the ruins were the wetherills--5 brothers from a family of quakers who had moved to colorado from kansas 8 years earlier. the oldest was richard who encouraged them all to spend every free moment digging among the ruins, hoping to sell their discoveries to museums in big cities. man as al wetherill: we had started in as just ordinary pothunters but as work progressed along that sort of questionable business, we developed quite a bit of scientific knowledge by careful work and comparisons. coyote: one day a stranger showed up, a young swedish nobleman with an interest in archaeology-- gustaf nordenskiold. when the wetherills showed him the ruins, his enthusiasm, one of the brothers remembered, increased almost beyond his control. for two months, from sunup to sundown, he kept the wetherill brothers busy, teaching them more scientific methods. he showed them how to use a mason's trowel instead of a spade, digging slowly and carefully to reveal a relic without damaging it. he insisted on labeling and photographing everything and often saved items that no other archaeologist of the time would have kept-- wood ash from fire pits, d