Tsé Yaa Kin or Mummy Cave, is an alcove village revered by Indigenous people as an ancestral place. TséYaa Kin means "House Under the Rock" and is aptly named.
The 1,700-year-old site is nestled in the center of a 1,000-foot vertical sandstone cliff at Canyon de Chelly National Monument on Navajo tribal trust lands in Arizona. The park is cooperatively managed by the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation.
The National Park Service awarded a grant to UNM's anthropology department to evaluate the site's physical condition and help plan for its long-term preservation. The grant is administered through the Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Study Unit. Since 2022, teams of researchers from across disciplines, universities and organizations have come together to study and help protect Tsé Yaa Kin.
Angelyn Bass, principal investigator and research assistant professor in the anthropology department at The University of New Mexico, leads the project while collaborating with teams from the University of Vermont, the University of California at Berkeley and Davis, Péten Archaeological Conservation Associates, Archeological and Architectural Consulting Services, The Front Standard Photography and the National Park Service.
The UNM team includes Angelyn Bass, Karen Price, senior collections manager of archaeology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Mike Spilde, a research scientist at the Institute of Meteoritics and UNM students Autumn Nozie, Bren
