[2] In 2004, the Joe Ben Wheat Site Complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
[3] A farmer named Mr. Stevenson found a piece of pottery at the site of a house that had burned down near the town of Yellow Jacket, Colorado.
In 1953 he sent the pottery to Joe Ben Wheat, Curator of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
Wheat recognized that the pottery was probably dated AD 500-750 and accepted an offer from Stevenson to investigate the property in the Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado.
[2][5] Also known as the "Stevenson Site" after the farmer who had found the pottery, Wheat changed the original name to a methodical name using the Smithsonian nomenclature, 5MT1, which consists of: 1) the number "5" for the state of Colorado, 2) the two letter abbreviation of "MT" for Montezuma County, and 3) a sequentially assigned site number, "1" for the first excavation.