North America - Southwest (Geographic Keyword)
301-325 (899 Records)
The zooarchaeological assemblage from Cottonwood Spring Pueblo (LA 175), an El Paso Phase (A.D. 1275-1450) horticultural village in southern New Mexico is dominated by small game. What explains this pattern? The high relative percentage of rabbit to deer follows a general trend associated with aggregated populations, growing agriculture dependence, and less seasonal mobility. Additional variables possibly contributing to this trend include shifts to small game in response to droughts, over...
Feasting and the Ritual Mode of Production in the Mesa Verde Region of the American Southwest (2017)
In the Southwest, feasting is understood as one of the primary mechanisms whereby small-scale agriculturalists of the past increased the social, demographic, and political scale of their societies. This study examines both artifact assemblages and communal architecture from a number of prehistoric sites in the Mesa Verde area. Consistent increases in the number and elaborateness of decorated serving bowls and the size of communal spaces suggest an increase in the frequency, intensity, and scale...
Field Schools as Public and Applied Archaeology (2016)
Field schools serve the vital functions of training students in basic research methods and introducing them to the realities of field-based investigations. Beyond that, they typically have been a venue for faculty to pursue their own research agendas. In this paper I present information about two field schools, one in Jamaica focused on community-engaged public archaeology, and a second in New Mexico emphasizing cultural resource management (CRM) as applied archaeology. I evaluate the strengths...
Figurines and Farmagers (2015)
Two temporally-sensitive fired clay figurine styles were identified among the 282 fragments recovered from the Early Agricultural period archaeological site known as Las Capas, located in Tucson, Arizona. The earlier style was only recovered from the 1220-1000 B.C. stratum, while the later style was just recovered from the 930-730 B.C. strata. Virtually all fragments were found in domestic trash deposits. Previous interpretations of similar figurines relied on the assumption that they represent...
Finding the Balance: Case Studies in Collaboration and Community Engagement from the American Southwest (2015)
In this paper we explore the challenges and benefits of conducting archaeological field work in rural communities where many stakeholders have vested interests in our research. Doing work in such situations can often feel like a complicated juggling act as one seeks to build relationships with local landowners, diverse community members, and various government agencies, while at the same time meeting the needs of student participants and achieving research goals. The benefits to all parties,...
Fine Dining in the Borderlands: Exploring Spanish colonial group identity in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (2017)
Previous research on seventeenth-century Spanish settlers in New Mexico has concluded that the colonists were composed of a population that blended Spanish and indigenous Puebloan groups genetically and culturally, which is often described as mestizo. However, there is no single, consistently used definition of mestizo or its archaeological expression. Furthermore, defining a population as mestizo ignores individual and household formulations of identity. So, what, if anything, united...
Fire Adds Richness to the Land: Ethnographic Research for the FHiRE Project (2015)
One component of the multidisciplinary FHiRE project included ethnographic research with 50 members of four tribes. Specific historical and traditional information about fire ecology related to the occupation of Hemish ancestral sites in the Jemez Mountains was collected at the Pueblo of Jemez. More generalizing information about the role of fire in Southwestern lifeways was collected with research participants at the Hopi Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and White Mountain Apache Tribe. Our ethnographic...
Fire, Forests, Climate and People in the Jemez Mountains: A 500-Year, Landscape-Scale Perspective (2015)
Forests and human communities are now extremely vulnerable to large, severe wildfires during droughts as a consequence of fire exclusion and other land use practices. The extent to which this vulnerability is influenced by extreme climate events and past land-uses remains unclear. Combined studies of climate, fire and human histories from the same landscape can help reveal the relative roles of people and climate variations in driving spatial patterns and temporal trends of wildfires. The Jemez...
Fires, Landslides, and All Manner of Varmints: site formation processes at high elevations in the VCNP (2015)
The Valles Caldera National Preserve in northern New Mexico encompasses a diverse landscape of grassy valleys, forested mountainsides, and rocky peaks, almost entirely more than 2600 m (8500 ft) above sea level. People have visited the area regularly for millennia to access large obsidian quarries and other resources. The long history of human activities has left us a rich archaeological record, but interpreting that record is complicated by the dynamism of the landscape; physical and biological...
Five Hundred Years of Plant Use in the Sand Canyon Locality, Southwestern Colorado (2015)
For more than 20 years, the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center has systematically acquired flotation, macrobotanical, and pollen samples from structure floors, thermal features, middens, and other contexts during the testing or excavation of many ancestral Pueblo sites dating from a wide range of time periods. In this study, we synthesize uses of plant materials through nearly 500 years of the Pueblo occupation of the Sand Canyon locality in the northern San Juan region. In order to control for...
Flooding Past and Present: Extreme Geomorphic Events in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands (2015)
Although presently a desert environment, extreme flood events are part of life in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. This paper examines two such flood events, one preserved in the deposits of Skiles Shelter and Kelly Cave, and another that occurred on June 20th 2014. These events provide examples of catastrophic floods that punctuate the sedimentary records in the shelters and contrast with the more incrementally formed deposits that occur in association with human activity in these settings. The...
Floods, Muds, and Plant Baking: ASWT Excavations at Skiles Shelter (2015)
Skiles Shelter (41VV165) is a "wet" rockshelter situated approximately ½ kilometer upstream from the confluence of Eagle Nest Canyon and the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas. Due to the threat of inundation and damage due to extreme flooding events when Rio Grande flooding backs up from Amistad Reservoir, Skiles Shelter is the most-threatened site within Eagle Nest Canyon. Initial testing of Skiles was conducted during the 2013 Texas State field school. In 2014, the Ancient...
Fodder and Water: Isotope Analysis of Livestock Enamel in Southwest Spanish Colonial Settlements in the Pimeria Alta (2016)
The introduction of livestock to the Pimeria Alta in the 18th-century dramatically shifted resource use in the Sonoran Desert and the Santa Cruz River Valley. Colonial and indigenous politics and economics were transformed as a result of the presence and uses of these animals, but it is relatively unknown how O’odham people in the Santa Cruz Valley balanced the grazing and watering needs of livestock with the needs of farming and seasonal wild food gathering in the arid region. Using carbon and...
Following the Shell Trail: Analysis of Prehistoric Shell at Petrified Forest National Park (2017)
Shell jewelry at Petrified Forest National Park has been found from Basketmaker II through Pueblo IV. Since there are no local sources of marine shell, it is important to understand how trade routes from the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico directly affected how shell was traded to this region. Shell recovered from archaeological contexts curated in the Petrified Forest National Park collections were typed according to class, genus, and species and were sourced to the Gulf of California...
Folsom on the Edge of the Plains: Occupation of the Estancia Basin, Central New Mexico (2015)
At the end of the Pleistocene, during Folsom occupation, the Estancia Basin contained the eastern-most pluvial lake in the American Southwest. The basin has a long history of archaeological research and the story of changing lake levels has played an important part in understand the Paleoindian occupation of the New World. Within the basin, geoarchaeological assessment at the Martin site can be used as a baseline for understanding environmental change during the late Pleistocene. The large well...
Folsom Toolkit Replenishment at Chispa Creek, Texas: Comparing Bifacial to Unifacial Technologies (2015)
Folsom technology has been characterized by Ingbar and others as employing a "serial replacement" strategy, where toolkits are replenished on a more or less continuous basis based on the proximate taskscape. Such replenishment is in evidence at Chispa Creek, a west Texas lithic workshop repeatedly occupied by Folsom foragers. Similar to Hanson, Wyoming, at least three local toolstone sources were used at Chispa to manufacture projectile points and a large number of unifaces. These occupations...
Forests, Fires and People: Reconstructing Human-Natural Interactions on the Jemez Plateau, New Mexico With Tree Rings (2015)
The Jemez Plateau of northern New Mexico contains a rich archaeological and tree-ring record characterizing interactions between humans, forests, climate and fire over the past 500 years. Ponderosa pine and pinyon-juniper woodlands on the Plateau were occupied by roughly 6,000 people within an area of about 30,000 hectares during the early 1600’s. Using dendrochronology we reconstructed detailed fire and forest histories directly on and surrounding several large, ancestral Jemez village sites...
Forgotten but Not Gone: Restoring the Research Potential of Older Perishable Artifact Collections from Southeastern Utah (2016)
During the 1890s, more than 4000 well-preserved textiles, baskets, wooden implements, hide and feather artifacts, and other organic materials were excavated by local “cowboy” archaeologists from Basketmaker and Pueblo-period archaeological sites in the greater Cedar Mesa area of southeastern Utah. Most of these artifacts were shipped to museums outside of the Southwest, where they were largely forgotten by archaeologists and the public. In 2010, the Cedar Mesa Perishables Project was born to...
Forgotten Finds: Updating Existing Collections for Modern Research (2015)
The existing collections of our nation’s institutions hold great potential for future research and should be subject to modern scientific inquiry. If these collections are not catalogued or sorted properly, they can lie forgotten and virtually inaccessible to scholarly research. The example presented here is of a legacy collection, comprised of artifacts from the Tulare Lake area in Kings County, California. This selection is primarily of lithic tools, which represent ancient California...
Formative Period Changes in Regional Interaction and Influence in Nine Mile Canyon, Utah (2016)
Fundamental issues regarding the interaction of the formative inhabitants of Nine Mile Canyon with their neighbors in Castle Valley and the Uinta Basin relate to temporally distinct changes identified in the canyon’s archaeological record. Arguments pertaining to changes in land use patterns, artifact assemblages, and the development of seemingly defensive structures hinge on connecting distinct material cultural characteristics with chronometric data to develop a first approximation of shifting...
Fortified Settlements as Forces of Social Change Among the Ancestral Pueblo Peoples of the Northern San Juan Region (2015)
The sociopolitical landscape of the ancestral Pueblo peoples residing in the northern San Juan region of the American Southwest was influenced and shaped in significant ways by a variety of pressures associated with the construction and habitation of fortified communities during periods of heightened social tensions and increased violence. Evidence of the formation of fortified communities and the implementation of various defensive strategies dates from at least three major periods of...
Friends in High Places: Windes, Shrines, and Lines of Sight (2015)
In the 1970s, Tom Windes began documenting shrines and stone circles around Chaco Canyon. Decades before landscape archaeologists spoke of viewsheds, Tom recognized the significance of visibility at Chaco. He observed that J-shaped Windes’ shrines create intervisible connections among great houses, and he pointed out that stone circles in Chaco are always within sight of one or more great kivas. Today, GIS is a useful tool for examining intervisibility across large areas. Inspired by Tom, and...
From Consultation to Collaboration: Expanding the Scope of Archeology's Engagement with Indigenous People (2015)
Consultation with descendant communities is now a widely accepted reality of doing archeology in North America. Since the passing of NAGPRA twenty-five years ago a robust body of scholarship has developed around the methodological and theoretical aspects of consulting with indigenous communities. Although many scholars today point out the need for "collaboration" in addition to "consultation" the constraints of archeological research and tribal politics often make true collaboration difficult....
From Hohokam Archaeology to Narratives of the Ancient Hawaiian ‘State’ (2017)
The analysis of material correlates to interpret cross-cultural variation in ancient political economies is a conventional and time-honored tradition in world archaeology. The material correlates that archaeologists use to gauge degrees of social stratification include evidence of subsistence intensification, hierarchical settlement patterns, craft specialization, large-scale monumentality, and differentiated mortuary programs. Ironically, recent claims for the rise of ancient states in the...
From La Villa to Pueblo Grande: Corporate Descent Groups and Property Rights Along Canal System 2 (2015)
Most studies of the organization of Canal System 2 have taken a "top-down" approach and focused on the degree to which a centralized management structure was required to operate and maintain the canal system. In this paper, we take a "bottom-up" approach and focus on the interests and concerns of the irrigators themselves. Architectural data from several pre-Classic sites along the canal system are examined in an attempt to reconstruct the organizational strategies of multi-household, corporate...