Puebloan Subsistence Patterns on the Shivwits Plateau, North Rim of the Grand Canyon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Based on fieldwork from the South Rim, Alan Sullivan has argued that ancient Puebloans in the Grand Canyon region practiced little or no corn agriculture. Instead, he proposes they relied on the gathering and processing of wild plants such as pinyon nuts, amaranth, and goosefoot. Here, we evaluate the applicability of this model to the southern portion of the Shivwits Plateau, located on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Like Sullivan’s study area, the latter area is located on the Colorado Plateau in a pinyon-juniper woodland setting. However, unlike along the South Rim, archaeological research on the Shivwits Plateau has yielded ample evidence of maize agriculture. In this paper, we examine why these differences in subsistence patterns might have occurred.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24241