American Periphery, Sonoran Heartland: Recent Archaeological Explorations of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (ORPI) is a vast, rugged, and remote unit of the U.S. National Park System situated in the heart of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Measuring 1,338.25 km² (517.7 mi²), the park encompasses an area half the size of the state of Rhode Island. ORPI’s 48.3 km (30 mi) long southern boundary constitutes a portion of the 3,201 km (1,989 mi) long international border between the United States and Mexico, and as a border park, ORPI suffers considerable impacts to its natural and cultural resources.

Since 2012, archaeologists with the National Park Service’s Intermountain Region Archaeology Program have conducted a series of field investigations across ORPI, reassessing previously recorded archaeological sites disturbed by recent border-related activities and surveying previously unexamined areas of the park. Cumulatively, these investigations have contributed to a deeper understanding of precontact Native American lifeways within the Sonoran Desert.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23074