North America - Southwest (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (899 Records)
Chaco and Hopewell are two of the most well studied archaeological regions in North America. Although Chaco is often compared to Cahokia, comparison to Hopewell brings out important ways in which extensive regional connectivities were formed through the intersection of religious, political, and economic networks. Both societies show evidence of periodic, eventful monumental construction; spatial connectivity through roads/causeways; long-distance procurement of materials; production and...
Chaco Canyon: Dispersed Settlement, Dialectical Tension, and the Rise of an Ancient Polity in the Southwest U.S. (2017)
Two dozen monumental buildings lie at the heart of Chaco Canyon, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Southwest United States. However, ancient Chaco Canyon was not a single locality but a focal point for outlier settlements spanning a region of 60,000 square miles. The canyon-outlier relationship is key to understanding the Chacoan polity. Residents of canyon and outlier settlements within a dialectical relationship gathered periodically to share resources, marriage partners, and ritual...
Chaco Legacy Studies: Archival Research, Archeomagnetic Dating, and the Role of Turkeys (2015)
Part of the Chaco legacy includes early excavations that were under or unreported leaving large gaps in our knowledge of a considerable amount of work, especially during the University of New Mexico field school era. UNM constructed a research station with laboratory facilities and dormitories with the goal of training students and conducting long-term research on a concentration of small village sites opposite the great houses of Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl. One of these excavations was at Bc...
Chacoan Heights at Aztec Ruins (2016)
At the Chacoan outlier of Aztec Ruins in northern New Mexico, the unexcavated Aztec North great house is located on top of a river terrace overlooking the broad Animas River valley. Down below, but out of sight from Aztec North, are two other great houses. The builders of these three great houses enmeshed them in a planned cultural landscape that reflects their cosmology and that intentionally reproduces a portion of the landscape at Chaco Canyon. Aztec North differs from its fellow great houses...
Changes in household organization and the development of Classic Period Mimbres pueblos (2017)
Changes in household organization were a major catalyst for social change in the Mimbres River Valley of southwestern New Mexico across the transition from pithouses to pueblos. This paper summarizes recent work at a large Pithouse period village, the Harris Site, and the Elk Ridge site, a large Classic period (AD 1000-1150) pueblo that is illuminating the relationship between households, community integration, and social change. Work at the Harris Site has documented the important role that...
Changes in production and distribution patterns of olivine-tempered ceramics in the Arizona Strip and adjacent areas (2016)
Artifact assemblages from the Arizona Strip and adjacent area are characterized by widely distributed ceramics tempered with olivine, a volcanic mineral. Sources of olivine lie in the vicinity of Mt. Trumbull and Tuweep, near the northwestern part of the Grand Canyon. The olivine-tempered ceramics were distributed mostly westward from Mt. Trumbull, up to 100 km to the lowland Virgin area in southern Nevada between A.D. 200 and 1350. Ultimately, the goal of this study is to understand why ceramic...
Changes in Turkey and Artiodactyl Abundance in Central Mesa Verde and Northern Rio Grande Archaeological Assemblages (2017)
Previous zooarchaeological studies in the Southwest indicate that over time, larger animal resources such as deer are replaced by smaller ones such as lagomorphs (cottontails and jackrabbits) and domesticated turkey in Ancestral Pueblo sites. These trends are identified on the basis of various faunal indices that measure the proportional abundance of one animal resource against another. In this study, we utilize an index that measures the proportion of domesticated turkey relative to artiodactyl...
Changing Attitudes and Perspectives on Public Participation in Archaeology: The Case of the Southwest Archaeology Team (2016)
In the early 1980s the Southwest Archaeology Team was formed under what is now the Arizona Museum of Natural History. Reacting to a need for an emergency response team to preserve information from archaeological sites, not protected by state or federal regulations, but being destroyed by development. While initially considered as outsiders and non-professionals, the acceptance of the public working on archaeological excavations quickly changed. This paper focuses on the changing attitudes and...
Changing Channels: Simulating Irrigation Management on Evolving Canal Systems for the Prehistoric Hohokam of Central Arizona (2015)
Societies that rely on irrigation face challenges arising from the variability and unpredictability of water supply and the physics underlying the flow of water through open channels; they overcome these through structured social interactions and institutions ranging from simple to complex. To better understand these past interactions we combine geoarchaeological studies with flow simulations and Agent Based Modeling. Fieldwork conducted during CRM projects on Hohokam irrigation structures in...
Changing Life Styles: New lithic finding from small sites in Casas Grades, Chihuahua Mexico (2015)
This paper reports on findings from the analysis on lithic collections from several Medio period small sites uncovered during the 2013/2014 summer excavations in the Casas Grades region of Chihuahua Mexico. While prior excavations within the region have placed focus on the large and medium sized site types found throughout the region, the summer 2013/2014 excavations focused solely upon the small, lesser-understood sites in order to evaluate their relation both specially and temporally to the...
The Changing Scale of Integrative Pueblo Communities in the Northern San Juan Region: Basketmaker III through Pueblo III. (2015)
Most studies of ancestral Pueblo communities in the northern San Juan region of southwestern Colorado use clusters of roughly contemporary habitations, often associated with public architecture, to define the spatial extent of residential communities. The term "community" has also been used to define important social groupings at both larger and smaller spatial scales depending on the focus of study and the type of social connection suggested. This study uses the locations of great kivas, one of...
Characterization of Minerals on Hohokam Palettes (2017)
Hohokam palettes are a unique artifact found at several important sites in southern Arizona. The Arizona State Museum (Tucson, AZ) has an extensive collection of Hohokam palettes from Gila Bend dating from the Santa Cruz and Sacaton periods (A.D. 850-1150). Most of these palettes have white lead-containing minerals on the surface. This project aimed at characterizing the composition and isotope signatures of these minerals using non-invasive and minimally destructive methods, including...
Characterizing Hunter-Gatherer Ground Stone Bedrock Features in the Northeastern Chihuahuan Desert (2017)
Ground stone bedrock features are common at archaeological sites in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. These features are human-made depressions pecked, ground, or worn into bedrock or large boulders, and were used for a variety of processing activities by the indigenous peoples. Although archaeologists in the region have informally recognized different "types" of ground stone bedrock features (e.g., slicks, grinding facets, deep mortars), there have been no dedicated studies of...
Characterizing Weathered Protein Residues from an Intra-Annual Cooking Experiment: A Mass Spectrometry Approach (2015)
The identification of archaeological protein residues from cooking pottery using non-targeted mass spectrometry based approaches is a promising avenue of research. A major strength of mass spectrometry in archaeological protein residue analysis is that it allows for the reliability of protein identifications to be probabilistically quantified. Though it is clear that proteins can preserve in ceramics under favorable circumstances, little is known about diagenetic processes that affect...
Chasing Tlaloc and Dragonflies in the Mimbres Valley: An Analysis of Ceramic Distribution and Style (2017)
Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures were common design elements on Classic Mimbres ceramics. However, certain forms and motifs were more widely used than others. During the 2016 field season at the Elk Ridge Ruin, a bowl with a Tlaloc figure was recovered from a burned ramada area, and a sherd with a partial dragonfly was found in one of the pueblo rooms. While both of these figures were included on rock art panels, they were infrequent on ceramics. This paper examines the presence of...
Chemical Characterization and Source Identification of Obsidian Projectile Points in the Southern Southwest (2017)
A sample of over 800 obsidian projectile points collected during 40 years of archaeological survey and excavation on Fort Bliss Military Reservation of south-central New Mexico and western Texas was submitted for chemical characterization and source identification using X-ray fluorescence (XRF). Obsidian projectile points representing all major temporal periods were analyzed, including Paleoindian Folsom points, several forms of dart points produced during the Early, Middle, and Late Archaic...
Chemostratigraphic Analysis of Alluvial Sediments in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2017)
Complex societies are generally dependent on agrarian economies whose success is contingent on water and nutrient availability. For Chaco Canyon, an Ancestral Pueblo cultural center in northwestern New Mexico with monumental construction dating from the 9th to 12 centuries A.D., the role of local agriculture has been of particular interest. Here, data =are presented from three summers of fieldwork using x-ray fluorescence to identify the geochemical composition of sediments, with a focus on...
Chimney Rock Ethnographic Partnership (2016)
The Chimney Rock Great House and associated sites are located on the frontier of the southwestern landscape that was occupied by the Ancestral Puebloans over a thousand years ago. Memories of that time and place still exist in tribal histories and ceremonies. Current knowledge and understanding of these resources comes from sporadic archaeological investigations conducted over the last 90 years. The cultural and traditional knowledge that descendants of the “Ancestors” possess of this cultural...
Chimney Rock: an Analysis of Landscape using Terrestrial LiDAR (2017)
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), widely known because of its aerial survey applications, is a multifaceted technology that can be used in terrestrial platforms. Here we present a new interpretation on the internal organization of Chimney Rock Great House and its landscape based on the use of terrestrial LiDAR. We will address methodological and technical approaches to the use of terrestrial LiDAR in the recording and study of this historical and archaeological monument.
Choosing Nomadism: On Northern Tiwa Flights to the Southern Plains (2017)
In Southwest archaeology, we are accustomed to thinking about the relationship between the Southern Plains and the Pueblo region in terms of the movement of objects in a continental economy of mutualistic exchange. Hunters moved buffalo meat and hides west; horticulturalists moved corn, lithics and ceramics east. With the onset of the Spanish colonial project, the movement of objects within the Plains-Pueblo macroeconomy intensified. Guns, knives and horses were added to the flow of goods. And...
A Chronological and Functional Analysis of Pottery from the HO-Bar Site: A Mogollon Early Pithouse Period Site in West-Central New Mexico (2015)
Pottery is thought to have been introduced into the Mogollon region sometime between A.D. 1 and A.D. 500, probably closer to A.D. 500 than A.D. 1. Dating of the HO-Bar Site and the paucity of ceramics suggest these ceramics are some of the earliest ceramics of the Mogollon Early Pithouse period. A geoarchaeological analysis of the site indicates a main occupation between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200. Typological and functional analyses of 355 sherds and 26 rims from the excavation of approximately 30...
Chronological Changes in Pottery Production in the Phoenix Basin: Evidence from La Villa (2015)
Recent excavations at La Villa recovered a large quantity of pottery that spanned a broad range of time from the Vakhi (ca. A.D. 500-700) to Early Sacaton phase (ca. A.D. 950-1020). Binocular and petrographic analysis of this corpus provides insights into changes in pottery production and distribution in the Phoenix Basin, particularly for Hohokam decorated ceramic types. The results from examining early red-on-gray through red-on-gray/buff sherds indicates those vessels were made with crushed...
Chupadero Black-on-white: Communities of Practice, Identity, and Memory (2017)
Since the beginning of archeological research, style has been used to characterize and define numerous aspects of social interaction and complexity, including communities of practice which structure ways in which elements of material culture are transmitted. The persistent transmission of knowledge through time and space implies a long lived community of practice. Chupadero Black-on-white, produced in central and southeast New Mexico, was possibly the longest lived of all the Black-on-white...
The Civilian Conservation Corps in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2015)
In 1937, a unique Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) sponsored "Indian Mobil Unit" was established in Chaco Canyon. The camp was located east of Pueblo Bonito and the goal was to train Navajo men and a woman in stone masonry, ruins stabilization, drainage control, archaeological excavation, and associated administrative tasks. In 1939, under the direction of National Park Service (NPS) archaeologist Gordon Vivian, men from the Indian Mobile Unit excavated a small village site in advance of the...
Clarifying Late Archaic, Basketmaker, and Pueblo I Project Point Types at Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona (2016)
Late Archaic, Basketmaker, and Pueblo I time period projectile point types are problematic in the greater Southwest because many exhibit considerable morphological overlap. The sizable collections from Petrified Forest National Park represent an excellent test case where all of these time periods are well represented. To characterize their considerable morphological range we analyze over 80 projectile points from cross dated surface finds and the excavated sites of the Basketmaker-era Flattop...