North America - Southwest (Geographic Keyword)
326-350 (899 Records)
After the early Medio period, populations subsisting in the Casas Grandes region, northwest Mexico experienced internal and external pressures that led to drastic reorganization of their socioeconomic system. This is reflected by significant changes in their lithic toolkit, where differences in raw material use and tool morphology accrued through time. Presented here are the results of our lithic study comparing multiple excavated Medio and the only excavated protohistoric site located...
From Ocean to Desert: Analysis of Prehistoric Shell Through Type, Use, and Trade Routes to Petrified Forest National Park (2016)
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...
From Orioles to Airplanes: O’odham Traditional Cultural Properties and Traditions of Travel through the Western Papaguería (2015)
Ethnographic research conducted on Barry M. Goldwater Range East with members of the Tohono O’odham Nation identified a series of ancient and historic travel routes relevant in O’odham history and contemporary traditions. These routes range from ancient foot trails leading to the Sea of Cortez to historic wagon roads and modern highways connecting O’odham communities. The O’odham commemorate important places in their history through place-naming, storytelling, songs, and traditional cultural...
From Plain Wares to Polychromes: A Geospatial Evaluation of Ceramics in the Casas Grandes Region (2017)
The past twenty-five years have seen a significant increase in archaeological fieldwork in the Casas Grandes region of Chihuahua, Mexico. Among significant issues in Casas Grandes archaeology is the relationship between sites close to Paquimé and those in its borderlands. Investigations into ceramic distributions across the landscape have the potential to provide a greater understanding of the relationship between sites and their relationship to Paquimé. In this study, we reexamine Carpenter’s...
From the Canyon to the Staircase: Expanding the Paleolithic Presence in the Arizona Strip (2017)
Evidence of Paleoindian and Paleo-Archaic occupation of the Arizona Strip, in northwest Arizona and southwest Utah, largely remains limited to isolated projectile points found lying on the modern ground surface, dispersed across large swaths of land. Building upon the few isolated finds, this presentation discusses the recent identification of multiple fluted and unfluted lanceolate and Great Basin Stemmed projectile points. In contrast to the few previously known finds, the various projectile...
From the Empirical to the Conjectural: Using Spatial Analysis to Determine Population Settlement Patterns on the Uncharted Mesa Verde Landform (2016)
A consistent issue that arises in archaeological studies is the absence of a complete set of data on which to perform analyses. Data may be unavailable for a variety of reasons, but its absence often inhibits complete understanding of a population in a defined area. In southwestern Colorado, survey coverage on the Mesa Verde landform is limited to the extent of Mesa Verde National Park, and therefore settlement studies are limited to less than one third of the prominent landform. To fully...
From Viewer to Observer: Analyzing Spatial Complexity of Pictographs in the Lower Pecos (2017)
From Viewer to Observer will discuss the visual elements of the Pecos River style rock art, exploring the painting techniques and patterns that created these complex spaces. In addition, this paper will examine Lower Pecos pictographs through David Summers’ Real Spaces, as well as other texts, to create a context within current and traditional art historical methodologies. In using Summers’ idea of the spatially aware "observer" instead of the "viewer" I hope to expand the boundaries of the...
A Frontier in Bloom: Social Implications of Architectural Diversity and Conformity during the Colonization of the San Juan Region of the Northern Southwest (2017)
Behavioral conformity and, its inverse, behavioral diversity are social adaptations wielded by small scale agricultural societies faced with change. By the sixth and seventh centuries A.D., the Basketmaker III period, long standing conflicts in the San Juan region of the northern Southwest had abated and new territories opened to agricultural colonization. Frontier colonization is by nature a contentious process that usually results in violence, displacement, and the reinforcement of factions....
Frontiers in Center Places (2017)
Borders often imply two-dimensional lines on a map, a naturalized "over here" and "over there". This is reified in places where political boundaries appear to follow ecological ones. But the nature of these lines, even apparently clear environmental ones, is always arbitrary, and the recognition of these lines is always dependent on subject position. The word "frontier" highlights this politics of definition and recognition; frontiers are defined in history and anthropology as the edges of...
Fuel Treatment Guidelines to Reduce Wildfire Damages to Ceramic Artifacts in the American Southwest (2015)
Artifact assemblages in the American southwest are currently subjected to periodic wildfires and prescribed burns, and have been exposed to fires in the past. Ceramics are a key constituent of these assemblages, leading to questions regarding effects of post-depositional heat and flame exposure on pottery. Alterations of ceramic pattern, form, and chemistry have been observed following wildfires, and such changes are significant because intact ceramics provide temporal context and other social...
Full-Coverage Regional Surveys:Insights Gained about Hohokam, Akimel O'odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Landscape Use (2017)
Full-coverage regional archaeological surveys conducted throughout the world in diverse environmental contexts have demonstrated the advantages of this methodology for addressing a broad range of anthropological issues. The Northern Tucson Basin Survey (1980-1987) directed by Suzanne and Paul Fish represents the first application of this methodology to document prehistoric Hohokam settlement and land-use. Contiguous survey blocks centered on three Classic Period platform mounds and their...
Funerary Practices in Prehispanic Sinaloa: Assessing Aztatlán Mortuary Behavior (2015)
Funerary traditions reflect social behaviors that contain important information about the integration of several social groups. Funerary practices seem to persist over time because they comprise an integral aspect of group identity. In this paper we discuss the funerary practices known for the identified late prehispanic Sinaloan archaeological traditions. Specific locations to bury the dead appear to be the usual practice for the Aztatlán and Huatabampo traditions. Funerary mounds with extended...
Further Analysis on Vessel Size and Feasting in three Chacoan Great House Communities (2015)
Examining rim sherds and identifying ceramic vessels size is one method of investigating feasting practices. Larger vessels may indicate larger scale food preparation and consumption than found at normal households. Chacoan Great Houses are thought to have been used as gathering places for local communities to serve as the locus of ritual and feasting activities. The temporal element is expanding the research by using general ware types as temporal indicators on the ceramics recovered from...
Future Salado Research: Roosevelt Archaeology at ASU Center for Archaeology & Society Repository (2016)
Archaeological collections have vital roles in contemporary and future research activities and afford opportunities for in-depth localized studies or broad regional syntheses. The Center for Archaeology & Society Repository (formerly Archaeological Research Institute) at Arizona State University curates the Roosevelt Archaeology Projects funded by the US DOI Bureau of Reclamation in cooperation with the Tonto National Forest. These well documented large scale excavations provide research and...
Games, Feasting, and Trade Fairs: Assessing the Relationship between Ballcourts and Exchange at the Ironwood Village Site (2015)
A significant amount of research in Hohokam archaeology has been dedicated to understanding the structure of interaction and exchange. One particular model that has gained recent momentum is that of a marketplace economy revolving around ballcourt events that served as gathering points for social and economic interaction. These markets, or trade fairs, would have provided a reliable mechanism for the exchange of goods to spatially and socially disparate populations. Feasting also may have been...
Gene Flow at Paquime: Cranial Non-Metric Approaches to Regional Social Interactions (2016)
The origins of the Casas Grandes phenomenon remain an essential, if elusive pursuit for Southwest/Northwest archaeologists. The explanations are numerous, and include migrations, in-situ development, local emulation of prestigious Mesoamerican traits, and several different combinations therein. In this study, a series of biodistance analyses are conducted using different cranial and dental metric and non-metric traits. Several hypothesized sources of migrants and cultural transmission are...
Gene-Culture Coevolution, Pit Hearth Cooking, and the Diabetes Epidemic among North American Indigenous Populations (2017)
While the diabetes epidemic among indigenous Native American populations has been examined for more than 30 years, the nuances between environmental and genetic causes of this disease remain understudied. In this paper, I explore the idea that the diabetes epidemic among Native American populations may be partially attributed to the introduction of a diet suited for Westernized populations. I will specifically look at gene-culture coevolution and the salivary amylase gene (AMY1) copy numbers...
Geochemical Evidence for Dispersed Ground Stone Tool Production at Hohokam Villages in the Middle Gila River Valley, Arizona. (2017)
A recent geochemical provenance analysis of Hohokam vesicular basalt grinding tools argued for the nucleated production of trough manos and metates during the Pre-Classic (A.D. 500-1100) and Classic (A.D. 1100-145) periods (Fertelmes 2014). One locus of production was suggested to have been the primary village of Upper Santan, which acquired vesicular basalt from the Santan Mountains and then distributed finished or nearly complete grinding tools to settlements across the Middle Gila River...
Geometric Morphometric Approaches to Casas Grandes Ceramic Specialization (2015)
Previous studies of the Casas Grandes region have suggested that several craft items, including ceramics and ground stone, were produced by part or full-time specialists. In this study, we build upon previous approaches to ceramic specialization by conducting geometric morphometric analysis on an extensive collection of scaled digital photographs of Viejo and Medio period whole vessels. Geometric morphometrics allows for the statistical analysis of shape as indicated by the relationship...
Geospatial Analysis of Cedar Mesa Settlement Patterns (2015)
Settlement pattern analyses published by Matson, Lipe, and Haase (1988) contributed basic understandings of the distribution of the many small dispersed sites in the Cedar Mesa area of SE Utah, and of the environmental factors that influenced these settlement behaviors. This project applies geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing techniques to supplement their settlement pattern study and gain additional insight into Ancestral Pueblo occupation of the region. Processing and...
Getting Accustomed... (2017)
Pueblo Indians have successfully managed social and environmental situations for thousands of years by moving our villages. However, after the Spanish invasion and the Anglo imposition, we were no longer as free to move. We've had to engage foreign ideas at our home villages in some cases very rapidly. Those in the 1950s were unlike anything we had seen in my pueblo. Seventy years' changes in America happened in ten years not giving us much time for careful thought as to what side effects these...
Getting Up-Close and Personal with Pecos River Style Rock Art (2016)
Pecos River style rock art in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico is arguably one of the most famous and complex pictograph styles in North America, if not the world. Thirty-two radiocarbon assays obtained from 19 figures range from 4200 ± 90 to 1465 ± 50 RCYBP. Many characteristics of the style have remained almost unchanged throughout that time. What attributes define the Pecos River style, however, are still debated, despite a seemingly iconic appearance....
Gini Coefficients and the Measurement of Inequality: An Introduction (2016)
We briefly explore the history and current use of Gini coefficients, emphasizing the relatively few studies previously completed in archaeology. Then we explore the behavior of this measure against a variety of theoretical distributions, showing that it makes a useful though imperfect statistical summary of interesting phenomena. Finally we present Gini coefficients for a variety of contexts drawn from prehispanic Pueblo societies. Archaeological thought on emerging inequality has tended to...
GIS Modeling of Agricultural Suitability in the Highlands of the Jornada Branch of the Mogollon Culture of southcentral New Mexico (2016)
Changes in the importance of agriculture in prehistoric economies are of major interest in a range of contexts worldwide. Measures of site location in relation to agricultural potential are an important tool for identifying relative shifts in the importance of agriculture over time within a given region. Here we examine the application of GIS modeling of agricultural potential based on soils, topography, temperature, precipitation, and horizontal coordinates in the highlands of the Jornada...
Glaze-Paint Pigmenting Strategies in the Upper Little Colorado and Western Zuni Regions of the American Southwest (2017)
LA-ICP-MS is used to examine glaze-paint pigmenting strategies during the Pueblo IV period in the Upper Little Colorado and Western Zuni Regions of the American Southwest. These data are integrated with INAA sourcing information and compared to glaze-paint strategies from other areas of the late precontact Southwest to define cross-cutting technological communities of practice and to trace the circulation of ideas, production techniques, raw materials and finished objects through networks of...