North America - Southwest (Geographic Keyword)
451-475 (899 Records)
In societies across the ancient world, incipient leadership and centralization were founded on connections to the cosmological through ancestors, origins, and other ritual practices. At Paquimé in northern Chihuahua, Mexico these ritual practices were expressed through the language of color symbolism. Color/directional symbolism is a cosmological principle that acts as a deep structure for societies in the Puebloan U.S. Southwest and Mesoamerica. Red, black, yellow, white, and blue/green...
Life and Ritual at the Edge of the Lava: The Ancient Chacoan Community at Las Ventanas (2015)
The ancient Chaocan-affiliated community at Las Ventanas, New Mexico, on the El Malpais National Monument, has been known to the southwestern archaeological community since Adolph Bandelier’s time in the late 19th century. Knowledge has accrued over nearly 140 years with visits by various archaeologists. Archaeology Southwest’s recent Las Ventanas Community Landscape Project has continued this work and produced some astounding findings. Seven extensive trails were documented in the lava west of...
Life Between Two Rivers: A Study of the Sedentary to Early Classic Transition on the Queen Creek Delta, Arizona (2017)
Disruption of exchange networks and settlement patterns during the late Sedentary to early Classic period transition has been well documented along the middle Gila River Valley. Previous research has suggested a trend in population relocation from downstream Gila River sites such as Snaketown in favor of sites upstream such as the Grewe-Casa Grande complex during this time. Based on evidence recovered from residential contexts identified during the PVR FRS project, outlying areas situated along...
Life histories of ochre and related pigments in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest (2016)
What defines an ochre: its chemical composition, its color, or both? The Ancestral Pueblo people of the US Southwest used a range of red and yellow pigments, some of which fit strict scientific definitions of ochre and some that do not. Ancestral Pueblo people also created a variety of paints by mixing these pigments with clays and other materials. In this paper, I consider the use of mineral pigments and paints through time and space, drawing on material from Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, ancestral...
A life in the mountains: Spanish identity in 17th c. New Mexico (2015)
As opposed to typical well-defined urban areas, 17th c. Spanish colonial New Mexico consisted of a series of small, dispersed, rural, isolated settlements. The colonists were also isolated in the sense that they had extremely limited and irregular access to trade goods and communication with the broader Spanish Empire. Furthermore, they stemmed from diverse ethnic backgrounds, often lumped as mestizo by modern researchers. Given these challenges to maintaining a perceived Spanish identity, how...
Life on the Edge: An Investigation of 18th Century Spanish Colonial Subsistence Strategies in the Northern Rio Grande (2015)
The 18th century Northern Rio Grande basin of New Mexico was a politically volatile and contested landscape. Hispano settlers, including those who established the aldea of San Antonio del Embudo (now Dixon, New Mexico) along the Embudo River in 1725, found themselves entangled in a complex web of socioeconomic interactions and, at times, hostilities with diverse indigenous peoples. To what extent did these Spanish colonists adhere to European subsistence strategies or embrace native foodways? Do...
Linking Hispanic Heritage Through Archaeology (LHHTA): Engaging Latino Youth With Our National Parks (2015)
Linking Hispanic Heritage Through Archaeology (LHHTA) is a program that connects Hispanic youth to their cultural history using regional archaeology as a bridge. The program highlights the role of the National Park Service in interpretation and cultural preservation. LHHTA involves high school students and teachers in archaeological field and lab work, visits to museums and National Parks, and experiential learning. Participants explored their personal and cultural histories through the use...
Lithic Analysis from the Rainbow Forest Clovis Site (2015)
During the late Pleistocene the Rainbow Forest Playa Paleoindian site at Petrified Forest National Park was an area where Clovis people procured lithic materials and took advantage of a local riparian microenvironment. This poster presents recent research on lithic tool assemblages from the Rainbow Forest Playa site, including microwear analysis from archaeological materials and the results of replicative experiments. Results suggest that while the site was clearly used as a lithic quarry, a...
Lithic Landscapes and Basketmaker Villages: An Update of the 2014 Petrified Forest Boundary Expansion Survey (2015)
In 2004 Congress authorized Petrified Forest National Park to more than double in size, in part to protect unique cultural resources. This poster introduces the preliminary results of the first and second seasons of pedestrian survey in these new lands. So far this research has recorded archaeological sites dating from the Early Archaic through the Late Pueblo periods. Sites range from lithic landscapes covering hundreds of acres to multi-room masonry or jacal structures. Mapping in...
Lithic Technology and Households at the Harris Site, Southwestern New Mexico (2015)
Recent excavations at the Harris Site in the Mimbres River Valley of southwestern New Mexico have documented differences between Three Circle phase (A.D. 750-1000) pithouses and associated features that suggest differences in social organization. In this poster we use data from cores and chipped stone tools recovered from house floors, extramural work areas, and extramural storage areas to examine core reduction technology and raw material use associated with these households. Our main goal is...
Living and Dying a Bioarchaeological Analysis of Human Remains Recovered by Earl Morris at Aztec Ruins (2017)
Aztec Ruins, an Ancestral Pueblo site in northern New Mexico, is recognized as a large and socially complex site. Aztec Ruins is typically considered in relation to the Chaco Phenomenon, although connections to Mesa Verde have also been made. Combined these relationships suggest close ties to other temporally occupied sites. Excavations of Aztec Ruins were undertaken between 1916 and 1923 by southwestern archaeologist Earl Morris. Among his many finds he reported excavating 186 sets of human...
A Local Expression of "Salado" in Tonto Basin (2015)
"Salado" refers to a series of local expressions developed when populations were faced with the challenges of increased population sizes, migrants, and complexity. Local populations incorporated ceramic styles, iconography, architecture, and community organization from new arrivals and surrounding populations in ways that were adaptive and fostered integration. This brought migrants into the fold, albeit keeping them at a safe distance with limited participation and membership. To have excluded...
Local Visibility and Monumentality in the Chaco World: A Total Viewshed Approach (2017)
Chacoan great houses are considered "monumental," in the sense both of scale and of conveying meaning. Throughout the Chaco World, great houses and other large-scale buildings would have been associated to some degree with a larger, regional Chacoan ideology. At the same time, these structures vary and should be understood in the context of diverse local and regional histories. Visibility can be a key component of monumentality, and it has been suggested that great houses were frequently placed...
Long Days Journey into Night, Government to Government Consultation under Section 106, on the Navajo Nation (2017)
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended requires that the Federal Agencies consult with American Indian Tribes on a Government to Government basis. There are numerous guidelines and trainings on how this should be accomplished under the law, but these do not consider the Tribal point of view. American Indian Tribes are sovereign Nations and expect to be treated as such, expecting long term relationships with Federal Agencies. During my tenure with the Navajo...
Long-term data versus Contemporary Crisis: Anthropological Archaeology in the U.S. / Mexico Borderlands (2015)
Steve Kowalewski’s work demonstrates the importance of long-term data and provides methods for synthesizing archaeological and other social science data to address problems of contemporary concern. This paper takes cues from that research and combines it with the social conscience for which Steve is known and respected. Instead of treating the deaths of undocumented border crossers in isolation, this phenomenon is contextualized by the long-term history of the U.S. Mexico Borderlands as a...
Looking Outward from the Village: The Effects of Soil Moisture on Prehistoric Cropland in the Central Mesa Verde Region (2017)
Ancestral Pueblo communities of the central Mesa Verde region (CMV) became increasingly reliant on maize agriculture for their subsistence needs by A.D. 900. Researchers have been studying the Ancestral Pueblo people for over a century using a variety of methods to understand the relationships between climate, agriculture, population, and settlements. While this research has produced a well-developed cultural history of the region, studies at a smaller scale are still needed to understand the...
Looking through the Local Lens: Recognizing Southern Chuska Valley Production of Mesa Verde Style Pottery (2015)
Recent analyses of ceramics from the Southern Chuska Valley (SCV) have suggested that vessels commonly identified as imports from the Mesa Verde region in fact largely represent locally-produced variants of Mesa Verde White Ware rather than actual imported vessels. Data collected from the US 491 Highway mitigation project (SRI) and the El Paso Pipeline project (WCRM) provide a baseline from which we plan to further investigate the presence of locally-manufactured Mesa Verde variant types in the...
Low Altitude Unmanned Aerial Photography To Assist in Rock Art Studies (2015)
A radio-controlled DJI Phantom quadcopter with GoPro or built-in camera can help document archaeological features best seen from the air, such as geoglyphs, rock alignments, and some rock art panels. The camera can be set for interval photography, or monitored and triggered in real-time. The fisheye image distortion can be reasonably corrected with software such as Photoshop or DxO. This portable and relatively inexpensive method of flying a pattern and hovering directly above a site (now...
Low Impact, High Resolution: Unraveling and Learning from 10,000 Years of Hunter-Gatherer Use of Eagle Cave (2017)
On the northeast fringe of the Chihuahuan Desert, one of the largest rockshelters in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, Eagle Cave, preserves an extraordinary record of hunter-gatherer life spanning more than 10,000 years. Ongoing investigations by the Ancient Southwest Texas Project of Texas State University beginning winter of 2015 have re-excavated a 4-meter deep trench through the center of this massive rockshelter in order to document and sample complex stratigraphy and to stabilize and backfill...
Luminescence Dating of Surface Ceramics from Naturally Burned Archaeological Contexts (2015)
Luminescence dating of surface ceramics at archaeological sites is problematic for many reasons, including estimation of environmental dose rate, likelihood that an artifact is in situ and weathering. Until now, there has not been systematic research on the effect of natural fires on luminescence dating of pottery. This is an important consideration, because while the temperature of a typical fire is well above the threshold for resetting the luminescence signal in a sherd, the length of time...
The Macaw from Cueva de Avendaños, Chihuahua (2017)
At the beginning of 2016, a EAHNM archaeologist performed a rescue project in the Cueva de Avendaños, municipality of San Francisco de Borja, Chihuahua, as a result of a complaint. There, the land owner decided to level the cave surface with a bulldozer not knowing that an archaeological site lay beneath. The result was the destruction of a pre-Hispanic funerary context which included the remains of at least three mummified individuals accompanied by textiles, basketry, string, leather, shell...
Macaw Husbandry in the Ancient Greater Southwest (2016)
The archaeological record of the American Southwest and North Mexico contains evidence that for hundreds of years, ancient peoples transported, kept and possibly bred tropical macaws at several major population centers. Archaeologists are still working to understand exactly how this was accomplished, but the fact that this evidence indicates aspects of macaw husbandry has been underappreciated. Ethological data on human and macaw interactions in similar contexts in the present can help inform...
Macroscale Analysis of Faunal Remains in the Hohokam Area of Southern Arizona: Preliminary Results (2015)
Pre-Contact societies in southern Arizona developed large-scale, agriculturally-based communities with essentially no access to domesticated meat. Their hunting opportunities were limited, as well, by the need to live close to water sources for irrigation. The resulting trade-offs between community needs have important implications for political organization, labor choices, and gender roles. In this poster, we present preliminary results of a GIS analysis of relationships between species...
Magnetic Gradiometry in the Spatial Reconstruction of the Early Agricultural Period Canal System at La Playa, Mexico (2016)
La Playa (SON F:10:3), in Sonora, Mexico, is an Early Agricultural period (2100 B.C.-A.D. 50) archaeological site which has the remains of an irrigation canal system. The Early Agricultural Period is characterized by the development of agriculture in the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. Due to severe erosion at La Playa, intact canals and cultivated soils had not been located for study. Magnetic gradiometry was used to detect intact agricultural features buried by alluvium....
Making Ends Meet in Frontier New Mexico (2015)
In 19th century frontier New Mexico consumer relationships reflected important social networks that were essential to the survival of Hispanic settlements. These relationships played a vital role in the formation and maintenance of modern Hispanic identity during the Mexican and American Territorial Periods. Visually and functionally similar plainware ceramics were produced and used by many different cultural groups on the landscape in New Mexico in the 19th century. Hispanic residents were able...