North America: Southwest United States (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evangelia Tsesmeli. David Eck.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mastication refers to the mechanical thinning of tree cover such as piñon-juniper woodlands and mixed conifer forests in order to reduce fuels and fire hazards, prevent erosion and improve understory development. Mastication utilizes heavy machinery to shred standing vegetation and may involve significant ground disturbance. Though mastication is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Danis. Ruth Tringham.

In this paper we discuss methods for what Yannis Hamilakis (2013) has called "sensorially reconstituted archaeologies." Rather than being strictly focused on single mode sensory experience in the past, such archaeologies cannot be done without a self-reflexive awareness of multisensorial elements in every experience and event of modern archaeology and the imagined past. The theoretical goals of such a large-scale shift in thinking about archaeology and the senses have already been laid out, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Adams. Anna Graham.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although the histories of major New World plant domestications of beans, corn, squash, gourd, and tobacco are well-known, histories of regional plant domestications from local wild plants are not. In the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest, a wild late winter/early spring-ripening annual grass known as Little Barley (Hordeum pusillum Nutt.) became a crop of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Adler. Laura Martin.

This is an abstract from the "The Vanishing Treasures Program: Celebrating 20 Years of National Park Service Historic Preservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past five years, there have been several high profile incidents of vandalism on public lands, including in multiple National Parks across the West. This presentation deals with one such incident that took place at Arches National Park in the spring of 2016. Visitors carved names...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxine McBrinn. Julia Clifton. Diana Sherman. Amy Montoya.

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The care and preservation of cultural materials is viewed by the public as a vital role of the museum. Consciously or not, museums are seen as “society’s attic,” a high-quality, sophisticated storage space that contains valuable and irreplaceable objects while remaining infinitely expandable. In reality, space is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melyssa Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Petrified Forest National Park" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Situated in a variety of environmental settings, over 1300 archaeological sites dot the Petrified Forest National Park Landscape. Though the position of many of the sites within the park appears to be almost random, human behavior dictates that there must be an advantageous reason for the placement of a particular site in one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Pye.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In October of 1869 a smallpox outbreak developed in Tucson, Arizona, which lasted until late April of 1870. Historical documents do not agree on the number of deaths resulting from the epidemic, and no concrete information is given about the extent of the illness spread through the Tucson community or the surrounding region. Bioarchaeological evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradley Vierra.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The American Southwest is an arid landscape that has experienced dynamic shifts in climate between dry and wet periods. Researchers have traditionally focused on the effects of drought conditions on farming communities. They often suggested that these extreme conditions dictated the regional displacement of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Clifton.

This is an abstract from the "How to Conduct Museum Research and Recent Research Findings in Museum Collections: Posters in Honor of Terry Childs" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A systematic survey of archaeological vessels in the collections of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe revealed almost 100 bird form jars, frequently referred to as duck pots or shoe jars, from New Mexico and its border environs. The survey found, among other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kellam J. Throgmorton.

In the late summer of 2017, I conducted dissertation research at two Chacoan communities: Morris 40, on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, and Padilla Well, in Chaco Culture National Historic Park. I was assisted by a team comprised of Binghamton University graduate students and independent researchers from New Mexico and Colorado. We used remote sensing, geophysical survey, and material culture analysis to map and document these two communities. We evaluated the idea that migration from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Koenig. Leslie Bush. J. Kevin Hanselka. Chase Mahan. Amanda Castañeda.

This is an abstract from the "Hearths, Earth Ovens, and the Carbohydrate Revolution: Indigenous Subsistence Strategies and Cooking during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Eagle Cave (41VV167) is a dry rockshelter in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas containing a 13,000-year record of hunter-gatherer lifeways. Beginning around 10,500 cal BP, Lower Pecos foragers began constructing earth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Campbell.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Early Navajo Pastoral Landscape Project is an ongoing study that explores the potential ways that incipient Indigenous pastoralism influenced early Navajo community life circa AD 1750. The recent dung-based identification of potential livestock enclosure features at four...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polly and Curtis Schaafma have been instrumental in identifying primary archaeological tenets associated with the origin of the Pueblo Kachina Cult. In this paper I revisit key ethnohistorical and archaeological findings of the origins of the Pueblo Kachina Cult and "Snake Dance" (Tsu’tiki or Tsu’tiva). Utilizing a comparative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Mink.

Margaret Lyneis, in her 1995 description of the Virgin Branch region, notes that three of the boundaries are quite distinct as they adjoin "non-Anasazi" societies. The eastern boundary is more diffuse, as the Virgin and Kayenta Puebloan traditions intersect in an area that is now part of Grand Canyon National Park. In this paper I will argue that Virgin settlement patterns in the western half of the Grand Canyon are distinct from the Kayenta and follow the upland/lowland pattern described for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Loehman.

This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the southwestern US humans and ecosystems share a history of fire. An integrated archaeo-ecological framework offers an important interpretive lens for both archaeologists and ecologists. Contemporary ecological patterns and processes that are thought to be ‘native’ or ‘natural’ may in fact be highly influenced by past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Vernon. Weston McCool. Simon Brewer. Brian Codding. Scott Ortman.

This is an abstract from the "Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decisions individuals make about where to live have profound consequences for everything from climate and conflict, to migration, inequality, the origins of agriculture, and urban development. It is not surprising that understanding and explaining those decisions remains an open and active area of research within archaeology. Many of the important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Wright. Nathalie Brusgaard.

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The far-western Southwest presents a landscape of wide, once-perennial rivers cutting through a xeric terrain of lava plains and mountain peaks. For the Yuman-speaking tribes tethered to the waterways, this landscape is both physical and metaphysical, in that it is simultaneously the place where people, animals, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Barg. Nathan Thomas.

Looting of archaeological resources on public lands has been an issue throughout the United States for over a century, and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)-administered lands are no exception. Looting can take many forms, ranging from a visitor looking for a souvenir to intense, large-scale, and intentional desecration of sites for personal profit. Looting issues can be exacerbated by the limited on-the-ground resources of federal agencies that manage millions of acres. The proactive actions the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Jones. Tyson Hughes.

This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center (CCAC) has a strong and lasting tradition of enjoining participants in the study of cultural continuity, change, and environmental adaptation in the desert Southwest, and serves as an innovative model for experiential learning through public archaeology. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Cordero.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies in avian biology have highlighted the plasticity of avian migratory flyways and location of wintering grounds for a range of taxa in response to agricultural production. This research provides a test of these studies to assess if pre-contact migrations in the American Southwest could have caused a shift in the wintering grounds of migratory birds along...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Covert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The effects of environmental changes can be seen through changes in archaeological site conditions. Over the past four years, archeological sites at Wupatki National Monument have been significantly affected by water erosion. Water erosion, mainly from summer monsoons, is affecting the integrity and condition of these archeological sites. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz.

The human labor involved in physically carrying goods across the landscape underpins all artifact provenance studies in the prehispanic American Southwest, yet this labor is all too often left unacknowledged and unconsidered, even as detailed and sometimes remarkable patterns of artifact production and distribution are brought to light. This is especially true for the Phoenix Basin Hohokam, where ceramic provenance studies have revolutionized archaeologists’ abilities to understand the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Schwartz.

This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The frequent deposition of animals in public spaces suggests an essential role in public rituals in the pre-Hispanic U.S. Southwest. Using ethnographic evidence and large-scale analysis of faunal remains in the Tonto Basin area of central Arizona, I ask whether ritual fauna cluster in socially integrative spaces and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Mathwich.

This is an abstract from the "Isotopic and Animal aDNA Analyses in the Southwest/Northwest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Political ecology examines the relationship between politics and the environment and how that relationship affects ecosystems. While bioarchaeologists have shown the extensive biochemical connections in human remains resulting from political and economic inequalities, less attention has been given to the ways in which animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Laluk.

In 2004 the White Mountain Apache Tribe passed a tribal resolution approving the White Apache Tribe Cultural Heritage Resources Best Management Practices (Welch et al.). These practices presented and delineated in guideline form discuss cultural heritage resource definitions; management and necessary steps before, during and after project implementation for any ground disturbing projects potentially adversely affecting cultural heritage resources on Ndee (Apache) trust lands. However, since the...