North America: Southwest United States (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Van Vlack. Jamie A. Civitello. Rory P. Gauthier. Robert Powers.

In honor of Robert Powers, Bandelier National Monument (BNM) presents research on his final project investigating agricultural potential in the arid highlands of the American Southwest. Powers’ research was conducted on behalf of the University of New Mexico’s anthropology doctoral program for archaeology. The Park is well-known for its ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites and the unique, natural ecotones throughout the Eastern Jemez Mountains. The region is topographically dynamic; the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanna Diederichs.

This is an abstract from the "Adopting the Pueblo Fettle: The Breadth and Depth of the Basketmaker III Cultural Horizon" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A range of evidence suggests that the Ancestral Pueblo tradition of the northern Southwest crystallized during the Basketmaker III period in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. As farming was adopted and populations expanded, social problems related to conflict mitigation, land tenure, and private...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Dombrosky.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is a common misconception that fishes were unimportant in the diet of past Pueblo people in the US Southwest. Yet, small numbers of fish remains are consistently recovered from late prehispanic/early historic (ca AD 1300–1600) archaeological sites in the Middle Rio Grande of New Mexico. The end of drought conditions may have impacted food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cyler Conrad. Sandi Copeland.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we use bone apatite and collagen stable isotope analysis to examine long-term Ancestral Pueblo turkey management strategies on the Pajarito Plateau in the northern Rio Grande of New Mexico. Since previous preliminary research within this region identified...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Braeden Dimitroff. Candice Disque.

The 2017 Alkali Ridge Data Modernization Project completed an intensive survey of 10 Ancestral Pueblo habitation sites within the Alkali Ridge National Historic Landmark as part of the ongoing collaboration between NMSU and the National Park Service to modernize data and conduct research. The 2017 fieldwork season focused on recording small residential sites in close proximity to community centers to examine the role small satellite habitations played in the Pueblo II-III period landscape of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Greenwald. Mary Weakhee. Hayley Kievman. Andrew Merryweather. Jamie Herridge.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Running is an important, and even sacred, cultural practice among modern Indigenous peoples of the western North America and has deep roots in prehistory. Oral history and limited archaeological evidence suggest that running was important in ceremonial contexts, communication between communities, in hunting practices, and warfare. However, the prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tucker Deady.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological survey of 800 acres at Redwood Llama Ranch in southwest Colorado documented over 50 previously unrecorded archaeological sites. A 2016 survey, completed as a settlement pattern study using a landscape archaeology framework, explored the extent of Ancestral Puebloan habitation and activity within this property situated in a canyon and on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Van Keuren. William Graves.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wendy Ashmore’s concept of ceremonial landscapes highlights how sacred ideas and ritual practices are intertwined with “sacred geographies” and “spiritscapes.” Her ideas have been primarily applied to pre-Hispanic urban settings in the Americas, where cities and surrounding natural features are seen to manifest “cosmograms.” We think her broader concept...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Waller. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Ana Morales-Arce. Meradeth Snow. Miguel Vallebueno.

Paquimé, the political and religious center of the Casas Grandes culture, demonstrates extensive evidence of Mesoamerican influence, including macaws, architectural characteristics such as ballcourts and platform mounds, and mortuary practices in the form of modified trophy skulls and human sacrifice. The role of Mesoamerican influence on the development and florescence of the Casas Grandes culture remains an important but contentious research question for the late prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Swarts.

This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeo- or paleoethnobiology is the study of how humans interact with their environment; the most extreme and intimate expression of this relationship is domestication. Domesticates are not only a biological organism, with their own unique evolutionary trajectories that they bring into domestication, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fred Nials. Winston Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent LiDAR-aided discovery of more than 60 mi² (155 km²) of Ancestral Puebloan agricultural features, roads, and ritual features in the Northern San Juan area brings into question many of our preconceived notions about prehistoric lifeways. Agricultural features, the focus of this discussion, are consistent in location, morphology, engineering...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saul Hedquist. Samantha Fladd. Vincent M. LaMotta. Nancy Odegaard.

This paper honors the anthropological contributions of the Homol’ovi Research Program (HRP) and its directors. We reflect on the conception and implementation of field and curation protocols that enabled years of innovative research into ancient Pueblo lifeways, work that continues today. Though fieldwork in the region has ceased, researchers still benefit from exceptional field recording standards, sound conservation techniques, and an explicitly behavioral project methodology. HRP was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Cootsona.

This paper explores the role of animals as social actors, namely the way natural animal behaviors influence human religious settings. The paper focuses on the case study of a floor organization of a formally closed thirteenth century Northern Tiwa kiva in the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. The worldview and beliefs of the Northern Tiwa were deeply shaped by the species and biomes with whom they co-habited. Through the synthesis of material data, ethnographic information and behavioral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker.

This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. If pottery was animate in past cultures, does this not beg the question how would these powers, central to magical technologies, contribute to creation of archaeological phases? Archaeologists generally struggle to explain rise and fall in the popularity of artifacts. Indeed the behavioral archaeologists developed artifact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Lorenz. David Preston.

This is an abstract from the "Social Interaction and Networks at the Intersection of Central Mesa Verde and Chaco/Cibola Culture Areas in the Middle San Juan River Valley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 2016 and 2018 seasons, excavators found more than 150 features in Floor 2 of the eastern half of the Great Kiva at Point Pueblo. Of these, 99 were east of the eastern vault complex. Features were lined with clay or adobe, demonstrated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jared Renaud.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2001, as part of the development of the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP), the Pima County government created a list of Priority Cultural Resources (PCRs) as a proactive approach to local heritage conservation. This list of PCRs highlights archaeological and historic sites considered integral to the county’s historical and cultural values and demand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Severin Fowles.

In this paper, I explore Ancestral Tiwa rock modifications and linguistic conventions to identify what might be referred to as an "aquatic imaginary" governing Pueblo engagement with the northern Rio Grande landscape. The movement of water, it is argued, emerged out of a preceding Archaic preoccupation with the movement of animals as the dominant new way of both conceptualizing ecological systems and intervening in those systems through the organization and modification of stone. Evidence from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Enduring Relationships: People, Plants, and the Contributions of Karen R. Adams" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is more than one way to gain insight about past Native American use of plants. The conventional approach is to collect archaeobotanical samples during archaeological excavations. Another perspective is to inventory the environments surrounding sites and communities to understand the foodscape that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard George. Stephen Plog. Adam Watson. Kari Schmidt. Douglas Kennett.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hundreds of scarlet macaw skeletons have been recovered from archaeological sites across the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico. The location of these skeletons more than 1,000 km outside their Neotropical endemic range has suggested a far-reaching pre-Hispanic acquisition network....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elaine Hughes.

This is an abstract from the "To Curate or Not to Curate: Surprises, Remorse, and Archaeological Grey Area" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA) is a private institution, yet 89% of its archaeological holdings are from federal, tribal, and state lands. The story of how MNA acquired these collections is rooted in its founding in 1928 by a group of local citizens under the leadership of Dr. Harold S. and Mary-Russell...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Lekson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After almost three decades in museums and allied institutions, I have some ideas about the challenges and opportunities facing archaeological curation, especially in the western United States. This poster presents several of these themes – the permanent curation crisis, UFOs and CUIs, legacy collections, changing audiences, and of course Tribal collaborations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Monagle.

This is an abstract from the "Dogs in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists frequently use single archaeological events to infer the entirety of the human-dog relationship in a particular time and place. While this practice makes sense given the limited sample of archaeological canids, it can lead to a one-dimensional understanding of how these two species interacted. The American Southwest, an arid region with a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ernie Rheaume. Dennis Gilpin.

This is an abstract from the "The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1848, towards the end of the Mexican War, Colonel Edward Newby, Commander of the Ninth Military Department of New Mexico, responded to Navajo raids on New Mexican settlements by leading a military campaign against the Navajos, which imposed the second treaty between the United...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Van Alstyne. Karen Harry. Daniel Perez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the summer of 2019, members of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas excavated two rooms within Pete’s Pocket, a Virgin Branch Pueblo cultural site located on the Shivwits Plateau in Arizona. The rooms, which were located about 300 meters from the north rim of the Grand Canyon, were contiguous and circular, forming an almost figure-eight shape. An...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kimbell. Catherine Jalbert. Victoria Pagano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1731, Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña (Mission Concepción) was constructed along the San Antonio River as part of a larger mission system whereby Franciscan missionaries sought to expand Spanish Colonial influence in present-day Texas through processes of cultural assimilation. Many of Mission Concepción’s associated landscape...