North America: Southwest United States (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elanor Sonderman.

The Lower Pecos region of Texas is a remarkable study area, primarily because perishable artifacts (those made of plant materials, bone, and leather) survive in near pristine conditions in its very dry caves and rockshelters. Vaughn Bryant was among the first researchers in the region to use pollen data to build paleoclimatic and ecological chronologies from this region, his dissertation is still one of the most comprehensive analyses of this region’s ecological past. Following this path, my...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Greer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents some of the preliminary results from two seasons of excavation work at Spirit Eye Cave, a prehistorically occupied site near Presidio, Texas. Despite being heavily impacted by decades of collecting, the Center for Big Bend Studies began excavations in the cave in 2017 and recovered thousands of artifacts discarded by collectors as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Windes. Benjamin Bellorado.

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. The depopulation of ancestral Pueblo people from the northern Southwest has been a fascination of archaeologists for decades. Using a suite of social and environmental models, scholars have attempted to explain the processes that led tens of thousands of people to vacate hundreds of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Klinton Burgio-Ericson.

Archaeological repositories abound in significant but overlooked collections. This paper presents a case study based in one such collection: the Hendricks-Hodge Expedition to the ancestral Zuni pueblo of Hawikku, NM (1917-1923), which accumulated 25,000 artifacts now in the NMAI, many remaining unstudied. Drawing on current interdisciplinary research into its seventeenth-century Spanish mission, this paper considers challenges of extracting new interpretations from older collections. Research...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Peeples. Barbara Mills. Jeffery Clark.

In a previous study Peeples and Haas (2013) compared brokerage (intermediate) positions in networks of ceramic similarity to measures of settlement growth and longevity for the late pre-Hispanic western U.S. Southwest (A.D. 1200-1500). Counter to expectations from many contemporary network studies where brokerage positions are associated with long-term advantage, this work instead suggested that broker settlements tended to be small, short-lived, and that brokerage was temporary. This example...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Judy Berryman.

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists routinely encounter ceremonially closed buildings and sites yet specific explanations about why this occurs and how to frame it remain murky. For the American Southwest and likely many other parts of the world, fear of witchcraft may explain these closures. We argue in this poster that ritual burning and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Weiner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights some results of my four year fieldwork project to document monumental roads throughout the Greater Chaco Landscape and on Navajo Nation in particular. I place particular emphasis on the question of why and how people moved along Chacoan roads as a dimension of ritual practice. Using a combination of LiDAR, drone-based SfM...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gay Ives. Sheldon Baker. Christine McAllister. Tim Hovezak.

Constructed roads affiliated with Ancestral Pueblo great house architecture are well documented in the cultural landscape of Chaco Canyon and elsewhere across the Colorado Plateau, but the potential for such features has received little attention on the Mesa Verde cuesta. This project examines the archaeological background and provides new insight into one such feature in Mesa Verde National Park. This feature, variously interpreted as a trail, road, and a canal, has been enshrouded in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Pilles.

This is an abstract from the "Hot Rocks in Hot Places: Investigating the 10,000-Year Record of Plant Baking across the US-Mexico Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in the Verde Valley of central Arizona have documented the use of roasting pits for food processing from Archaic to modern times. The most obvious evidence for this can be seen in the large mounds of burned earth and fire-cracked rocks that dot the Valley. Over 90...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deianira Morris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the past few decades, increasing attention toward the study of rock art in the archaeological community has resulted in new approaches to this sub-discipline. Through various research projects, a number of archaeologists have begun to consider what kinds of questions can be examined through the study of rock art and different methods of approaching rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cox. Whitney Cox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a long-running debate over the function of rock art. The authors provide a definition of prehistoric Southwest Native American religion relating to cyclical time and the cosmos and show how certain aspects of rock art in the American Southwest operate within a greater Mesoamerican ideological and religious worldview.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Alberti.

Archaic rock art in the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico demonstrates an intimacy with the ecologies of which it is a part, from the microscopic life with which it shares its surfaces, to the talus slopes it occupies or watches over. Knowledge of materials and the ecological processes with which they were thoroughly entangled encouraged hunters to lay down tracks and traces of their own, including the geometric patterns and animal and bird prints that constitute the archaic rock art...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dylan Person.

What is the value of an expedient lithic tool? By what standard is its performance judged? Analysis of lithic debitage has long focused on morphological characteristics of flakes to determine fracture mechanics and other technological aspects of the flintknapping process. As such, most lithic flake termination types are seen as the result of misdirected force as opposed to techniques producing a mechanistically ideal flake type. What does this mean for past humans who did not follow the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Boulanger. Ian Jorgeson. Michael Adler.

This is an abstract from the "Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation uses lithic-sourcing data from two large northern Rio Grande Pueblo communities, Pot Creek Pueblo (1250–1320 CE) and Picuris Pueblo (1000–Present CE), to delve into the social and economic dynamics that shaped the exchange of obsidian and chert over the past millennium in the Taos region. Drawing on data from over 2,000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Winston Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Though traditionally perceived as representing two distinct Puebloan subcultures, San Juan Red Ware and Tsegi Orange Ware are best understood as representing a single ceramic tradition whose production geography shifted several times between the eighth and fourteenth centuries,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jill Neitzel. David Witt.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The inextricable combination of color and raw material was the most fundamental characteristic of Ancestral Pueblo jewelry. For white and shell, blue-green and turquoise, and black and various types of stone, the color and the material each had diverse sets of sacred meanings that gave ornaments their value. Together,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marielle Pedro Black. Connie Reid.

The Kaibab National Forest has a long history of completing site inventory, recordation, and research within wilderness areas with the help of assorted volunteers. Recent work on the North Kaibab Ranger District of the Kaibab National Forest in the Saddle Mountain Wilderness has been the result of the Wildcat and Fuller fires. Archaeological involvement during the fire planning process helps to proactively identify and protect heritage resources ahead of fire spread. Working with fire crews,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleesha Clevenger. Allen Denoyer.

This is an abstract from the "Mogollon, Mimbres, and Salado Archaeology in Southwest New Mexico and Beyond" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research examines the projectile point assemblage from the Gila River Farm site, a Cliff phase (AD 1300–1450) Salado site excavated by the Archaeology Southwest and University of Arizona Upper Gila Preservation Archaeology (UGPA) field school from 2016 to 2022. The projectile point assemblage was recovered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lacey Point is a distinctive landmark rising above the Painted Desert in Petrified Forest National Park. This prominent butte harbors a concentration of Ancestral Pueblo petroglyphs encompassing themes of fertility and hunting. Associated with these petroglyphs is a large and diverse artifact assemblage, including thousands of ceramic sherds. This is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Worthy Martin. Carrie Heitman. Paul F. Reed.

Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection (SPARC) Project was initiated in 2015 by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, Salmon Ruins Museum, and Archaeology Southwest. The primary goal of the SPARC Project is creation of an online digital archive of materials from excavations at Salmon Pueblo...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Gabe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1598, the first Spanish colonists in the southwestern United States established a capitol at Yunque Owingeh, later known as San Gabriel del Yunque, New Mexico. They concentrated in a series of converted Puebloan roomblocks until the capitol was moved to Santa Fe in 1610. For over 300 years, the location of this first capitol was the stuff of legends and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Di Naso. David Dove. Winston Hurst. William Lucius.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Montezuma Canyon, in extreme southeast Utah, was home to large populations during the Basketmaker III through PIII period (AD 500-1300). Potters located throughout this deeply-incised, 73 km long north-south running canyon, produced San Juan Redware pottery in abundance well-beyond the needs of the village. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hard. John Roney. A.C. MacWilliams. Mary Whisenhunt. Karen Adams.

This is an abstract from the "Local Development and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Pre-Hispanic Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sanchez cerro de trincheras is situated on a 650-foot mountain above the Gila River in the eastern end of the Safford Valley, Arizona. The site contains about 130 rock rings clustered on and near the top of the ridge and has perimeter walls with an aggregate length of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen L. Black. Charles Koenig.

Eagle Nest Canyon, a box canyon draining into the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas, houses Bonfire Shelter, the oldest and southernmost bison jump site in North America. Bonfire was excavated in 1963-64 and again in 1983-1984, leaving open a 3m-deep excavation block. Nearby Eagle Cave was excavated in the 1930s and again in 1963, leaving the central trench unfilled. In 2015-2016, the Ancient Southwest Texas Project of Texas State University re-excavated the 4-meter...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Antelope Cave is a large limestone cavern sunk beneath the undulation hills of the Uinkaret Plateau in Northwestern Arizona. Native Americans lived in the cave intermittently for 4000 years during the Archaic and Puebloan periods. This paper focuses on the Basketmaker materials, particularly the sandals, recovered by UCLA archaeologists at Antelope Cave in the...