North America: Southwest United States (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benji Chavarria. Danny Naranjo. Jesse Gutierrez. Isaac Gutierrez.

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. The Santa Clara Pueblo people are indelibly tied to the land, animals, air, and waters of the American Southwest. Since the formation of Santa Clara Pueblo’s Right’s Protection office a few decades ago, and more recently their Tribal Historic Preservation Office in 2014, their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard George. Christopher Schwartz. Stephen Plog. Patricia Gilman. Douglas Kennett.

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. Our understanding of scarlet macaw aviculture throughout the southwestern United States has greatly benefited from recent methodological advances, leading to new discoveries in regional management dynamics, breeding regimes, and exchange networks between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. These studies have mainly focused...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Schwartz.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For over a thousand years, people living in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest (SW/NW) acquired, raised, and kept nonlocal scarlet macaws (Ara macao). Although they are endemic to the neotropics of southern and eastern Mexico and Central and South America, people transported...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Dresser-Kluchman.

In the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Red River, groups of ponderosa pine trees are dotted with peeled trees, scarred by surrounding animals and weather as well as by human consumption of the trees’ cambium. In most considerations of inner bark utilization, the threat of starvation is posited as the key motivation for bark-peeling. This landscape, however, lends itself to narratives that use trees as artifacts, among the full breadth of survey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael W. Graves.

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. Ann Ramenofsky has a record of scholarship in archaeology in which one can identify a consistent application of a science-based approach. This approach recognizes: the systematic nature of science; the distinction between conceptual and empirical domains; the role of unit formation in science, the complementary roles of theory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chester Liwosz.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the first forays into the use of databases and computational analysis of rock art compositions by Leroi-Gourhan in the middle of the twentieth century, digital archaeology applications have boomed, becoming a virtual necessity in twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary computerized tools for managing “big-data”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Ryan.

With the development of a detailed contextual archaeology, we have gained the ability to identify how termination behaviors are related by subtle linkages in time and space. Individual actions that take place within the various portions of a structure are temporally distinct events, but are contextually related via ultimate decommissioning objectives. Each individual behavior qualified the meaning of those that preceded or followed it. Using multiple ancestral Pueblo sites in the Mesa Verde...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Brinkman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spanish colonists living on estancias and missions in 17th century New Mexico used Pueblo Indian produced goods for their much of their daily practice. This included the use of sandstone cooking griddles, ceramic serving bowls, cooking jars, and soup plates. While the use of Indigenous ceramics in Spanish households has received a significant amount of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Yost. R. E. Burrillo. Harland Ash.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Research by PaleoWest" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Silver Creek drainage in north-central Arizona was a focal point of Ancestral Pueblo population aggregation in the late thirteenth century during a time in which the nearby Colorado Plateau was all but depopulated. With a few notable exceptions, most of the masonry pueblos and villages in the greater Silver Creek area were subsequently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Cruz.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Velarde Valley of the Northern Rio Grande, New Mexico, has received only limited attention from researchers. The area is known to have been home to several Classic Period Tewa communities, some of which were inhabited right up to the time of Juan de Onate’s settlement of San Gabriel in A.D. 1598. The area is also dense with historic and modern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Neff. Ted Neff. Peter Pilles. Ronald Krug.

Ethnohistoric accounts, historic records, and the archaeological record indicate the Yavapai and Northern Tonto Apache lived a mobile lifestyle during Protohistoric time (approximately A.D. 1300 - 1850) across the diverse environment of the Verde Valley area of Central Arizona, just south of the Colorado Plateau. Due to their subtle, portable, perishable, expedient, and reused material traces across the landscape, archaeologists struggle to merely identify protohistoric sites much less...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Jonsson. Caitlin Stewart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research on Virgin Branch Puebloan groups has primarily focused on the Moapa Valley and lowland Virgin areas, despite widespread occupation across modern-day southern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and northwestern Arizona. Only a small percentage of the Shivwits Plateau has undergone study by cultural resource inventories or academic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chip Wills.

Places where people invest significant human capital and resources in architecture and landscape engineering may nevertheless be abandoned in response to environmental or social factors. Those places might eventually be re-occupied by the original builders, or in some cases, appropriated by others. During migrations, abandoned or largely abandoned places may become destinations for people on the move. Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, has archaeological evidence for episodes of abandonment or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Stephens Reed. Michelle I. Turner.

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 Ancient Puebloan occupation of the Aztec complex in northwest New Mexico spanned a tumultuous two and a half centuries that saw the arrival of Chacoan people and Chacoan ways in the Animas Valley in the late 11th century C.E., followed by the waning influence of Chaco by 1140, and a new era of Aztec-centered power in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lycett. Phillip Leckman.

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. In the emergent social geography of empire, Franciscan missions were agents of spatial production as well as colonial establishment. Their foundation, form, and operation instantiated claims to and about society, dominion, and the culmination of history. These claims were forged within an already extant, meaningful, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Harry.

Lava Ridge Ruin, located on the Shivwits Plateau near the northern rim of the Grand Canyon, is a late Pueblo II period site associated with the Virgin Branch Puebloan culture. Excavations at the sixteen-room pueblo suggest that its inhabitants used natural and cultural objects to maintain historical connections with their ancestors and with previously occupied settlements, as well as to signify their connection to important places on the landscape. These connections are reflected in the very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Podolinsky. Elizabeth Hora.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Depreciative behaviors are unintentional actions by visitors that damage the resource or impact the experiences of others. Rock art in particular is highly susceptible to these types of behaviors and the damage may be permanent. As visitation to cultural sites, including rock art locations, increases, the opportunity for depreciative behavior likewise...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Carmichael.

This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The University of Texas at El Paso 2014 summer archeological field school was hosted by the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo at Chilicote Ranch near Valentine, Texas. Students conducted a pedestrian sample survey focused on the cuestas and mesas between the Sierra Vieja and Wild Horse Draw. The survey identified 95 sites and a number of non-sites;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Heisinger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Skiles Shelter (41VV165) is located at the mouth of Eagle Nest Canyon, roughly 250 meters northwest from the Rio Grande in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. Skiles Shelter is characterized by a fading panel of Pecos River Style rock art, numerous bedrock milling features, and a massive burned rock midden (BRM) accumulation of fire cracked rock...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Strait.

The presence of dogs across burial sites in the southwestern United States and worldwide has been well noted in archaeological literature. The ubiquity of canine burials attests to their historical role as complex social actors in human society, prompting actions and performances, taboos and transgressions. To access the true depth of meaning in many canine remains, then, we must examine them with the level of precision normally reserved for human burials. This paper offers a close reading of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christina Sinkovec.

This is an abstract from the "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: A National Perspective on CRM, Research, and Consultation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The US Army Corps of Engineers recently undertook a project to mitigate cumulative adverse effects to the Leone Bluff archaeological site at the Corps’ Trinidad Dam and Lake Project in Las Animas County, Colorado. The Leone Bluff site is one of two type sites for the Sopris Phase (AD 1000-1250), a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matt Liebmann.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For nearly half a century, prevailing models of post-Contact Native American demography have held that the appearance of Europeans and Africans in the New World sparked a rapid and catastrophic population decline across North America in the sixteenth century. Recent archaeological investigations in the Pueblo Southwest and elsewhere...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Howe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late 1880s in El Paso, Texas, the establishment of a copper and lead smelter on the Rio Grande later brought about the rise of a community called Smeltertown. This community of workers, families and Mexican nationals from across the border established a thriving community. Located at the intersection of both land and water borders of the U.S. – Mexico...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaitlyn E. Davis.

This project centers on Plains-Pueblo interaction in the late-prehistoric and protohistoric periods. It analyzes how trade and inter-regional interactions were ritually mediated between these two culture groups, through the examination of pipes and smoking materials used in economic interactions at pueblos in the Northern Rio Grande area of New Mexico. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature indicates that pipe-smoking was part of rituals that cemented inter-tribal trade relationships. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laurie Webster.

This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dotted-diamond-grid pattern first appears on the textiles and pottery of the southwestern United States in the mid-AD 1000s or early AD 1100s. Fifteenth-century kiva murals from the northern Southwest confirm the importance of this design system for decorating ceremonial cloth prior to Spanish contact. In this...