North America: Southwest United States (Geographic Keyword)
801-825 (873 Records)
Domestic turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) husbandry at Chaco Canyon has been the subject of considerable debate. Previous research has argued, among other things, that turkeys were rare in the Canyon (Akins 1985); that turkeys first were a source of feathers for ritual and ceremonial activities, and only later treated as food (Akins 1985; Badenhorst et al. 2016; Windes 1977); that local wild turkeys were not present in Chaco Canyon and domestic turkeys were imported from the Four Corners region...
Turquoise, Lead and Copper at Tijeras Pueblo and Environs (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Public Education at Tijeras Pueblo, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did the people of Tijeras Pueblo acquire and use non-lithic and non-ground stone mineral resources? What role did such resources play in communities in the region east of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains? Minerals addressed include turquoise, galena (lead ore), and various copper compounds....
Two Recently-Discovered Early Historic Examples of Chili (Capsicum annuum) from Arizona (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Specimens of chili (Capsicum annuum) are absent from prehistoric sites in the southwestern United States, but they are common in Spanish Colonial contexts. Building on a relatively recent review of northern Mexican prehistoric chili cultivation by Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen, we examine two recent chili finds in Arizona. The two finds may provide hints of...
UAV Lidar Mapping Sand Canyon Pueblo: Technical Collaboration for Site Visualization and Reassessment (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Research Institute at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center partnered with Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and two private companies, Routescene Inc. and Caddis Aerial, to conduct a lidar survey of Sand Canyon Pueblo. The drone-based lidar data penetrates the dense vegetation present on the site to make a highly accurate map. This allows...
UAV-Based Mapping and Public Outreach at Blackwater Draw (2018)
Remote sensing has dramatically changed the way we collect data at archaeological sites, and has added new and innovative methodologies to our fieldwork. It has also facilitated greater public engagement by making archaeology more accessible – this is especially true of sites that are considered remote or difficult to access because of challenging terrain. As part of the public outreach initiative of the new Blackwater Draw Museum and its associated website, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)...
Uncovering a Globalized Past with the Connections Project: Highlighting challenges associated with exploring long-distance interaction between the Southwest US and Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Connections Project is a long-term research venture focused on documenting material indicators of interregional interactions amongst people that inhabited an area ranging from the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest (SW/NW) to Central America from 800-1540 CE . Data...
Understanding Changes in Lagomorph Proportions within the Homol’ovi Settlement Cluster, Northeast Arizona (2018)
Lagomorphs (rabbits and hares) were a critically important dietary resource for inhabitants of the pre-contact American Southwest, where they typically dominate faunal assemblages. It is useful to examine proportions between genera of lagomorphs—specifically, cottontails (Syvilagus sp.) and jackrabbits (Lepus sp.)—to elucidate information about the past environment and how it might have changed in response to human actions. Based on habitat preferences and predator evasion strategies, the...
Understanding Dam Effects on Downstream Archaeological Resources: Lessons Learned from Three Decades of Research Downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The destructive effects of large dams on upstream archaeological sites has been recognized for many decades, resulting in passage of federal legislation and numerous large-scale archaeological salvage projects in the 1940s through 1970s. Considerably less attention has been paid to the effects of large dams on downstream archaeological resources. For the past...
Understanding Past Human Securities, Sustainability, and Migration for a Climate-Changing World (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Landscape Learning for a Climate-Changing World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 1200s–1400s CE in the US Southwest and Mexican Northwest, tens of thousands of people were on the move—many leaving places where knowledge of landscapes had accrued at the scale of millennia. By the end of the 1400s, population levels had declined by about 50%. What conditions led to this migration and...
Understanding the Emergence and Spread of Chupadero Black-on-white Ceramics through Network Analysis (2018)
It has been hypothesized that social ties between the Salinas Pueblo Province and the Jornada Mogollon sparked cultural change in both regions. In this study, I use Social Network Analysis to characterize these interactions from A.D. 900 to 1450 via the spread of Chupadero Black-on-white pottery. Integral to the study of social interaction and the emergence of Chupadero Black-on-white ceramics is the nature of the pithouse-to-pueblo transition in each region. Prior to the emergence of pueblo...
Understanding the Landscape and Material Sources through Community Partnership in Abiquiú, New Mexico (2018)
This paper aims to discuss how the success of community partnership has led to an understanding of the way people moved across the landscape in the past. Situated in northern New Mexico, the Pueblo de Abiquiú contains a rich history that dates back at least into 2,800 – 4,000 BP (Before Present). Using portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, obsidian artifacts found at the pueblo suggests that groups are bringing obsidian from at least three known local sources. However, there is an...
Unmanned Aerial Systems in Federal Cultural Resource Management (2018)
Although use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or what are commonly known as drones, has become popular among the general public over the years, federal land management agencies are just beginning to realize their potential for cultural resource management. The Bureau of Land Management, Las Cruces District Office (LCDO), has recently obtained UAS resources and trained staff capable of collecting data that is useful for a variety of resource management issues. In particular, the LCDO UAS team...
Unpacking the Dishes: The Agency of (mis)Translation in the Hybrid Ceramics of Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Equally of New Spain and the Pueblo Indian world, seventeenth-century New Mexico presents a fraught social context where diverse materials and imagery became entangled through the creativity of Native artists. Archaeological remnants testify to ceramics’ importance in these exchanges, including combinations of Euro-American forms with Indigenous materials,...
Unravelling the Origins of Pre-Columbian Agave Domestication in Present Day Arizona (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Botanical exploration over the last thirty years in Arizona has revealed at least six putative domesticated agaves still surviving in their archaeological context. These agaves share characteristics of relictual domesticated plants including clonality, reduced genetic diversity compared to wild agaves and reduced seed set or complete sexual sterility....
Urban Archaeology at the Hohokam Village of Pueblo Grande (2018)
PaleoWest Archaeology recently completed two data recovery projects at the east and west ends of the seminal Hohokam village of Pueblo Grande in Phoenix, Arizona. The two projects were in the last two undeveloped parcels of Pueblo Grande, which was the largest and most influential Hohokam village in the lower Salt River Valley. Despite more than a century of historic use of these parcels, which included residential and commercial developments, substantial prehistoric archaeological deposits...
The Use of Shell Ornaments at Early Agricultural Period Sites in the Tucson Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations of Early Agricultural Period (circa 1200BC-AD 50) sites in the Tucson Basin of southern Arizona have produced a number of ornaments of personal adornment manufactured from marine shells that are found in either the Gulf of California or the Pacific coastal region of southern California. Thriving shell ornament manufacturing industries in...
Using Computer Vision and Deep Learning Algorithms to Predict Pottery Types: An Example Using Ancestral Pueblo Pottery from the Central Mesa Verde Region (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques have made much progress in the past several years. Cloud computing has rendered these tools more accessible than ever to researchers in a wide range of fields. Here we explore applications of these models to classify Ancestral Pueblo pottery types in the central Mesa Verde region of...
Using Drones for Exploring the Links between Vegetation and Traditional Archaeological Survey: An Example from Arizona (2018)
The use of drone based photogrammetry is now well established in archaeology for surface modeling and mapping of archaeological sites. The Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs (AZDEMA) is sponsoring a number of longterm projects on their properties. One project will be using traditional drone photogrammetry to create high resolution maps to assess plant communities, plant health, and canopy structure as a way of exploring links between vegetation and other survey methods. A...
Using Food Web Models to Examine Desert Networks in the American Southwest and Western Australia (2018)
Archaeological studies benefit from rich ecological data, yet linking ecological data to narratives of the past can be difficult. Here I use trophic network modeling to understand both Ancestral Pueblo and Australian Aboriginal food webs, comparing these systems for a greater understanding of human and environmental resilience. Here I show that Ancestral Pueblo people connected themselves into a greater environmental web and use network analysis to examine how the changing network properties of...
Using Remote Sensing to Re-evaluate Prehistoric Land Use in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote sensing has been used extensively the past several years to study prehistoric land use in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Previous land use models for Chaco predict economic activities such as agriculture and water management near some of the major sites within the canyon, and these models have been critical to understanding how land use contributed to the...
Using Rules from the Texas Lower Pecos to Interpret Jornada Mogollon Rock Art (2018)
Four principal rules of interpretation for Pecos River Style rock art of the Lower Pecos region of Texas are proposed. These rules were proposed based on a commonality between Pecos River Style and the iconography of historic Corachol-Aztecan speaking tribes such as the sixteenth century Mexica of central Mexico and the present-day Huichol of western Mexico. This presentation shows how the same rules can be applied to the interpretation of the rock art of other prehistoric Corachol-Aztecan...
Using STEM to Educate the Public about Cultural Diversity in the San Antonio Missions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "NPS Archeology: Engaging the Public through Education and Recreation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twice a year Western National Parks Association has a Mexican Art Exhibit featuring pottery from Mata Ortiz at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park Visitor Center. The pottery from Mata Ortiz follows the centuries-old ceramic tradition of Casas Grandes culture of the Chihuahuan desert. Park interpretive...
Using the Past to Inform the Future: Employing Empirical Data to Guide Future Land Management Decisions (2018)
This presentation will explore the opportunity to increase scientific driven data into the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) Section 106 compliance process particularly relating to Bureau of Land Management (BLM) undertakings. The absence of empirical data available to the BLM to analyze how different activities’ development and/or management affect archaeological sites can result in unfounded assumptions and unnecessary complications during project planning and implementation. Using...
Ute Ethnographic Cultural Landscapes in Southeast Utah (2019)
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. The Nuche, or Ute people, have been in their homelands across Colorado and Utah since time immemorial. Southeast Utah formed part of the larger movements of the Ute bands with connections to the area, which in turn formed part of the overall Ute movements across the entire Ute homeland. The...
Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Presevation Office Reflections on Tribal-Archaeologist Collaborations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Preservation Office has worked regularly with archaeologists. While archaeology focuses largely on scientific understanding, the effects of this work on tribes and other stakeholders also needs to be considered. Through this talk,...