North America: Southern Southwest U.S. (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Wichlacz.

This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work tests the feasibility of using 2D geometric morphometric analyses of archival vessel profiles to reevaluate vessel form classifications from Pueblo Grande in order to aid in asking new questions of the dataset. Two-dimensional profile drawings of whole and reconstructible ceramic vessels were routinely made during archaeological projects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Searcy. Scott Ure. Michael Mathiowetz. Jaclyn Eckersley. Haylie Ferguson.

In 2017, we used UAVs (drones) to record eight archaeological sites from the air. As this type of technology becomes more refined, we have found that it is especially useful in carrying out three specific tasks: contour mapping, archiving site conditions, and identifying architecture. This paper reports our findings resulting from aerial images captured while flying archaeological sites in Nayarit and Chihuahua, Mexico.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Stark.

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. Fire cracked rock (FCR) and hearth features represent one of the most commonly observed cooking features encountered by archaeologists. This research presents an ethno-archaeological context in which FCR utilization and discard is observed, providing a Middle Range theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Houghten.

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. One of the main staple foods of the Mescalero Apache was Mescal or Agave. The heart of the plant is cooked in an earth oven for four days. The plant is then eaten straight out of the oven or dried for storage and supply. Today the roasting of Mescal is still done every year in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DeBry. Kristin Corl.

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. ​Bone tools are not always recognized in a zooarchaeological analysis, and often once identified, the function or use is even more difficult to define. A modified rabbit innominate found by the authors in two Jornada-Mogollon sites presented here is one such example. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Veech.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (ORPI) is a vast, rugged, and remote unit of the U.S. National Park System situated in the heart of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Measuring 1,338.25 km² (517.7 mi²), the park encompasses an area half the size of the state of Rhode Island....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Schollmeyer.

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. This poster examines contextual patterns in deposits of animal bones from the Mimbres and upper Gila areas of southwest New Mexico from the Mimbres Classic through Cliff phase Salado periods (AD 1000–1450). Remains of common animal species in contexts like sheet middens and room fill are often interpreted as food remains....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Krummel. James Watson.

The La Playa archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert represents one of the earliest agricultural settlements in northwest Mexico. Over 310 mortuary features have been uncovered during salvage excavations since the site was discovered in 1930, revealing a wide variability in mortuary practices that may reflect specific treatments for pathological or transgressive individuals after death. This paper describes analyses of burials uncovered during the 2017 field season utilizing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Roth.

Throughout much of the Southwestern U.S., ash was an important component of ritual deposition and has ethnographically been closely associated with processes of cleansing and renewal. The presence of ash in ritual contexts is well documented, but it also appears to have played an important role in the closing of domestic structures. In this paper, I present cases of ritual closure of domestic structures and examine the role that ash played in these closures using data from pithouse sites in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacqueline Fox. William Bryce. Andrea Gregory. Travis Cureton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Logan Simpson recently mitigated multiple prehistoric sites along the Middle Gila River in Arizona for the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Florence Flood Retarding Structure Rehabilitation project. One site, AZ U:15:836(ASM), is a small Hohokam farmstead within the Grewe-Casa Grande canal system. Recent investigations at the site identified evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jakob Sedig. Vagheesh Narasimhan. Brianna Flynn.

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. This poster describes our attempt to address some long-standing questions about Mimbres pottery through convolutional neural network-based classifiers. Over the past few years the field of computer vision has made major strides in classification and segmentation tasks particularly due to the availability of rich training...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Gokee. Jason De León.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Federal agencies and news media often report undocumented migration across the US-Mexico border in gross terms of hundreds of thousands to millions of crossings and apprehensions—a scalar project that then plays into broader political discourse about national belonging. In this paper we draw on research by the Undocumented Migration...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Metz.

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 mission of the Huhugam Heritage Center, which is both a tribal and federal repository, is to "ensure our Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh cultures flourish for future generations." This includes not just the physical remains of ancestral culture, but the cultural practices themselves. While we care for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Roberts.

This is an abstract from the "The Art of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bold Line Geometric is one of five currently identified rock art styles in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas. It has previously been described as thick, glossy pigment applied in bold lines, geometric shapes, and globular anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms. In 1965, David Gebhard laid the ground work for the initial description and definition of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Savanna Moore.

This is an abstract from the "Partners at Work: Promoting Archaeology and Collaboration in the Chiricahua Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the goals of the Student Conservation Association (SCA) is to develop the next generation of conservation leaders. While the focus is often on natural resources, cultural resources, as a nonrenewable resource, have, until recently, been neglected. Chiricahua NM has been partnering with the SCA...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Blecha.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located in the Sierra Vieja breaks, a subset of the Chihuahua Desert near the Rio Grande in far west Texas, are fields of thousands of small vesicular boulders and survey work found some contain petroglyphs. Beginning in the fall of 2018 the Center for Big Bend studies led a thorough investigation and documentation of over 200 petroglyphs pecked into these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Cook.

This is an abstract from the "Partners at Work: Promoting Archaeology and Collaboration in the Chiricahua Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chiricahua National Monument, located in southeastern Arizona near Willcox, holds evidence for thousands of years of Native American occupation. Relatively recent in this timeline is occupation by the Chiricahua Apache. Up through the 19th century, the Chiricahua Apache ranged over a significant part...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myles Miller.

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. Among prehispanic and historic societies of the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, mountains and caves had multivalent metaphorical and symbolic meanings relating to underworld, ancestors, water, and emergence. Mountains and caves are featured among origin and emergence myths and many contemporary Pueblo societies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica Murrell. Phillip Leckman. Michael Heilen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding changes in mobility and subsistence practices among Jornada Mogollon hunter-gatherer groups remains a substantial research issue. Residents across the Permian Basin largely maintained a hunting-and-gathering cultural adaption throughout prehistoric times, although some segment of the local population practiced cultivation during the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Pailes. John Carpenter. Guadalupe Sánchez.

This is an abstract from the "25 Years in the Casas Grandes Region: Celebrating Mexico–U.S. Collaboration in the Gran Chichimeca" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will summarize results from ongoing research on the late prehistoric period of the Sonoran Sierra Madre. Thus far, investigations focused on the Sahuaripa and Fronteras valleys. These valleys are approximately equidistant from Paquimé at 185 and 165 km, respectively. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Lincoln.

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. This paper will chronicle some of the history of the Federal investment in Big Archaeology for the Central Arizona Project. Specifically, the decisions to support a philosophy of Cultural Research Management, which facilitated a huge contribution to the archaeology of Arizona, and more broadly to the Southwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emiliano Gallaga. Manuel R. Parra.

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. Despite the distance and how isolated the Presidio was, it did not cease to belong to the globalized colonial economic sphere. The paper will present the first results of the study of the ceramic materials of the Presidio de San Carlos Archaeological Project (PAPSC). It is a project of historical archeology on the northern border of the state...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Berrier.

This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Jornada Mogollon region is known for its rich body of rock art. Researchers have suggested that elements such as cloud terraces, masks, goggle-eyed figures, and horned serpents are associated with ceremony. Although hundreds of bighorn sheep images exist in the regional rock art these figures are not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jaye Smith. Jeffrey Clark.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2015, centenarian Ray Robinson wanted to find a permanent home for thousands of artifacts he collected from numerous sites in the Safford Basin, Arizona during the late 1950s and 1960s, including items from the Bonito Creek Cave Cache. Through a collaborative effort between Archaeology Southwest, Northern Arizona University and the Arizona State Museum...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Ryan.

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. Similar projectile point types were used by people in central and southern Arizona during the Classic Period (A.D. 1150-1450), a time when considerable changes occurred within the region. An analysis of over 600 points was conducted to examine how social, technological, and...