Southwest (Other Keyword)
26-50 (71 Records)
One component of the multidisciplinary FHiRE project included ethnographic research with 50 members of four tribes. Specific historical and traditional information about fire ecology related to the occupation of Hemish ancestral sites in the Jemez Mountains was collected at the Pueblo of Jemez. More generalizing information about the role of fire in Southwestern lifeways was collected with research participants at the Hopi Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and White Mountain Apache Tribe. Our ethnographic...
Forgotten Finds: Updating Existing Collections for Modern Research (2015)
The existing collections of our nation’s institutions hold great potential for future research and should be subject to modern scientific inquiry. If these collections are not catalogued or sorted properly, they can lie forgotten and virtually inaccessible to scholarly research. The example presented here is of a legacy collection, comprised of artifacts from the Tulare Lake area in Kings County, California. This selection is primarily of lithic tools, which represent ancient California...
From Medio to Missionization: A Comparison of Lithic Technology in the Casas Grandes Valley into the Protohistoric Period (2017)
After the early Medio period, populations subsisting in the Casas Grandes region, northwest Mexico experienced internal and external pressures that led to drastic reorganization of their socioeconomic system. This is reflected by significant changes in their lithic toolkit, where differences in raw material use and tool morphology accrued through time. Presented here are the results of our lithic study comparing multiple excavated Medio and the only excavated protohistoric site located...
From the Empirical to the Conjectural: Using Spatial Analysis to Determine Population Settlement Patterns on the Uncharted Mesa Verde Landform (2016)
A consistent issue that arises in archaeological studies is the absence of a complete set of data on which to perform analyses. Data may be unavailable for a variety of reasons, but its absence often inhibits complete understanding of a population in a defined area. In southwestern Colorado, survey coverage on the Mesa Verde landform is limited to the extent of Mesa Verde National Park, and therefore settlement studies are limited to less than one third of the prominent landform. To fully...
From The Leaves On The Trees In The Forest To The Stones And Sands Of The River: Archaeobotanical Investigations Of Spanish New Mexican Land Use (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 17th-century New Mexico, subsistence activities were the major ways Spanish colonists engaged plants and created landscapes. Colonists’ relationships with plants were developed through a combination of existing notions of human-environment interactions and the creation of new practices that suited the social...
Geospatial Analysis of Cedar Mesa Settlement Patterns (2015)
Settlement pattern analyses published by Matson, Lipe, and Haase (1988) contributed basic understandings of the distribution of the many small dispersed sites in the Cedar Mesa area of SE Utah, and of the environmental factors that influenced these settlement behaviors. This project applies geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing techniques to supplement their settlement pattern study and gain additional insight into Ancestral Pueblo occupation of the region. Processing and...
Groundstone Shrines of the Pueblo Southwest (2015)
The Pueblos of the American Southwest define their sacred geographies by using ground boulders and bedrock shrines (cupules, slicks, grooves, and channels) to establish land tenure, reflect cosmologies and religious organization, and to record history. Based on ethnography and Pueblo collaboration we know that these places mark the remains of the deceased, act as communication nodes with the spiritual world, and delineate social boundaries. Because these landscapes (and their associated shrines)...
Hard-Scrabble Living - Cattle, Horse, and Goats; Ranching on the Chihuahua Desert, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico (2013)
Prior to the United States Army taking over the 2.5 million acres that is White Sands Missile Range, this area was the home to ranches. Not the type that would be expected in the land of Billy the Kid, but rather hard-scrabbe cattle, horse and angora goat ranches. After the Apache Indians were moved onto reservations in the late 1800's the White Sands area of New Mexico became the home to Anglo and Hispanic American ranchers. All that remains are often barbed wire fence lines, tumbling down...
Historic Pueblo Canteens: How were they made and how were they used? (2015)
Historic Pueblo potters formed ceramic canteens that have one flat and one bulbous side. This form posed unique issues for construction. The form is symmetrical along only one axis, and while other Pueblo ceramic forms exhibit this feature, such as duck effigies, these flat-sided canteens are unique in that they were made to carry water. The shape suggests it was designed to be transported against a flat object. 19th century ethnographic research suggests transportation against a human back,...
How Modern Boundaries Blind Us to the Pre-Columbian Known World:a view from the Southwest/Northwest (2017)
Archaeologists live in a North America divided by lines. These lines include the borders of nations, the boundaries of states and provinces and the limits that we as archaeologists have drawn around culture areas. These lines affect in subtle and complex ways, how we frame questions, how we define the boundaries of our studies, what journals we read, what colleagues we talk to, where we go to school and dozens of other aspects of archaeology. Most if not all of these lines had no meaning for the...
Investigating Cedar Mesa (Utah) Settlement Pattern Behaviors Using Ideal-Free Distribution (2017)
Ideal-Free Distribution (IFD), a behavioral ecology theory, has been increasingly adopted by archaeologists to address questions about the relationship between settlement distribution, environment, and economy. In an anisotropic environment like Cedar Mesa, IFD theorizes that individuals would arrange themselves across the landscape according to habitat suitability and occupy the highest ranked regions first to maximize benefit to the individual. The Ancestral Pueblo of Cedar Mesa subsisted on a...
Macaw Husbandry in the Ancient Greater Southwest (2016)
The archaeological record of the American Southwest and North Mexico contains evidence that for hundreds of years, ancient peoples transported, kept and possibly bred tropical macaws at several major population centers. Archaeologists are still working to understand exactly how this was accomplished, but the fact that this evidence indicates aspects of macaw husbandry has been underappreciated. Ethological data on human and macaw interactions in similar contexts in the present can help inform...
Mapping the Monumental Architecture of the Largo Gap Great House (2015)
This study combines spatial technology with traditional field methods to accurately identify and map the monumental architecture of the late Pueblo II Largo Gap great house. Although previous visits by early researchers to the site identified monumental architectural characteristics typically associated with Chaco-style great houses (primarily the presence of a great kiva), the surface expression of such features is currently lacking. Rubble present along the steep slopes of the knoll upon which...
Mesoamerican contact on the Southwest Northern frontier (2017)
Research by ARCON, Inc. over the past two decades, using multi-disciplinary archaeology research tools and inter-regional comparative research, is bridging regional boundaries to help construct histories of ancient people. The role of cultural exchange is becoming more apparent with intellectual data for exploring the rise of high civilizations in ancient cultures. A variety of research discoveries includes ancient turquoise trade between Mesoamerica and the Southwest (turquoise trace analysis...
The Middle and Late Holocene Archaeological and Climatic Records of Southern New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas: New Insights and New Revelations (2016)
A contextual analysis of 3,989 radiocarbon dates provides unprecedented insights into 8,000 years of prehistoric adaptions and social evolution in the northern Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico and Trans-Pecos Texas. The chronology is particularly robust between 4500 BP and historic times, allowing for distinctive subsistence, technological, and social developments to be isolated throughout the terminal Middle Holocene and Late Holocene and corresponding Middle Archaic, Late Archaic, and...
Modeling Soil Moisture of Farmland near Mesa Verde Villages at Goodman Point, Southwestern Colorado (2015)
The abandonment of the Mesa Verde region at the end of the Pueblo III (PIII) period (AD 1150 to 1300) represents a complex synergy of causal processes, such as inter-village conflict, drought induced water and food resource stress, and high population density. Decisions to abandon a place, however, occurred at the scale of human interaction, that of the village. This study examines one factor that would have been important in those decisions, the location and properties of farmplots near...
The Montezuma Canyon Citadel Complex: A Major Prehistoric Religious Shrine (2015)
Spirit Bird Cave created a new model to evaluate Southwestern caves and earth openings in relation to prehistoric Native American beliefs about religion and sacred landscape. This model suggests that such concepts were major considerations in the choosing of settlement locations and foremost in the ideology of the prehistoric peoples. Site 42SA2120 in Montezuma Canyon, which fits this new paradigm, has not been formally described to this point. A survey of the site found evidence that the...
The Multi-Kiva Site: Migration and interaction in Northern Arizona during the Pueblo III Period (2016)
The Multi-Kiva site (AZ P:3:112 [ASM]), situated on the Colorado Plateau in Northern Arizona provides insights into the ways that groups interacted and negotiated their place on the landscape during migration. The Middle Little Colorado River valley region has traditionally been characterized in the Pueblo III (1125-1275 C.E.) period by dispersed pithouse settlements. Recent investigations have illuminated the presence of masonry pueblos in the Middle Little Colorado River valley during the...
The Night is Different: Sensescapes and Affordances (2016)
Archaeology has paid scant attention to the differences between diurnal and nocturnal landscapes, and the differences in meaning and use implied and constrained by the change from day to night. We also neglect the multi-sensoral nature of the landscape. Vision is emphasized almost to the exclusion of hearing, smell, and touch. Humans are diurnal animals emphasizing vision, and modern archaeologists are further biased by our brightly lit world of electricity, neon, and LED screens in which a...
The Nutritional Context of the Pueblo III Depopulation of the Northern San Juan: Too much maize? (2015)
The abandonment of the Four Corners area is a longstanding problem in archaeology. Recent work has shown that the terminal occupation was concentrated into a limited number of large defensive sites. This resulted in an extreme emphasis on maize, which was untenable because of maize's low amounts of Lysine and Tryptophan. I describe the processes that led to this settlement pattern and the evidence for this diet. I then explain how the combination of the settlement pattern and the...
Origins and Construction Techniques of Historic Flat-Backed Canteens (2016)
In the 19th century, ethnographers documented numerous Pueblo groups throughout the American Southwest making and using ceramic flat-backed canteens. These canteens pose unique manufacturing issues due to their shape: they are symmetrical along only one axis due to one flat and one bulbous side, and the closed rim is parallel to the flat side, not perpendicular as is usual. They are also extremely similar in shape to large European canteens, and thus can offer insight to the complex...
Paint It Black: A Geospatial Analysis of Chupadero Black-on-white Ceramics (2017)
Chupadero Black-on-white ceramics were produced in the Salinas and Sierra Blanca regions of New Mexico beginning around A.D. 1100. They quickly gained popularity, covering a geographic region that encompassed much of the modern state of New Mexico, west Texas, southeastern Arizona, and northern Chihuahua. Yet, despite their popularity, little is known about the exchange mechanisms that yielded Chupadero Black-on-white’s impressive distribution. ArcGIS contains analytical applications that can be...
Paquimé and Diablo Phases at Paquimé: An Examination of Architectural Validity of Phase Declarations (2015)
This paper will present on the results of statistically-based analyses of architectural data relating to the Paquimé and Diablo Phases at the site of Paquimé collected and published by Charles Di Peso et al. in 1974. A re-examination of the architectural data is necessitated as, in a methodology dissimilar to standard procedure, Di Peso utilized architectural attributes as a basis for phase differentiation. While prior statistical analysis (Frost 2000) has been applied successfully to...
Patents, Peaches, and Perseverance: The Homestead-Era on the Pajarito Plateau (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Beginning in the 1880s, Euro- and Hispanic-American homesteaders expanded from either the Rio Grande Valley or the eastern United States onto the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico. In 1943, the US Army/Government displaced these groups in preparation of the coming of Manhattan Project scientists. While journals and documentary accounts from visitors and descendants provide insight...
Plucked Macaws: Evidence of Regular Feather Harvesting at Chaco Canyon (2017)
Macaws are not native to the American Southwest, but were imported into this region from central Mexico for hundreds of years. Recent research has demonstrated that the wing feathers of Southwestern turkeys were regularly plucked, as evidenced by significant scarring on the birds’ ulnae. This paper provides a macroscopic analysis of macaw skeletal remains from Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo Arroyo in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and argues that these elements also show evidence of a practice of regular...