American Southwest (Other Keyword)
1-16 (16 Records)
The Salado Phenomenon has long been of interest to Southwestern archaeologists, and perhaps the most notable signifier of the phenomenon is a suite of pottery types collectively referred to as Salado Polychromes or Roosevelt Red Wares. Previous researchers have tended to focus their ceramic studies on the Salado Polychrome pottery itself, and few have attempted to situate these vessels within the context of the broader ceramic assemblages of which they were part. Often, this kind of information...
Chemical Characterization and Source Identification of Obsidian Projectile Points in the Southern Southwest (2017)
A sample of over 800 obsidian projectile points collected during 40 years of archaeological survey and excavation on Fort Bliss Military Reservation of south-central New Mexico and western Texas was submitted for chemical characterization and source identification using X-ray fluorescence (XRF). Obsidian projectile points representing all major temporal periods were analyzed, including Paleoindian Folsom points, several forms of dart points produced during the Early, Middle, and Late Archaic...
Cultural Transmission and Lithic Technologies, a Case Study in the Late Prehistoric Tonto Basin (2016)
The past 5 years have seen new lithic studies inferring the degree of contact between and migrations of Pleistocene hominin populations (Tostevin 2013, Scerri et al. 2014). Their methodologies are grounded in a rigorously defined middle range theory, but independent tests of the approach have only recently begun. Bridging the gap between individual knapping events, and the trans-generational patterns we see in the archaeological record will likely require multiple approaches, including applying...
Dr. Fay-Cooper Cole and His Father, Rev. Dr. George L. Cole: A Forgotten Chapter of Early Archaeological Explorations in the American Southwest (2016)
In the history of American archaeology, Fay-Cooper Cole (1881-1961) at the University of Chicago was instrumental in implementing standardized archaeological field methods and training a generation of archaeologists through his Illinois field schools in the 1930s and 1940s. In recent years, there has been some debate about the origins of the “Chicago Method” of excavation, for it has been stated that “Cole had no previous training in archaeology” (Browman 2002). Yet before he began his...
The Emergence of Tewa Pueblo Society (2016)
This poster explores the emergence of Tewa Pueblo society in northern New Mexico and uses archaeological methods to understand the ways in which disparate communities (of migrants and autochthonous people) coalesced to create a novel social, ceremonial, and residential organization – the hallmarks of Tewa village life – in the mid-fourteenth century. While recent research demonstrates where and when these changes occurred, archaeologists know little about why and how the ancestral Tewa...
Mugs of the Mesa and Old Chocolate: Evidence of Prehistoric Cacao Use in the Mesa Verde Region of the North American Southwest (2015)
Undergraduate Anthropology and Chemistry students at the University of San Diego (USD) collaborated on the application of analytical chemistry to archaeological ceramics. USD curates 1000’s of prehistoric Southwestern artifacts, all of which are available for student research. We examined some of the collections vessels for cacao, which is the raw form of chocolate. Patricia Crown and W. Jeffrey Hurst recently found it in cylinder jar fragments from Chaco Canyon. Crown’s methodology was adapted...
Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating of Little Springs Lava Flow: Impact of Lava Flows to Human Adaptation in Mt. Trumbull, Arizona (2015)
Recently, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of sediment has been used increasingly in the study of human occupation history in archaeology. This paper employs OSL to date the Little Springs Lava Flow, a lava flow near Mt. Trumbull, northern Arizona thought to have erupted about 1000 years ago. The accepted dates are based on cosmogenic helium dating. This lava flow covers some of the most productive agricultural land in the Mt. Trumbull area. Previous archaeological surveys revealed...
The Origins of Agriculture and Neolithic in the American Southwest: The View from Western Europe (2016)
The transition from foraging to farming is certainly one of the most dramatic processes in human history. The use of domesticated plants spread widely across Western Europe from the Near East, and across the American Southwest from Mexico. Research in Western Europe has traditionally focused on the movement of farming communities across the region which displaced or subsumed local foragers. Recently various aspects of this process have been discussed including climate change, the expansion of...
The re-evaluating diachronic trends of corrugated ware and rim eversion of jars in the Virgin Branch Ancestral Pueblo ceramics using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating (2017)
Although the ceramic chronology in the Virgin Branch Ancestral Puebloan area requires more well-dated ceramic assemblage, there are some generally accepted diachronic trends based on surface treatment and form. Corrugated ware, for example, is believed to date around A.D. 1050. Rim eversion of jar is also often used as time indicator; sharply everted rim is considered to be associated to later time period, and little or no everted rim is associated to earlier time period. This information may be...
Reading Between the Lines: A Biscuitware Analysis in the Lower Chama Valley (2017)
Archaeologists have long understood that the Lower Chama Valley in New Mexico was home to a large Tewa population during the Classic Period (A.D. 1340-1540) but the area underwent dramatic depopulation by A.D. 1600. The precise timing, motivation and movements of people are unclear due to the lack of chronological control in the region. One way to address this chronological problem in the Lower Chama Valley is through analysis of the abundant and locally produced biscuitware pottery. Bandelier...
Salvage Excavation: NMSU Summer Field Project at the South Diamond Creek Pueblo in the Northern Mimbres Region (2017)
New Mexico State University (NMSU) anthropology students spent the summer of 2016 getting to know a bit more about the Mimbres people who lived more than 1,000 years ago, and along the way helped preserve their history. Eight NMSU students joined community volunteers for four weeks to explore and excavate areas of the South Diamond Creek Pueblo (SDCP) in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. The project had three major goals: 1) to contribute to our understanding of cultural trajectories in the...
Settlement patterns of Salado period occupations in the Duncan/York Valley on the Upper Gila River (2017)
The Salado period occupation sites have become the focus of substantial discussion in the Southwest as it relates to broader regional migrations, population fluctuations as well as sociocultural changes. Unfortunately many of these important sites have suffered from decades of destruction and continued looting. Comparing early site notes from the Gila Pueblo and other early researchers in the Duncan/York Valley to the University of Texas at San Antonio Southwest field project survey notes, this...
Tracing the Growth of Historic Preservation in the U.S. and the Arc of Tom Windes’s Career (2015)
The passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966 and the conferring of Tom Windes’s M.A. in Anthropology in 1967 appear to be causally independent, but thereafter the arc of historic preservation and Windes’s archaeological career are intertwined. We distinguish three major stages in cultural resource management over the last 50 years, each of which tracks almost seamlessly with the changing focus of Windes’s work. The challenges of defining the intent of the act, enforcing...
Two episodes of ritual turkey and dog burials in southwestern Colorado; a case study (2017)
Many instances of turkey and dog burials have been documented in the prehistoric American Southwest. Some are simple burials or discarded remains but some examples bear characteristics of deliberate sacrifice, arrangement and elaborate ritual interment. Excavations directed by D. M. Dove from 2008 through 2012 in Early Pueblo II period contexts at the large Champagne Spring site in Dolores County, Colorado, revealed two unprecedented examples of this latter type. On or near the floors of two pit...
Using Geospatial Strategies and Ground-Penetrating Radar to Study Sites in the American Southwest (2015)
In American archaeology, ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has enjoyed its longest use in the Southwest. While this method has long been used to locate features of archaeological interest, much of the focus has now shifted from using this technique as a prospection tool to one that can be used directly in the study of archaeological sites. This reflects an increasing sophistication in the ways practitioners process, interpret, and visualize GPR data, which capitalizes on this method's...
War and Peace in the Sixteenth-Century Southwest: Objected-Oriented Approaches to Native-European Encounters and Trajectories (2017)
Although conflict and conquista campaigns characterized many of the earliest encounters between Native and European groups in New Spain and La Florida, the transformation of objects, communities, and strategic policies in these areas was locally variable and changed dramatically by the close of the sixteenth century. Materials characteristic of these changes and variegated responses are found widely in the archaeological record of the American Southwest, but have seldom been explored for the...