Early Agricultural period (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
Investment in cultigens and early irrigation in the Sonoran Desert (circa 3600 BP) signal a major shift in subsistence strategy identified as the Early Agricultural Period (EAP). The EAP is also recognized as a period of significant social transformation, and Las Capas (LCA) has played a critical part in our redefinition of this period. We examine how biocultural signatures from the LCA mortuary sample compare over the site’s occupation and within broader patterns of the EAP. Our results...
The Evaluation of the Labor Costs of Stone Boiling Dried Maize During the Early Agricultural Period in the Southwest (2017)
The Early Agricultural period (2100 BC-AD150-500) in the Southwest begins with the presence of maize and ends with the advent of ceramic vessel use. It is assumed maize was dried out and stored for future consumption. Once dried, maize required extensive processing to gelatinize the endosperm starch, or transform the polysaccharides back to a digestible monosaccharide, through techniques such as: parching, steeping, grinding, and/or boiling (Hard et al. 1996). Little, however, is known about the...
Excavations in the Santa Cruz Floodplain: Further Investigations at Los Pozos (2007)
The current volume, the third of four, acts as a final report for the excavations that were conducted at Los Pozos, AZ AA:12:91 (ASM) in the fall of 1998. Hoping to build on earlier work conducted by Desert Archaeology at other Early Agricultural period sites along the Santa Cruz, these volumes combine data with those from both seasons at Los Pozos and those garnered from Las Capas to explore the implications of this total body of work for current understanding of this important and lengthy...
La Playa in the Broader Early Agricultural Period (2024)
This is an abstract from the "13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will situate La Playa site within a broader narrative of the development of the Early Agricultural period (EAP). We review evidence for the obvious parallels of technological development that occurred at La Playa and other EAP sites in both Northwest Mexico and the US Southwest. These changes are then...
Resilience in an Arid Environment: Long-Term Climate Change and Human Adaptations in Sonora (2019)
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. Recent interdisciplinary investigations have revealed that the Sonoran Desert region is not only one of the earliest regions occupied in the Americas, but also demonstrates one of the longest continuous occupation records. The earliest Sonorans were proboscidean hunters...
Revealing La Playa's Cultural Landscape during the Early Agriculture Period through Paleoethnobotanical Research (2024)
This is an abstract from the "13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a reconstruction of the cultural landscape of the La Playa Site in Sonora (SON F:10:3) during the Early Agriculture period (3450–1800 BP). We employ a paleoethnobotanical approach, analyzing 150 macrobotanical samples alongside ethnobotanical investigations, ethnographic data, and oral tradition...
Stratigraphy and Chronology at Las Capas, an Early Agricultural Period Site in the Tucson Basin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses the stratigraphic chronology for the Las Capas site in the Tucson Basin, southern Arizona. Las Capas was inhabited by early farmers during the Late Archaic/Early Agricultural period (EAP), which dates from about 2100 cal BC to cal AD 50. Maize and canal irrigation were introduced during this interval....
The Use of Shell Ornaments at Las Capas, an Early Agricultrual Site in Southern Arizona (2015)
Recent excavations at the site of Las Capas, located along the Santa Cruz River in the Tucson Basin in southern Arizona, have given us an opportunity to examine an Early Agricultural period site in this area. Along with other pieces of material culture such as flaked stone and ground stone tools, ornaments manufactured from marine shell were also part of the lifeway of the local inhabitants. Deriving from locales in California and northern Mexico, where established marine shell ornament...