Dolores Archaeological Program (DAP)

From 1978 until 1985 the University of Colorado contracted with the Bureau of Reclamation (Contract No. 8-07-40-S0562) to mitigate the adverse impact of a large water impoundment project on the cultural resources in the project area. This complex and evolving long-term mitigation plan known as the Dolores Archaeological Program (DAP) has been called a “truly unique chapter in American archaeology” (Breternitz 1993:118) and was applauded by Lipe (1998:2) for its ability to “increase the power and efficiency of archaeological methods”.

Data and materials from the DAP and other Dolores Project contracts are curated by the Anasazi Heritage Center (AHC) through an agreement between the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Land Management, and the President’s Advisory Council. This facility has been an important means of disseminating DAP findings to general public and greater Southwestern archaeological community (Lipe 1998; Sebastian and Lipe 2009).

Since the program’s completion in 1985, the DAP has continued to provide archaeologists with a platform for understanding prehistoric culture change at local and regional levels as well as a model for structuring large-scale archaeological investigations. Recent examples of the DAP’s legacy include Schachner’s (2010) treatment of corporate groups and social differentiation in the context of pithouse-to-pueblo transition ca. A.D. 700 to 900 and Kohler and Reed’s (2011) examination of Pueblo I period village development. The consistency and quality of the DAP database that have enabled it to remain an invaluable research tool even today were made possible by a great deal of forethought and planning in the way archaeological observations were documented (Wilshusen et al. 1999).

The DAP research design was structured to systematically address broad domains of inquiry that encompass economy and adaptation, paleodemography, social organization, extraregional relationships, and cultural processes. Mid-level research designs and supporting studies were employed by task specialists in additive and reductive technologies, environmental archaeology, and survey to address more specific problem domains.

Since field and laboratory research focused on the explanation of cultural process for the prehistoric Ancestral Puebloan population of the Dolores River valley, new conventions and terminology was required to describe spatial and temporal variability that was unique to the Dolores data. These sets of archaeological units, or DAP systematics, provide a common frame of reference for the project analytical and field staffs. Due to the specific nature of this system, researchers are encouraged to consult the Final Synthetic Report of the DAP (Breternitz et al. 1986) before attempting to use DAP databases.