Antelope Cave: A Dry Ancestral Puebloan (Virgin Anasazi) Site in Northwestern Arizona

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Janetski.

The dry deposits of Antelope Cave on the Uinkaret Plateau in northwestern Arizona have yielded a rich artifact assemblage and abundant faunal and botanical remains dating to the late Archaic, Basketmaker II, and especially late Pueblo I/early Pueblo II times,. The collections recovered through archaeological work provide especially useful insights into Ancestral Puebloan life in this region. These activities include rabbit drives for food and the production of rabbit skin textiles, sandal repair...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karl Reinhard. Isabel Teixeira-Santos.

Results of 20 Antelope Cave coprolites show both consistencies and inconsistencies with other Ancestral Pueblo coprolite analyses. Most of the human coprolites appear to be late summer and early fall depositions. Four principle plant foods were ground to a fine flour: maize kernels, dropseed caryopses, sunflower achenes, and cheno-am seeds. Maize and dropseed were found in six coprolites each and they did not co-occur. Microscopically, maize starch occurred in seven coprolites. Thus, maize was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terence Murphy. Karen R. Adams. Keith L Johnson.

Quids are small wads of fiber that were chewed or sucked by prehistoric Native Americans and then spit out. To identify the plants used for making a selection of quids from Antelope Cave, we extracted DNA from 10 quids, used polymerase chain reaction to amplify a 250-base section near the chloroplast trnL gene, and determined the sequence of the amplified fragment. DNAs from the 10 quids had identical base sequences, and these matched corresponding sequences from authentic samples of Yucca ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adauto Araujo. Karl Reinhard.

Human and animal coprolites revealed an interesting group of parasites, some of which have never been found before in archaeological context. The Rocky Mountain Wood Tick, Dermacentor andersoni, were found in two human coprolites. These were probably crushed and ingested. Acanthocephalan eggs found in the human coprolites were consistent with Macracanthorhynchus ingens. This is the first well-documented infection among Ancestral Puebloans and suggests that people at Antelope Cave had different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Fisher.

Zooarchaeological research conducted under the conceptual realm of behavioral ecology has generally focused on the decision-making processes made during and immediately after hunting activities, at the cost of studies that explicitly attempt to predict culinary processing according to ecological or social conditions. It is critical that archaeologists develop tools for predicting and identifying culinary processing methods if our goal is to fully understand prehistoric foraging decisions. Since...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Adams.

Unburned yucca (Yucca) quids with wild tobacco (Nicotiana) contents have preserved within Antelope Cave in northwestern Arizona. Although the cave was visited during the Archaic, Southern Paiute, and Euro-American periods, material culture remains and radiocarbon dates indicate heaviest use by the Virgin Anasazi (A.D. 1 - 1000). Quids are wads of fiber twisted or knotted into a ball for insertion into the mouth. Ten of the quids examined were clearly made from the fibers of Yucca plants, based...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Johnson.

Antelope Cave is a large limestone cavern sunk beneath the rolling hills of the Uinkaret Plateau in northwestern Arizona. Native Americans lived in the cave intermittently for 4000 years during the Archaic and Puebloan periods. Environmental conditions over those thousands of years appear to have changed little. This paper addresses the variety and abundance of local resources available to the cave's inhabitants who lived in this semi-arid region north of the Grand Canyon. Flora in the vicinity...