Pueblos at the Passageway: A Reassessment of Burial Collections From Nuvakwewtaqa, Chavez Pass, Arizona

For several centuries (13th – 15th C AD) Nuvakwewtaqa was comprised of three large pueblos that harbored a large population of ancestral puebloan people. It has been argued that the location and size of the pueblos correspond with their position along a major trade route - a transitional zone between forest and desert ecotones on the Colorado Plateau. A recently completed Forest Service sponsored NAGPRA Documentation project presents reassessments of the burial assemblages excavated by ASU (Chavez Pass Project 1976-1982) in cooperation with the Coconino National Forest. The site had been subjected to decades of looting which made past analysis of the disturbed burial contexts and surface scatters challenging. New insights into the people and material culture of Nuvakwewtaqa are presented which demonstrate that extensive regional ties provided the necessary conditions for the establishment a center of population and trade during the dynamic regional changes of late prehistoric times.