Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeological Research in Montezuma Canyon, San Juan County, Utah," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since the 1960s, faculty from Brigham Young University have conducted archaeological research in southeastern Utah. The focus has been Montezuma Canyon, a long, winding drainage renowned for its rich archaeological heritage, especially Ancestral Puebloan ruins. Ray Matheny directed nine field schools in the canyon beginning in 1969, and Joel Janetski continued the tradition with four field seasons in the 1980s. Students of those field schools have completed numerous Master’s theses as well as scholarly publications on that work, which has emphasized both survey and excavation. Research interests have varied from canyon demographics to human impacts on the canyon and shifting subsistence emphases over time. Recent studies have focused on canyon geomorphology. In this session we summarize the history of that research and present a synthesis of findings in the broader context of regional prehistory.