Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Now, as in the past, societies are not comprised solely by any one site or style of artifact. Instead, the interplay, among sites, artifacts, and natural features on a landscape, forms the social fabric from which human societies are woven. Southeastern Utah has been both at the center and on the edges of numerous cultural landscapes persistently for almost 13,000 years, yet relatively little synthetic research has occurred in this portion of the northern Southwest. Like now, the area appears to have been a contested landscape at several points in the past and a melting pot for societies from diverse backgrounds at other times. This session draws upon recent research in southeastern Utah to understand the social, ritual, subsistence, and political dimensions of ancient cultural landscapes in this crossroads region. Through innovative field-, collections-, archival-, and laboratory-based research, the authors in the session seek to understand landscape-scale patterns in subsistence, chronology, demography, and social identity. While recent political battles rage over the scale of federal protection across the area, the authors seek to move forward, beyond new or old political boundaries, to understand the ancient and historic peoples and the scale of the cultural landscapes in which they participated.