Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Transcending Boundaries and Exploring Pasts: Current Archaeological Investigations of the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The International Border between the United States and Mexico is a region fraught with political, economic, and social tensions—perhaps never more so than at our present point in history. In an effort to momentarily transcend those tensions (the byproduct of comparatively recent geopolitical boundaries), this symposium showcases recent explorations of the deep culture history of a portion of that border region, specifically that encompassing southwest Arizona and northern Sonora. For millennia this magnificent, yet austere, part of the Sonoran Desert has been a crossroads of numerous groups and cultural traditions—Hohokam, Patayan, Trincheras, O’odham, Apache, and others. Today, archaeologists and cultural preservationists on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border continue to uncover and decipher facets of this deep and complex culture history, as this symposium demonstrates.