Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Upper Gila and Mimbres region continues to be one of the most active areas of fieldwork in US Southwest archaeology, with numerous projects affiliated with different institutions investigating sites dating throughout much of the prehispanic sequence. In this session, researchers from ongoing field projects in this region present preliminary results and discuss their implications for craft specialization, food preparation and storage, religion, settlement pattern, mobility, and other research topics of broad interest.

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  • Documents (9)

Documents
  • Animal Remains and Archaeological Context in the Mogollon Area, AD 1000–1450 (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Schollmeyer.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines contextual patterns in deposits of animal bones from the Mimbres and upper Gila areas of southwest New Mexico from the Mimbres Classic through Cliff phase Salado periods (AD 1000–1450). Remains of common animal species in contexts like sheet middens and room fill are often interpreted as food remains....

  • Automatic Classification of Mimbres Pottery Styles through Convolutional Neural Networks (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jakob Sedig. Vagheesh Narasimhan. Brianna Flynn.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster describes our attempt to address some long-standing questions about Mimbres pottery through convolutional neural network-based classifiers. Over the past few years the field of computer vision has made major strides in classification and segmentation tasks particularly due to the availability of rich training...

  • Exploring Classic Period Mimbres Social Networks through Neutron Activation Analysis: A Pilot Study (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Lewandowski.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of a study that uses the neutron activation analysis (NAA) dataset that has been compiled for the Mimbres region in order to conduct social network analysis (SNA) for the Classic period (AD 1000–1130). The NAA dataset for the Mimbres region identifies compositional groups and probable...

  • The Forest for the Sites: Archaeological Heritage and Contestation in Gila National Forest (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Margotta.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The national forests of the United States represent a highly contested cultural space, where narratives of archaeological heritage, stewardship, wilderness, and more intersect and clash in the present day. For two previous field seasons (2018 and 2019) the Upper Gila Preservation Archaeology (UGPA) field school, run jointly...

  • Living on the Mimbres Western Edge: Regional Affiliation in Arizona’s Upper Gila River Valley AD 750–1300 (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Whisenhunt. John Roney. Robert Hard. Lori Barkwill Love. Toni Laumbach.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Data derived from archaeological survey and local informant knowledge in southeastern Arizona’s York-Duncan Valley provides new insights into regional affiliations and potentially the identity of those living on the far western edge of the Mimbres region. From 2014–2020, University of Texas at San Antonio field school...

  • The Pithouse to Pueblo Transition, Mealing Facilities, and the Mogollon Mimbres Society (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean White.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mealing facilities include the tools (metates, manos), features (bins), and architecture (kivas, pueblo rooms) used in the process of grinding corn kernels and other materials at an archaeological site. The goal of this poster is to classify, catalog, and compare the properties of mealing facilities in the Mogollon Mimbres...

  • Prehispanic Copper Artifacts Found in the Gila National Forest (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Adams.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of a prehispanic copper artifact on a Classic Mimbres site in the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico in 2009 initiated an archaeological investigation to determine if more prehispanic copper artifacts existed in the Mimbres area. This preliminary investigation involved surveying a small sample of...

  • Ritual Closure: A Countermeasure to Witchcraft (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Judy Berryman.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists routinely encounter ceremonially closed buildings and sites yet specific explanations about why this occurs and how to frame it remain murky. For the American Southwest and likely many other parts of the world, fear of witchcraft may explain these closures. We argue in this poster that ritual burning and the...

  • The Virtuous Archaeologist (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Fuchs.

    This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology is a scientific profession critical to understanding the story humans have written on the world over the course of our history. However, unlike many areas of scientific study, the “subjects” of that scientific inquiry are ultimately people, leading to a complex system of ethics surrounding the treatment of...