Field Houses and Traditional Agricultural Landscapes of the Northern US Southwest

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Field Houses and Traditional Agricultural Landscapes of the Northern US Southwest" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Field houses, water and soil control features, and other horticultural features are often identified and recorded as isolated elements dotting expansive landscapes during archaeological surveys in the northern US Southwest. This suite of agricultural features typically receive far less investigative attention than civic-ceremonial or residential structures, as they exist in spaces perceived as “empty” and disconnected from loci of intensive occupation. Understanding the breadth of extensive landscape engineering and agricultural investment is further limited by subjective project and survey boundaries, exaggerating the perceived isolation of field houses and other horticultural features. Interpreting these features, however, within the context of larger lived landscapes is not only more aligned with Indigenous perspectives of space, but also yields valuable information on traditional cultural practices and values, ecological knowledge systems, stewardship, sustainability, and resilience. This symposium highlights recent research on agrarian landscapes in the Ancestral Pueblo southwest, including perspectives from archaeology, landscape architecture, and descendant communities.