Twenty Years of Studying the Salado

Summary

Archaeology Southwest (formerly the Center for Desert Archaeology) has been heavily engaged in studying the Salado Phenomenon through the lens of migration for nearly twenty years. Our research has been both intensive and extensive in scope: gathering new data from sites on public and private lands, reanalyzing existing collections, and scrutinizing published and unpublished reports from nearly every valley and basin in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. Here we summarize this research and the salient empirical facts that any model of Salado must accommodate. We then present our conception of Salado, consistent with these facts, as an inclusive ideology that was developed by a spatially dispersed, but culturally connected, immigrant minority from northeastern Arizona. This ideology was ultimately adopted by many local groups in an attempt to ease tensions in the wake of migration and integrate multi-cultural coalescent communities. Many of these communities failed prior to the arrival of Europeans for reasons that remain obscure.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Perspectives on Salado   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage