To Retest or Not To Retest: A Case Study at Wide Ruins

Summary

To conduct an archaeological data recovery project using another’s testing results as your guide can be problematic, especially when those results are over a decade old. In 2014 Northland Research, Inc. undertook a large data recovery project at two sites located at the Wide Ruins Community on the Navajo Nation. Both of these sites had been previously tested by a company other than Northland. One of these sites AZ P-37-42(NN) was an obvious habitation with the remnants of a room block and an associated great kiva located just outside of the right-of-way. For this reason a less than robust testing strategy was utilized on this site. As a result of testing, a total of 80 cultural features were projected to be within the right-of-way. In reality Northland located well over 350 archaeological features within this site. This poster presents the results of the archaeological testing and subsequent data recovery at AZ P-37-42(NN) and examines if an alteration of testing methodology would have made a significant difference in the archaeological feature projections. Additionally this poster seeks to provide some insight on the lessons learned from the Wide Ruins excavations.

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

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• CRM, Kinteel, and the Community of Wide Ruins

Keywords

Spatial Coverage