Vesicular Basalt Provenance Analysis: A Collaborative Research Effort among Southern Arizona Native American Communities and Archaeologists

Summary

Vesicular basalt was a preferred material for groundstone manufacture in central Arizona, and identification of source areas for raw materials will provide important information regarding prehistoric and historic exchange and interaction patterns in the region. As part of archaeological research under the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, the Gila River Indian Community’s Cultural Resource Management Program has recently devoted considerable effort to the creation of a vesicular basalt geochemical database that is essential for conducting geographic provenance analyses of groundstone artifacts from sites in the Phoenix Basin. The development of this database has required collaboration among several Native American communities, federal agencies, and public universities. Additionally, community members were trained in cutting-edge archaeological techniques (portable XRF) as part of the research. This presentation highlights some of the benefits of collaborative investigations among archaeologists and Native American communities, and summarizes the initial results and importance of the vesicular basalt research program.

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

• Tribal Heritage Management Programs in Action at the Gila River Indian Community, Arizona   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage