Experimental Hearth Reconstruction at White Sands National Monument

Summary

Cultural sites known as "hearth mounds," scattered throughout the gypsum dune field of White Sands National Monument in south-central New Mexico, have the potential to provide additional insight into human habitation and subsistence strategies within the Tularosa Basin. These sites contain the remains of prehistoric thermal features which transformed the surrounding gypsum sediments into a hardened material similar to plaster of Paris. This paper explores the formation processes that influence the spatial and temporal relationships between Middle Archaic through Pueblo period (4300 BC – AD 1450) hearth mound sites and presents the results from an experiment designed to replicate simple cooking facilities described ethnographically for Mescalero Apache and other southwestern pueblos. The data collected during the experimental hearth reconstruction provide a more robust understanding of thermal feature morphology, site function, resource availability, recycling strategies, potential number of firing episodes, as well as a site’s preservation potential.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage