Modernizing Empirical Data in Alkali Ridge, Southeastern Utah

Summary

The Alkali Ridge Project conducted by New Mexico State University is a data modernization project geared towards updating maps and providing artifact analysis around the Ten Acres community in the National Historic Landmark Southern District in southeastern Utah. Though much work in this area has been done by our predecessors, additional data is necessary to better understand the community organization. The 2015 field season allowed us to survey four sites, including the Ten Acres site (42SA15206) excavated by Alfred Kidder in 1908, a previously unmapped tower complex site (42SA4998), and two other small satellite sites. As a result of our survey at those four sites, we were able to recognize architectural similarities among them and clearly identified the Ten Acres site, which had multiple story structures and more than 40 kivas, as a community center. Further, there are a great number of medium and small satellite sites surrounding Ten Acres in addition to the ones surveyed. In this poster, we will tackle three major questions: 1) What was the role of the Ten Acres site? 2) Were other satellite sites occupied at the same time? and 3) How did these other sites interact with the Ten Acres community?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage