Soil Quality and Agricultural Productivity of Eolian Landscapes in Petrified Forest National Park

Summary

The Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona contains extensive sand sheets and dunes. Archaeologists have long recognized the importance of the eolian landscape for prehistoric agriculture. Archaeological sites dating from c. 200-1400 A.D. correlate with eolian landscape features, which suggests that eolian soils were used for dry-farmed dune agriculture. Eolian soils are not always conducive to dry-farmed agriculture; however, dune farming is known ethnographically, and has been inferred in archaeological contexts on the southern Colorado Plateau. Previous work by the author has demonstrated that eolian soils in the Petrified Forest National Park are high in clay, which may have increased the water holding capacity of the soils, improving their suitability for farming. This study uses soil chemistry to further test the suitability of eolian sediments for prehistoric cultivation in the region. Soil chemical and physical analyses include soil nitrogen, phosphorus, phosphate, organic matter, calcium carbonate, and bulk density. These are used to document the relative quality of eolian soils in the study region for prehistoric agriculture. In addition, soil geomorphic studies demonstrate the geologic conditions that made agriculture possible, and perhaps even productive, in a marginal landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20616