Ceramic Production and Exchange among the Virgin Anasazi, 30 Years Later

Summary

At the 1988 SAA annual meeting in Phoenix, Margaret Lyneis presented a paper with the title Ceramic Production and Exchange among the Virgin Anasazi. In that paper she presented convincing evidence that, despite its abundance in the Moapa Valley of southeastern Nevada, Moapa Gray Ware was produced 70-100 km to the east, near the north rim of the western Grand Canyon. She also defined a new type of pottery, which she was calling Shivwits Brown at the time (later Shivwits Plain). Shivwits Brown (or Plain) was also abundant in the Moapa Valley, but Lyneis argued that it was made on the Shivwits Plateau, also north of the western Grand Canyon but west of the main Moapa Gray Ware production zone. That 1988 SAA paper inspired much subsequent research, including my doctoral dissertation, which (in part) examined the distributions of Moapa Gray Ware and Shivwits Plain across the western part of the Virgin region and within the Moapa Valley. In this paper, I update and expand on that study, adding data from recent excavations, from my unpublished fieldwork on the Shivwits Plateau and in the St George Basin, and from recent reanalysis of ceramic assemblages from the western Virgin region.

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): 20598