Sunset at Rock Art Ranch: Human Use and Occupation of the Middle Little Colorado River Valley before the Homol’ovi Settlement Cluster

Summary

From 2011-2016 the Rock Art Ranch (RAR) field school, directed by E. Charles Adams and Richard Lange, surveyed about 17 square kilometers and conducted excavations at three sites to understand how groups utilized the prehistoric landscape of the Middle Little Colorado River valley. Research at RAR, located near the modern town of Winslow, Arizona, sheds light on over 10,000 years of human settlement and contextualizes over three decades of work by Adams and Lange at the nearby Homol’ovi settlement cluster. During six seasons, the RAR field school documented 220 sites representing use beginning with mobile hunter-gatherer populations through Ancestral Puebloan communities of the Pueblo III period. Additionally, ceramic evidence indicates that visits by Hopi people continued through the early Historic period—demonstrating the continued importance of this area. The intensive survey and excavation data collected by the RAR field school is regionally significant as very little of the surrounding landscape has been investigated outside of the Homol’ovi settlement cluster of the Pueblo IV period and the extensive rock art from which the ranch derives its name. In this paper we summarize our findings, which help to contextualize the social and physical landscape prior to aggregation at the large Homol’ovi pueblos.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20181