Pre-Contact Land Use of the Gallinas Mountains, Lincoln County, New Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

SWCA Environmental Consultants is conducting heritage resource surveys across 4,388 acres of lands managed by the Cibola National Forest. These surveys will aid the U.S. Forest Service and the Claunch-Pinto Soil and Water Conservation District of Mountainair, New Mexico, in completing landscape-level treatments designed to protect an unburned forested watershed in the Gallinas Mountains, Lincoln County, New Mexico. The project area lies at the northern end of the Sierra Blanca region, along an ambiguous border with the Salinas area. Previous surveys in this area were restricted to roadways; the vast majority of the acreage had not been inventoried for heritage resources. SWCA archaeologists have surveyed 2,900 acres thus far, and have identified strong evidence of resource exploitation, lithic reduction, and tool manufacture/refurbishment, beginning in the late Paleoindian period and continuing into the 1400s. This paper would provide an initial overview of the environmental setting and cultural history of the project area and a brief literature review of prior research in the area, and present field results from 2017 and 2018 surveys with a focus on lithic reduction and tool manufacturing technologies. The goal of this analysis is to encourage a deeper understanding of pre-Contact lifeways in the Estancia Basin.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25942