Footprints of the Ancestors: A 1,000-Year-Old Hohokam Trackway in the La Plaza Site, Tempe, Arizona

Summary

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

In 2016, archaeologists with Environmental Planning Group, LLC, conducted excavations at a portion of the La Plaza site near the Arizona State University campus in Tempe, Arizona, for a HUD-funded veterans’ housing project. Exposures near a large canal revealed a short prehistoric trackway segment associated with the Hohokam archaeological culture, ancestral to the O’odham people and dating to approximately AD 1000. This presentation will discuss the prehistoric context of features surrounding the trackway, as well as its placement in the immense La Plaza site. We will describe the techniques leading to its discovery and successful excavation. We’ll discuss the collaboration of multiple stakeholders to ensure preservation and public interpretation of the trackway, and methods that we used to preserve and successfully extract the trackway intact for subsequent display. Preservation of the prehistoric trackway was a lucky combination of natural processes burying the trackway and subsequent urban development sealing the trackway until excavation in 2016. The trackway provides a visual and tactile link to past residents of Arizona.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23695