Hard Times and Mobility in Thirteenth-Century SE Utah: A Chronometric Study

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Large areas of the western Northern San Juan Region were repopulated in the early AD 1100s and mid AD 1200s, but the overall lack of systematic chronometric dating has complicated our understanding of events during these critical periods of settlement and abandonment. The Wood Project has assisted federal land managers in documentation of intact and semi-intact dwellings throughout southeastern Utah that are suffering from increased visitation, natural deterioration, and the threat of energy extraction. Our work has endeavored to systematically document intact building sites in basins and canyon systems throughout the area, in order to provide base-line information for the visible fragile structural wood remains, architecture, and additional cultural materials. In many cases, these wood elements and other remains have never been systematically recorded, even though they have the potential to greatly refine the temporal aspects of the late Ancestral Puebloan occupations and the subsequent final depopulation of the region by these people. Dates and detailed architectural documentation from our work on Cedar Mesa, and larger region, provide a new subset to add to the growing interest in the prehistory of the area.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23141