The First Excavation of a Pithouse Site in the Mt. Trumbull Area

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The first excavation of Virgin Ancestral Pueblo structures was conducted at Mt. Trumbull during the summer of 2018 after more than 15 years of intense surface surveys. The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of the settlement patterns and changes in adaptive strategies among the Ancestral Puebloans who lived in this marginal environment. A potential pithouse site, 71 ASM, was chosen for excavation after a previous GPR survey indicated the existence of a possible subsurface feature underneath a large depression. The OSL dates for previously analyzed ceramics from this site suggest the time associated with this feature is the Basketmaker III period. A long trench excavation was conducted to answer several questions, such as site function, length of the occupation, seasonality of the site, and the energy devoted to construct this structure. This excavation showed that a five-meter diameter pithouse was constructed by digging into the limestone bedrock, which suggests a relatively large amount of energy was devoted to the construction of habitation during the early occupation in the Mt. Trumbull area. To understand the history of this pithouse, OSL dating of 30 ceramics from various layers will be discussed in this paper.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23752