The Central Arizona Project and Platform Mounds in Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper will chronicle some of the history of the Federal investment in Big Archaeology for the Central Arizona Project. Specifically, the decisions to support a philosophy of Cultural Research Management, which facilitated a huge contribution to the archaeology of Arizona, and more broadly to the Southwest United States. The CAP construction project snaked its way through homeland territory of the prehistoric Hohokam and Salado affecting many platform mound-centered communities in the Phoenix Basin, Gila Basin, Tucson Basin, and in the Tonto Basin and it is these sites and communities that provided the fruit for informed archaeological research and a significant intellectual contribution to American Archaeology in the late Twentieth Century. The massive CAP archaeological program, from the late 1960s to the 21st Century (50 years and counting), had its own historical roots and I will discuss the relevance of the Bureau of American Ethnology as the intellectual spark for Big Archaeological thinking at the Federal Level, notably late Twentieth Century mitigative archaeology, and the why the furtherance of Big Federally-sponsored Archaeology programs is a logical, necessary, and appropriate model.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24477