Landscapes, Landforms, and Landform Elements: Putting the "Land" Back into Landscape Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Chuska Mountains are a landform that extends north-south for approximately 70 kilometers, marking the western boundary of the San Juan Basin. The low mountains, broad piedmont, and sluggish drainages grade towards Chaco Wash, the main drainage in the area. Alluvial and eolian landforms provide the locations for prehistoric habitations, commonly in active geomorphic settings. Keys to understanding the buried cultural landscapes are the surface expressions of landform elements such as small gravel bars, eolian dunes, bedrock knolls, clay-rich deposits, and exposed paleosols. The alluvial and eolian chronology spanning the Middle to Late Holocene is based on AMS radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence, and dendrochronology age estimates. Buried cultural landscapes are interpreted through chronostratigraphic analysis of dated thermal features, alluvium, eolian deposits, and soils. Certain places on the landscape were occupied for several thousand years, even though alluvial and eolian deposition was quite active. The last period of alluviation occurred about AD 1570 when a juniper forest was rapidly buried by well-stratified alluvial sands. The dynamic landscape preserved a history of buried archaeological stratigraphy that provides insights into climate-landscape-human interactions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project: A Multivocal Analysis of the San Juan Basin as a Cultural Landscape   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23615