Our Checkered Past: Sites, Landscapes, Trails, and Transect Recording Unit Survey

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For over 30 years, archaeologists in southern New Mexico have discovered and managed cultural resources in a survey setting using the transect recording unit (TRU) method. This survey approach divides survey space into a grid of uniformly sized cells and serves as the basis for recording all cultural manifestations observed across a study area. TRU survey strikes a balance between traditional site-based recording methods and site-less survey approaches, generating the site boundaries required by cultural resource management regulations while also providing a high-resolution spatial framework for fine-grained, landscape-scale analyses of survey data. In this paper, I provide an overview of the TRU survey approach while discussing both the research potential of the method and some of the issues and challenges it raises. These issues are explored via an examination of the use of TRU data for identifying and tracing precontact foot trails in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin. These trails, which are essentially invisible during pedestrian survey, are readily identifiable as linear patterns using landscape-scale TRU survey data derived from multiple survey projects, providing insight into precontact routes of movement and exchange.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33654