Assessing the La Playa Projectile Point Assemblage

Summary

This is an abstract from the "13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

More than 300 projectile points have been collected from the La Playa site. The vast majority were found on the surface without archaeological contexts. The site begins to be used continuously from the middle Holocene (ca. 7,000 years) by Archaic hunter-gatherer/forager groups as a locality included in their residential mobility rounds. During the early and middle Holocene, the Boquillas river floodplain was an important locality to find water and prey and collect mesquite seeds, wood, and herbs with seed near the river. Around 5,000 years ago better weather returned to the Sonoran Desert, and the Boquillas River was an oasis where a sedentary community with a much larger population could settle and farm corn that they obtained from their neighbors from the south. Here we present a cultural history of the site using projectile point styles. We also offer some demographic data and interaction data for the Archaic and Early Agricultural period peoples in the Sonoran Desert, comparing the La Playa points with other studied sites in the Plains of Sonora.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38848.0