Reconstruction of the Site History of the “Zip Code Site,” a Large Virgin Branch Puebloan Site at the Mt. Trumbull Area in the Arizona Strip

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Virgin Branch Puebloan Region" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of the settlement patterns among the Virgin Branch Puebloans, who were small-scale farmers living in the marginal environment at the Mt. Trumbull area in the Arizona Strip. The Zip Code Site (131BLM) is a large site with multiple pueblo structures at least 200 m long. One of the hypotheses for this large site is that it was a late aggregated village. Previous studies, however, mention the very few corrugated sherds, thus implying that this site was occupied relatively early during the late Basketmaker III or Pueblo I period. Both the radiocarbon dates and the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates range from AD 476 to 1350. Thus, it is hypothesized that, instead of being an aggregated village, this large site is the result of long-term occupation and not all of the structures and rooms were used simultaneously. Between 2018 and 2023, several rooms were excavated to better understand the history of the site’s use. In this poster, we will present the results of the chemical compositional analyses of the soils using pXRF from different depths in a few rooms, combined with OSL dates, to investigate the history of site’s occupation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of the Virgin Branch Puebloan Region   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39408.0