Experimental Granary Construction in Range Creek Canyon, UT

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Food storage is a key component of many human subsistence patterns and has been a topic of interest for decades. In arid environments, agricultural surplus can be critical to survival. Having stored surplus available when needed is a benefit likely well worth the costs. In Range Creek Canyon (RCC), prehistoric maize farmers appear to have invested considerable effort into creating secure food storage facilities in the form of above-ground granaries and semi-subterranean cists. There is, however, significant variation in how these facilities were constructed and where they are located. Experimental reconstructions will help explain this variation by providing estimates of construction costs associated with different types of granaries, as well as any differential benefits conferred by those methods of construction. Students at the Range Creek Archaeological Field School participate in this experiment by building their own experimental reconstructions and recording their time costs. Students are free to experiment with different techniques and are not micromanaged to make every granary identical. This contributes to their learning and formation of potential research questions and refines the experiment with new information. Additionally, students gain skills that help them in recording similar features that they see at the field station or in later careers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39578.0