The Monticello Uplands: A Cultural Resource Survey in The Lands Between

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Reemerging from the Ancient and Current Pasts: Recent Archaeological and Ethnographic Research in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Between September 2023 and April 2024, Woods Canyon Archaeological Consultants, Inc. (Woods Canyon) conducted a Class III cultural resource inventory of 6,485 acres of land for the BLM Canyon Country District in San Juan County, Utah. These acres were broken across 23 separate survey areas on both sides of the Montezuma Canyon drainage. More recently, this area has come to be called the “Lands Between” as it falls between the culturally-rich areas of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah and Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in Colorado. The survey area included well-known landforms such as Alkali Ridge, Brushy Basin, Cedar Park, and Bug Point. A total of 778 archaeological sites were recorded by the project, 602 of which were new recordings. Cultural affiliation was primarily Ancestral Puebloan, ranging from Basketmaker II – Pueblo III, but included Archaic, Historic Navajo, and Euroamerican sites as well. This presentation will attempt to provide a synopsis of the project’s findings, shedding some new light on the extensive temporal and areal use of The Lands Between, and highlighting the potential for new research opportunities identified by recent inventory work.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Reemerging from the Ancient and Current Pasts: Recent Archaeological and Ethnographic Research in Southeastern Utah

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51750