The Early Agricultural Period in the Northern Tonto Basin, Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Early Agricultural period was revived as part of Late Archaic culture-historical systematics during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Work by Bruce Huckell at Milagro, Barb Roth at Cortaro Fan, Paul and Suzy Fish at Tumamoc Hill, and CRM projects in the Tucson Basin fueled this conceptual revision, along with long-term projects at La Playa and Cerro Juanaqueña in northern Mexico. Less intensively investigated areas, overlooked because of industry-created “single region biases”, include the Cienega Creek, San Pedro, and Gila Valleys east of Tucson, and the Tonto Basin and Mogollon Rim to the north. One of the obscure regional sites is the Boatyard Site, located in the northern Tonto Basin in central Arizona. It was excavated by Bruce Huckell in 1994 as part of the Tonto Creek Archaeological Project, about the time he proposed reviving the EAP as the final portion of the Archaic sequence. The site has three temporal components: a Colonial period Hohokam farmstead, a Late Cienega phase farmstead, and a Middle Archaic camp site. This report gives a look at the EAP in the Tonto Basin from the view of the Boatyard Site, a 225 km/140 mile walk north of Tucson, 30 years after excavation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Papers in Celebration of Bruce B. Huckell, Part 2

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52382