Untangling Legacy Data: A Siteless Survey of the Citadel Pueblo Agricultural Catchment in Northeastern Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cultural Resource Management professionals are no strangers to the challenges that accompany legacy data stewardship. Past collection methods, outdated site definitions, and the digitization of existing data often lead to inaccurate, overlapping, and missing data. Highly dense cultural landscapes that have been carved into discrete archaeological sites in the past often exhibit some of the most convoluted data. This poster presents the results of revisiting previously surveyed areas at Wupatki National Monument in northern Arizona using a siteless survey approach, relict plant tallies, and archival and ethnographic research. The goal of this project was to utilize adapted methodologies in a federal land management setting to examine issues of data collection, data gaps, legacy data management, and public interpretation on a landscape scale. Standardizing feature classes and using modified methods revealed that what had been previously recorded as discrete sites are in fact part of a larger connected landscape. This revelation has led to a deeper understanding of landscape use and the distribution of agricultural fields that once sustained the Citadel Pueblo community.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52009