Landscape Settlement Patterns on Southern Cedar Mesa, Utah

Summary

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

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (GLCA) manages 1,229 acres of land on the southern rim of Cedar Mesa in San Juan County, Utah. Northern Arizona University surveyed 160 of those acres in 1987 and Museum of Northern Arizona inventoried the remaining 1,069 acres during three projects in 2020-2024. Including rock art sites recorded by GLCA in 1994, the area contains 83 archaeological sites comprising 89 temporal components. This is a density of 41.1 sites per square mile, 2.8 times the GLCA average. These sites are exclusively Archaic, Basketmaker II, and Pueblo I-III Ancestral Puebloan in cultural/temporal affiliation, with sites of each interval strongly associated with specific local environmental zones that form contiguous strips: mesa rim, dune ridge, and dune fields. Absent are Basketmaker III, single component Pueblo I, and Protohistoric components. The Cedar Mesa Project of the 1970s did not identify any Archaic sites but did identify early Basketmaker III sites, otherwise the recent inventories found similar site types, temporal components, and site locations. The results of the recent projects compliment and expand upon the earlier sample surveys, providing additional strong evidence for cultural changes through time on Cedar Mesa in response to changing environments and dietary needs.

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): 52438