Examination of Multigeneration Use of the Rooms in the “Zip Code Site,” a Large Virgin Branch Puebloan Site at the Mt. Trumbull Area in the Arizona Strip

Summary

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

The objective of this study is to better understand the settlement patterns of the Virgin Branch Puebloans, small-scale farmers who inhabited the marginal environment of the Mt. Trumbull area in the Arizona Strip. The Zip Code Site (131BLM) is a large site with multiple pueblo structures, extending at least 200 meters in length. From 2018 to 2023, several rooms were excavated to better understand the history of the site’s use. The previous analyses of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of sherds from these rooms supported the hypothesis that this large site is the result of long-term occupation and not all of the structures and rooms were used simultaneously. The 2024 excavation revealed that some rooms had been occupied by multiple generations, as evidenced by multi-level floors. This poster presents a summary of the excavation of these multi-level floors, including three-dimensional models of the structures, shifts in artifact types, and chemical compositional analyses of the soil from different depths using pXRF, in conjunction with OSL dating, to explore the history of the site’s occupation.

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): 53432