Square Hearths, Rabbits, Mesquite, and Maize at an Early Ceramic Site along the Santa Cruz River

Summary

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

Recent excavations sponsored by Tucson Electric Power in at a small Early Ceramic Period habitation site along the Santa Cruz River in Tucson, Arizona confirm that cultural patterns associated with the Hohokam can be found at sites dating to the Early Ceramic Period in the Tucson Basin. The Early Ceramic Period in the Tucson Basin represents a transition from the Late Archaic/Early Agricultural Period, when people began to cultivate maize and live in small settlements, to the Ceramic Period when the Hohokam lived in large villages along the Santa Cruz River. Subsurface features, ceramics, and radiocarbon dating place the site’s main occupation in the middle of the Early Ceramic Period with a possible earlier occupation during the Early Agricultural Period, as well as an ephemeral later Hohokam use. Investigations encountered oval or circular pithouses with square-shaped hearths, as well as storage pits, thermal features, middens, and activity areas, in two possible loci. Like the later Hohokam, these families hunted rabbits and other wild animals, gathered and processed mesquite and other wild plants, utilized wild reeds and grass for house construction, farmed maize, and traded for shell from the Gulf of California.

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): 53607