April 14th, 2014 Archaeological Documentation on a Slippery Slope, Part 1
By Paul F. Reed, Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins Recently, I was fortunate to assist my colleague Doug Gann with a project at Walnut Canyon National Monument, near Flagstaff, Arizona. The work took place at two small cliff dwellings about halfway down a very steep ravine above Walnut Creek. The project […]
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April 10th, 2014 A View from the Edge…of Salado
By Kathryn Turney, Project Intern I have had the pleasure of being an intern for the Edge of Salado project since February of this year. It has been fun, challenging at times, and very rewarding. It has been a good learning experience, in terms of how to meet the project’s research goals while still providing […]
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April 7th, 2014 The Quest to the O. W. Randall Rock
By Randy Craig Randall When I was in college, I became interested in our family history. I vividly recall one conversation with my paternal grandfather, whom we called “Daddy Jack.” One evening at their home in the piney woods around Nacogdoches, Texas, I asked him to tell me what he knew about the Randall […]
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April 3rd, 2014 Tracking Canals in the Safford Basin: A Tale of Fate 34 & 54 Years in the Making
By James A. Neely, Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin This story begins in the summer of 1994, when I accompanied Kyle Woodson—one of my graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin—into the field to get him started on excavations for his master’s thesis project at the now well-known site of Goat […]
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March 19th, 2014 Exploring the Edge, March 8–9, 15–16
By Lewis Borck, Preservation Archaeology Fellow We have been working in the Coyote Mountains for three weeks now as part of our Edge of Salado investigation. I can say, without any doubt, that it has been one of my favorite settings to work in. Each site is nestled within a box canyon eroded from […]
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March 12th, 2014 Not Exactly a Vacant Lot!
By Stephen Darling, Archaeology Southwest Member since 2013 This past Saturday morning, March 8, my wife Anne-Marie, my friend Steve Cox, and I attended Archaeology Southwest’s 2014 Annual Members’ Gathering, which featured a walking tour of the Valencia site. Owned by Pima Community College and Pima County, the Valencia site is protected from any future […]
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March 6th, 2014 Heighten Your Awareness on March 29
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist March is Archaeology and Heritage Awareness Month for the State of Arizona. Setting aside a month to celebrate archaeology highlights the importance of our shared past, as well as the social and economic impacts of archaeology in the state. Of course, there are tours, events, and lectures on archaeology […]
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March 4th, 2014 Exploring the Edge, March 1–2
By Lewis Borck, Preservation Archaeology Fellow Preparations for Edge of Salado research (click on that link to learn more) have been underway for the past month: Excavations began two weekends ago in the Sulphur Springs Valley: And we often had company! We continued this past weekend in the Coyote Mountains at a platform […]
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February 20th, 2014 A Visit to the Steam Pump Ranch Pithouse
Today’s guest author is Nanette Weaver, Arizona Site Steward Regional Coordinator for the Lower and Middle San Pedro River valley. Have you ever stood looking at the vague outline of a Hohokam pithouse and tried to visualize what the whole house looked like? I know that I, for one, as a Site Steward, have wished […]
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February 11th, 2014 Footprints
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist There have been some interesting archaeological news stories in the last couple of months revolving around the discovery of incredibly preserved human footprints. These stories, coming one right after the other, really got me thinking more about other known instances of footprints in the archaeological record, what those footprints […]
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February 6th, 2014 Something There is That Doesn’t Love a (Painted) Wall
By Andy Laurenzi, Southwest Field Representative (With a nod to poet Robert Frost!) It’s always fun introducing new site stewards to a site, especially on field trips with experienced site stewards. Nanette Weaver and Bob Sherman, the new regional site steward coordinators for the lower and middle San Pedro River area, have been promoting tours […]
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February 3rd, 2014 The Marginal Middle or the Path to Chaco?
By Paul F. Reed, Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins On January 20, Scott Michlin welcomed me back to his morning radio show on KSJE, the San Juan College radio station in Farmington, New Mexico. Continuing my chronological foray into ancient Pueblo history, I discussed the Pueblo I period (A.D. 750–900) in […]
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January 30th, 2014 From Above: Images of a Storied Land
By Adriel Heisey, Photographer I grew up in a land cloaked in verdure, where time and the elements have long since softened every bold edge, so the desert’s nakedness will always turn my head. Even now, after living here a quarter century, when I fly through this land laid bare by climate and natural […]
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January 21st, 2014 From Durango to Durango and from Las Vegas to Las Vegas, Part 2
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist In my previous post on the 14th biennial Southwest Symposium, I shared what I learned about the Fremont area. A number of other papers at the conference focused on the Virgin River area, which is the subject of today’s post. Sometimes considered a branch of the larger Ancestral Pueblo […]
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January 20th, 2014 From Durango to Durango and Las Vegas to Las Vegas, Part 1
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist Several of Archaeology Southwest’s staff members attended the 14th biennial Southwest Symposium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, held from January 9 to 11. Because it focuses on current research in the Southwest, this conference is one of my favorites. This year’s theme was “Social Networks in the […]
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January 7th, 2014 Tanque Verde Brown and the Temper of Sand
By Lewis Borck, Preservation Fellow In the not-so-distant past, I organized a meeting of the minds to discuss problems and interesting phenomena associated with precontact southern Arizona pottery (“precontact” meaning “before the arrival of Europeans”). As I prepared for “Edge of Salado,” Archaeology Southwest’s upcoming investigations into why some people engaged with the Salado […]
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December 31st, 2013 Flight of the Phantom
By Doug Gann, Preservation Archaeologist and Digital Media Specialist As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to wrap up 2013 with a little cautionary tale about the use of unmanned flying cameras, commonly called “drones” in the media. In the Pretty Rock blog post, I illustrated how a revolution in generating three-dimensional data […]
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December 16th, 2013 Going Back to the Past: The Basketmaker Roots of the Pueblos
By Paul F. Reed, Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins Scott Michlin welcomed me back to his morning show morning radio show on KSJE, the San Juan College radio station in Farmington, New Mexico, this past Monday. For December, I spoke about the Basketmaker era in the northern Southwest. I framed it […]
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December 12th, 2013 A Dream Comes True
Deb Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist When I was a kid growing up in the Denver area, I loved going to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS). There, I could see fantastic nature dioramas, rooms full of dinosaur skeletons, and Egyptian mummies. Now that I’m back in Colorado, my son and I frequent the […]
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December 2nd, 2013 Stout’s Hotel: A Place of the Past with a Future?
By Andy Laurenzi, Southwest Field Representative Over the past several years, I’ve traveled to the Town of Gila Bend on numerous occasions to meet with town officials, promote the Great Bend of Gila National Monument, tour Gatlin National Historic Landmark, rendezvous with others on the way to the Sentinel Plain and lower Gila River […]
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November 28th, 2013 Back to Basics, Part 3: Broad Research Themes
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist The archaeological culture areas I described on Wednesday are really just a means of conceptualizing similarities and differences among people living in different parts of the Southwest. These constructs do not represent cultures in the way we define them today, and regional designations were not static. Other, very important […]
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November 27th, 2013 Back to Basics, Part 2: Archaeological Cultures in the Southwest
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist On Monday, I wrote about how archaeologists define culture areas, which represent geographic zones in which people were living in generally similar ways and across which people were connected through shared history and practices. Before we look at the three main culture areas of the Southwest, I should say […]
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November 25th, 2013 Back to Basics, Part 1
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist As I reviewed recent posts, I thought we should take a moment to break it down for those who are interested in learning what Southwest archaeology is about, at the most basic level. This week, in three successive posts, I’ll try to summarize a bit about what we know […]
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November 21st, 2013 News from the North: A Burial from Salmon Pueblo and Some Thoughts on the Great Drought
By Paul F. Reed, Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins Host Scott Michlin recently welcomed me back to his morning radio show on KSJE, the San Juan College radio station in Farmington, New Mexico. I’m on with Scott every month to discuss interesting topics in local or national archaeology. For November, I […]
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November 4th, 2013 This Post Is Not about the Borg or Peanut-Butter Cups—Or Is It?
By Kate Sarther Gann, Communications Coordinator, with Jeff Clark, Preservation Archaeologist One of the most rewarding aspects of serving as the content editor of Archaeology Southwest Magazine is the continual opportunity to learn new things directly from the finest scholars. I have been fortunate to have Tobi Taylor, the previous content editor, and Emilee […]
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October 30th, 2013 Faces of Salado?
By Katherine Dungan, Preservation Archaeologist In 1972, a cache of truly remarkable items—a large, wooden human figure and a slightly smaller stone human figure accompanied by animal effigies, textiles, and wooden objects—was recovered from a cave in the Cliff Valley, along the Upper Gila River in New Mexico. The objects are described in a 1978 […]
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October 23rd, 2013 The Archaeologist’s Gaze
By Lewis Borck, Preservation Archaeology Fellow Dating techniques are one of first things students learn about in archaeology courses in the United States. Archaeologists—and people more generally—have two primary ways of marking time: absolute (chronometric), or a computed numerical age, and relative, or a sequence of events. One relative dating method is seriation, which […]
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October 22nd, 2013 An Archaeologist’s View of “Digger” Shows
By Paul F. Reed, Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins Host Scott Michlin recently welcomed me to his morning radio show on KSJE, the San Juan College radio station in Farmington, New Mexico. I’ll be on the air with an archaeology update each month. For the month of October, I spoke about […]
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October 8th, 2013 Student Research at the Dinwiddie Site: Raw Material Sources
Deb Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist Students attending the 2013 Archaeology Southwest/University of Arizona Preservation Archaeology Field School completed several interesting and valuable research projects covering a wide range of topics, from experimental ceramics and flaked stone studies to magnetometer surveys. A course requirement, these projects contribute to our long-term research in the Upper Gila region […]
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October 1st, 2013 Pretty Rock: Creating Virtual Interactive Models of Places of the Past
By Doug Gann, Preservation Archaeologist and Digital Media Specialist Things have been quiet on the Virtual Southwest project as we fine-tune our models and programming, so I thought I’d take a moment to share a bit about some new tools for documenting and sharing archaeological landscapes that we are utilizing in an upcoming exhibit […]
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September 26th, 2013 Routes to the New World
By Paul F. Reed, Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins Recently, I was a guest on the Scott Michlin Morning Program at KSJE, the San Juan College radio station in Farmington, New Mexico, where I discussed recent findings regarding migrations to the New World. (Listen to the broadcast here.) The researchers used […]
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September 12th, 2013 Back to the 70s—Enjoying an Archaeological Preserve
By Bill Doelle, President & CEO Back to the 70s—I am talking temperatures, desert temperatures. Last weekend, daytime temperatures around Tucson kept to the high 70s for much of the day. For me, that means that hiking in the desert is once again possible. My time is always limited, so I don’t even need […]
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September 5th, 2013 Paradise by the Antiquities Act
By Bill Doelle, President & CEO Paradise is defined many ways. For me, spending last week away from a cell phone and the rest of the electronic world was paradise. My personal paradise was at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It can’t get much better than that! Grand Canyon National Park is the […]
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September 3rd, 2013 Red or green?
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist Red or green? It’s the state question of New Mexico—referring, of course, to the color of the chile sauce you want on your dinner. Synonymous with New Mexican cuisine, chile peppers are part of New Mexican identity. Even the road signs welcoming you to New Mexico are marked with […]
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August 22nd, 2013 Journeys and Crossroads
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist Earlier this week, I drove up to Springerville, Arizona, to give a talk at the Casa Malpais Museum hosted by the Little Colorado Chapter of the Arizona Archaeological Society. My presentation focused on migration and cultural diversity in the Upper Little Colorado region in the centuries before the Spaniards […]
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August 21st, 2013 Movement Is Life
By Andy Laurenzi, Southwest Field Representative “Movement is life. Movement is seen everywhere… Movement was characteristic of our ancestors, who moved across the landscape like the clouds across the sky.” —Tessy Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo, quoted on the Bandelier National Monument website Last week, I experienced mind-numbing deep preservation at the New Mexico Archaeological […]
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August 20th, 2013 Open Pueblo
Deb Huntley, Preservation Archaeologist On Saturday, August 10, around 100 visitors—including journalists, archaeologists, and local community members—took advantage of relatively cool temperatures and toured excavations in progress at Goat Spring Pueblo. Located in the mountains near Magdalena, New Mexico, on the Cibola National Forest, this ancestral Piro village (also known as Bear Mountain Pueblo) […]
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August 11th, 2013 No New Ruins — A Plea from a Stubborn Optimist
By Bill Doelle, President & CEO Sometimes, archaeologists can prevent ruins. Yes, I said prevent, not preserve. Camp Naco is teaching me life lessons about just how hard it can be to prevent ruins. After working with a devoted team of ruin preventers for the past eight years, it is time to start counting successes. Camp […]
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July 30th, 2013 Zing! Bow-and-Arrow Technology in the Ancient Pueblo Southwest
By Paul F. Reed, Preservation Archaeologist and Chaco Scholar at Salmon Ruins The development and spread of bow technology across North America has sparked considerable archaeological debate for more than 100 years. Experts have proposed various ideas about how and why bow technology spread out of Asia between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, including […]
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July 25th, 2013 The Casa Grande Community—In More Ways than One!
By Bill Doelle, President & CEO Community. Just when cynicism seems at its most pervasive, I am glad to see that community spirit can still shine through. It certainly infuses the new legislation for the expansion of Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. A bipartisan group of Arizona Representatives—Paul Gosar (R-4), Ann Kirkpatrick (D-1), Raúl […]
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July 22nd, 2013 An Arizona Icelandic Saga
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist A little more than a week ago, I was lucky enough to travel with ten other Southwestern archaeologists to the city of Akureyri in northern Iceland. We went there to take part in a collaborative research meeting with a group of climate scientists and archaeologists working in the circumpolar […]
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July 21st, 2013 Tribal Consultation in the Kaibab National Forest and Vermilion Cliffs National Monument
Today’s guest author is Connie Reid, an Archaeologist with the Kaibab National Forest: “Sometimes you get homesick, but here you don’t. It feels normal and like you were back to where you were before. You have a sense of being. Everything is there and you can feel it. You don’t have any feelings of being out […]
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July 18th, 2013 Of Ancient Networks and Bacon Numbers
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist Yesterday afternoon, many of us at Archaeology Southwest gathered around the first box off the truck, grinning over the new issue of Archaeology Southwest Magazine. It’s on its way to our members’ mailboxes now (if you’re not yet a member, join now). This issue is special to me because […]
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July 16th, 2013 Life with New Mexico’s Weather
By Trevor McLam, field school student from Washington State University As one might expect of a place that has been called the Great American Desert, the first thing one notices upon arrival is that it is hot. But it truly is a dry heat, which helps immensely. When we arrived in Mule Creek, it was […]
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July 9th, 2013 Visiting Chaco Canyon
By Thatcher Rogers, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse The weekend field trip to Chaco Canyon began splendidly with an informative visit to Zuni. Due to purchasing a large number of zoomorphic figures associated with water, we were unfortunately deterred by rains from accomplishing our original goal of staying overnight at Chaco. After spending the night […]
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July 8th, 2013 Archaeology Students on the Loose!
By Jay Stephens, University of Arizona After a long and hard five weeks of excavation and lab work, we were turned loose on a three day trip to Chaco Canyon and the pueblos of Acoma and Zuni. It is difficult to summarize all of the amazing landscapes and sites that we saw over the long […]
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June 28th, 2013 Experimental Archaeology at Mule Creek
By David Loome, field school student from Northern Arizona University/Coconino Community College As students at the Preservation Archaeology Field School at Mule Creek, we are exposed almost every day to the tools and technology used by people in the past. By analyzing and studying artifacts like stone tools and pottery, we can gain important insights […]
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June 27th, 2013 Summer Solstice Sites in Southwestern Arizona
Introduction by Andy Laurenzi, Southwest Field Representative Of the several rewarding elements of my job, meeting and traveling with site stewards is certainly one of the most enjoyable. As our first line of defense in our collective efforts to safeguard ancient sites, site stewards have been monitoring sites for many years and, apart from some […]
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June 25th, 2013 Sharing Archaeology with the Community, Part I
By Dorothy Kilgore, field school student from the College of Western Idaho On June 15, 2013, Archaeology Southwest field students and staff performed a community outreach day at the Gila Community Center in New Mexico. Stations included an artifact show-and-tell, a pottery-making station, an artifact-digging station, a stone tool-making station, and a video crew to […]
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June 21st, 2013 Gila Cliff Dwellings
By Heather Seltzer, field school student from SUNY Binghamton On Sunday, we took a break from excavating and lab work and headed to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. After being decently shook up on the long bumpy road, we piled out of the van. Before we went to tour the Mimbres-Mogollon site or see […]
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June 12th, 2013 Meet Our Cook
By Emily Reed, field school student from the University of Connecticut Excavating the Dinwiddie site has been exhausting. With the sun beating down on us constantly while we pick-axe and shovel into the hard ground, we are all drained by the end of the day. Our thirty-minute ride from Dinwiddie back to Mule Creek usually […]
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June 11th, 2013 Field School Expectations
By Danny Beard, field school student from University of Colorado Boulder When you are itching with cabin fever in the middle of a snowy, cold Colorado winter’s day, the sunshine of the New Mexican summer starts to sound pretty enticing. I always try to avoid building up too many expectations, as sometimes they can be […]
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June 10th, 2013 An Archaeology Road Show in Arizona’s Mogollon Highlands
By Doug Gann, Preservation Archaeologist and Digital Media Specialist In a community such as Springerville, like almost every place in the Southwest with nearby water, archaeological evidence of ancient peoples is fairly common. The objects linking the past of these places to the present are usually encountered in the things left behind, most often […]
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June 8th, 2013 Archaeological Eyes
By Ely Rareshide, field school student from Rice University Before we put trowel to dirt at the Dinwiddie site, we first visited the Valencia site at Pima Community College, Desert Vista Campus, to train our “archaeological eyes.” Bill Doelle led us through the site and explained how to interpret the landscape and find surface artifacts. […]
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June 7th, 2013 First Week in Mule Creek
By Linda Pierce, Deputy Director I spent most of last week at our Preservation Archaeology Field School headquarters in Mule Creek, New Mexico, helping out with (and documenting) the start of the 2013 field season. It was a busy week, and by the time I left late Friday morning, it seemed everyone was getting […]
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June 6th, 2013 Raise the Roof! (Preservation Archaeology-style)
By Bill Doelle, President & CEO Finally, it is happening. The hard-luck adobe camp that was part of a “human fence along the border” right after World War I is getting some of the preservation treatments it has needed for two decades. A grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is ridding Camp Naco […]
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June 3rd, 2013 Settling into Camp
By Kathryn Turney, field school student from Pima Community College There is much more to Upper Gila Archaeological Preservation Field School than learning the basics of Preservation Archaeology. There are fun and informative field trips and lecture opportunities and a lot of hands on learning. Additionally, archaeology may mean living in the field, literally in […]
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May 30th, 2013 Not Just for Sherd Nerds
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist Although a holiday, this past Monday definitely was not a quiet day at Archaeology Southwest. The first full day of the Preservation Archaeology Field School kicked off with some introductory lectures and tours. I was fortunate to tag along for a behind-the-scenes look at the Arizona State Museum’s (ASM) […]
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May 29th, 2013 Art and Preservation Archaeology at Casa Malpais
By Doug Gann, Preservation Archaeologist For the past twelve years, I’ve been helping a community in eastern Arizona’s Mogollon Highlands preserve, protect, and interpret a unique ancient place now known as Casa Malpais. Because they are located at cooler elevations in and around the White Mountains, the towns of these highlands have long been […]
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May 17th, 2013 The Story of San Lucy Village
By Andy Laurenzi, Southwest Field Representative This week we attended a meeting of the Four Southern Tribes Cultural Resources Working Group, hosted by the San Lucy District of the Tohono O’odham Nation and held at the San Lucy Feast House. At the committee’s invitation, we provided a brief overview of the legislation introduced by […]
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May 10th, 2013 Celebrating Catalina State Park (and Getting Some Sherds Washed)
By Linda Pierce, Deputy Director Last Saturday, a number of us at Archaeology Southwest were happy to take part in the 30th anniversary celebration for Catalina State Park. Encompassing 5,500 acres on the north side of Tucson, the park is a haven for Sonoran Desert plants and wildlife, and also protects a number of […]
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May 7th, 2013 Recent Field Visits for the Salado Preservation Initiative
By Andy Laurenzi, Southwest Field Representative The next phase of the Salado Preservation Initiative began last month, when Bill Doelle, Jeff Clark, myself, and our new Preservation Fellow, Lewis Borck, headed to the field to visit several sites in the Sulphur Springs Valley, on the west side of the Chiricahua Mountains, and some sites […]
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May 6th, 2013 The Brigadoon Effect
By Bruce Hilpert, Archaeology Southwest Member and Volunteer Springtime for southern Arizona archaeology means… the Brigadoon Effect! Now you see it, now you don’t. As many of you probably know, vegetation can be an archaeologist’s friend or foe. Trees and creosotes can hide site features—or they can reveal them as if by magic. Archaeologists call […]
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March 15th, 2013 An Archaeology Road Show
By Matt Peeples, Preservation Archaeologist A few Saturdays ago, on March 2, 2013, Doug Gann and I traveled up to the Casa Malpais Archaeological Park and Museum in Springerville, Arizona, for a regional Archaeology Road Show. Supported by the Arizona Humanities Council, this event represented our take on the popular PBS program Antiques Roadshow. We invited […]
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February 21st, 2013 From Above: Online, on Exhibit, and Now on Your Phone
I dread flying. I become so focused on the destination that the journey feels like a chore. There are absolute hassles, of course: rushing all morning to wait all afternoon, walking barefoot and beltless through security checkpoints, anxiously checking – and rechecking – IDs, tickets, flight times, gates…
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