Trails as Transcendental Archaeology

(December 23, 2025)—TREAD is the theme of this season’s Archaeology Café series on trails ancient, living, and modern. As one of the featured speakers, I must confess that I started studying Indigenous trails by happenstance—it was actually my interest in the petroglyphs and ground figures on Arizona’s volcanic landscapes that led me to trails.

I’ll explain.

Desert pavements in the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts are literally canvases upon which Indigenous communities created enduring illustrations intended to be preserved, and presumably seen, into perpetuity.

My research into petroglyphs and cultural landscapes, and especially those in and around the Sentinel-Arlington Volcanic Field along the Great Bend of the Gila, made desert pavements—ground surfaces of densely packed stones—a regular presence in my life. Anyone who’s walked on a desert pavement will know how enduring yet fragile they are, because impacts can leave impressions, or “scars,” that persist for centuries.

It is this malleable quality that makes these surfaces ideal for the creation of ground figures, which are patterns people deliberately created by moving or otherwise manipulating the rocks. And it is this same fragility that poses significant and persistent heritage land-management challenges, to which countless vehicle tracks in desert pavements attest, some of which have sadly obliterated ground figures.

Countless “trails” cut through these pavements as well. Although many of these trails look “legit,” as though they were indeed footpaths used by the area’s Indigenous residents, archaeologists still debate whether they are instead game trails used by desert critters. This is especially problematic in ranchlands, where cattle have created vast networks of interconnected trails that obscure older, human-made trails. Of course, this dichotomy is probably irrelevant in many places, as we and our animal relatives traverse each other’s paths all the time when trying to move efficiently and effectively through these often rough terrains.

Some archaeologists claim that human trails are straighter and narrower than animal corridors and use that premise to distinguish them, but controlled comparative studies have not conclusively shown that to be true. The way I’ve come to recognize human trails across desert pavements is through the association of other human creations with trails—namely artifacts and archaeological features. I’ll explain more about those artifacts and features in just a bit.

Our careful surveys in and around the Great Bend have shown that the locations of some petroglyphs and ground figures are undoubtedly due to the presence of trails, and are often situated at gateways where trails move between valley floors and elevated settings like mesas and mountain passes. Descendant communities generally hold petroglyphs, ground figures, and other rock-feature types on these landscapes in a kind of sacred or spiritual regard—“shrines” are probably the closest analog in Western ways of thinking—and these same communities maintain sacred songs that relate experiences of traveling great distances along trails during pilgrimages and other spiritual journeys. The nexus, then, between trails and ritual features on these desert landscapes is therefore logical and easy to understand, as I explained recently in a chapter on Patayan and Yuman sacred landscapes.

Understanding how artifacts and archaeological features line Indigenous trails—along with the types and compositions of those artifacts and features—has proven instrumental in our ability identify and map trails beyond desert pavements. As my recent Archaeology Café talk touched upon, our surveys in the Sonoran Desert National Monument show how we can, paradoxically, practice trail archaeology in the literal absence of trails.

And, as I wrote several years ago, it begins with one pot sherd, one piece of broken pottery. Although they may seem alone, they are not. They are instead part of a larger web of material things and immaterial experiences that humanity and time have draped over the landscape.

When we shift our frame of reference away from seeing a lone artifact, such as a sherd, as an insignificant isolated occurrence and begin to conceptualize these seemingly minor materials as snippets of an integrated cultural landscape, we can begin to understand the archaeological record in new ways. Rather than objects and discrete sites, we have networks, the transcendent ebb and flow of people, goods, beliefs, relationships, and memories across landscapes and generations.