Our Projects

As human populations worldwide grow and settle in formerly remote regions, questions about how hunting can be managed in order to provide long-term access to animals for local people without loss of biodiversity are becoming increasingly urgent. This project, a collaboration between Karen Schollmeye...

Understanding how people acquire food and maintain food security under changing social and environmental conditions has important implications for both understanding past human societies and exploring ways for contemporary societies to maintain access to food supplies. Archaeological datasets are id...

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Coolidge, Arizona, is among the state’s best-known cultural landmarks because of its striking “Great House,” one of the largest known ancient structures in the United States. Established as the first archaeological reserve by President Benjamin Harrison i...

Long-term protection of archaeological sites is an essential component of Preservation Archaeology. Here in the American Southwest, a great number of important archaeological sites occur on private land. Nineteenth-century homesteaders settled in areas with readily available water and arable land...

The Heritage Southwest (HSW) database is a digital geodatabase containing information on more than 10,000 precontact (prehistoric) and historic archaeological sites in the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. The large HSW database is divided into a number of smaller sub-databases, each developed for...

Banner image courtesy of Eastern Arizona College The centuries between A.D. 1200 and 1540 were a time of great change in the Southwest. Deteriorating environmental conditions on the Colorado Plateau in the late 1200s led people to leave the Four Corners region. This movement of northern peoples i...

What slows or halts the geographic spread of an ideology—especially an ideology that brings people together? Preservation Fellow Lewis Borck found out. His research built on previous work done by Archaeology Southwest that focused on detecting Kayenta immigrants and determining their impacts i...

Built between 1919 and 1923, Camp Naco (also known as Camp Newell) first housed military personnel during the Mexican Border Defense campaign and later served as a base camp for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Troops encamped at the facility included units of the renowned Buffalo Soldiers. The only...

Archaeology Southwest joins the Bureau of Land Management, United States Forest Service, Arizona Game and Fish Department, and other stakeholders in identifying long-term needs and management goals for Arizona’s Perry Mesa. In 2011, Arizona’s Game and Fish Department (AZGFD) purchased Hor...

If you’ve ever visited one of our National Forests, part of your experience within its boundaries involved travel on a road open to motorized vehicles. Over the past 30 years, as the popularity and availability of four-wheel-drive and off-highway vehicles has increased, motorized uses of our publi...

Banner image by Ely Rareshide Doorways in Pueblo Bonito The Dynamics of Chacoan Social and Spatial Networks, A.D. 800–1200 With National Science Foundation support (BCS-1355381), we collaborated with a team of researchers (including Archaeology Southwest’s Paul Reed and ASU's Matt...

20 years of collections in disarray One goal of the partnership between Archaeology Southwest and Salmon Ruins Museum involved long-term curation and preservation of the enormous Salmon artifact, sample, and archival-photographic collection. As was the case with many large projects in the...