The Virgin Anasazi,far western Puebloans

In the American Southwest, the Virgin Anasazi region included the western part of the Colorado Plateaus and the river valleys of the adjoining Mojave Desert in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. This occupation spanned the Puebloan periods from Basketmaker II to Early Pueblo III, roughly A.D. 1 to A.D. 1200. Virgin Anasazi subsistence combined cultivation with hunting and gathering. Current research is unveiling a prehistoric society with flexible food procurement strategies and group organization. They underwent a version of the pit house-to-pueblo transition familiar from the Kayenta and northern San Juan areas. Both intra- and interregional exchange seems to have peaked in Late Pueblo II times and then fallen off prior to the end of their culture history. Face-to-face communities remained small, even into the late 1100s, when other Anasazi areas saw the beginnings of aggregation. Their fate, early in the widespread abandonment of the northern Southwest, remains to be understood.     

News from the Northern American Southwest: Prehistory on the edge of chaos

Recent developments in the study of the prehistory of the northern Mogollon and Anasazi areas of the North American Southwest are reviewed, with emphasis on the pre-A.D. 1150 period, in an attempt to identify key empirical results and incipient interpretive directions.     

The Emergence of Kwahe’e Black-on-white pottery in the Tewa Basin,New Mexico

Despite the importance of ceramic typologies for defining archaeological cultures and making chronological inferences, the ceramic types comprising these typologies are not always well dated. Here, we present an analysis of radiocarbon dates generated from Accelerator Mass Spectrometry of corn remains found in association with Kwahe’e Black-on-white (Kwahe’e B/w) ceramics from the Tewa Basin of the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico in the American Southwest. This autochthonous ceramic type is the first in a cohesive lineage of decorated white wares known as the Rio Grande ceramic series. A Bayesian analysis of these dates yielded a 95% probability range of a.d. 975–1023 for the beginning temporal boundary marking the emergence of Kwahe’e B/w. This estimate for the chronological emergence of Kwahe’e B/w is at least 27 years earlier than previously demonstrated and appears to coincide with the initial population increase in the Tewa Basin during the Late Developmental period (a.d. 900–1200), and with the emergence of the Tewa language that is still spoken in the region.     

Ancestral Puebloan mtDNA in context of the greater southwest

Ancient DNA (aDNA) was extracted from the human remains of seventy-three individuals from the Tommy and Mine Canyon sites (dated to PI-II and PIII, respectively), located on the B-Square Ranch in the Middle San Juan region of New Mexico. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups of 48 (65.7%) of these samples were identified, and their frequency distributions were compared with those of other prehistoric and modern populations from the Greater Southwest and Mexico. The haplogroup frequency distributions for the two sites were statistically significantly different from each other, with the Mine Canyon site exhibiting an unusually high frequency of haplogroup A for a Southwestern population, indicating the possible influence of migration or other evolutionary forces. However, both sites exhibited a relatively high frequency of haplogroup B, typical of Southwestern populations, suggesting continuity in the Southwest, as has been hypothesized by others (8, 9, 29, 45 and 57). The first hypervariable region of twenty-three individuals (31.5%) was also sequenced to confirm haplogroup assignments and compared with other sequences from the region. This comparison further strengthens the argument for population continuity in the Southwest without a detectable influence from Mesoamerica.     

The use of “soft” X-ray radiography in determining hidden construction characteristics in fiber sandals

The use of soft X-ray radiography is evaluated as to its potential use in perishable artifact analysis. Thirty-five plain weave pointed-toed Anasazi sandals were X-rayed and the radiographs examined. This technique permitted the viewing of hidden construction characteristics as well as missing structural features in many of the samples. Soft X-ray radiography is a powerful analytic tool not only because of its potential uses, but also because it is non-destructive, inexpensive, and readily available.     

Modeling agricultural potential in Chaco Canyon during the Bonito phase: a predictive geospatial approach

This study presents a geospatial analysis of surficial hydrology and geomorphology and their relationship to potential agricultural productivity in order to better understand the economic role of water in Chaco Canyon during the Bonito Phase (ca. AD 850–1150). Defined as the Natural Agricultural Suitability Analysis, the foundation of this study is a hierarchical geospatial analysis that integrates six key natural factors: slope, soil texture, soil depth, non-catastrophic overbank flooding potential, drainage flow length, and drainage proximity and flow potential. These factors are combined through a raster weighted overlay function to generate composite suitability map that offers a testable proxy for variability in relative agricultural potential during the Bonito Phase at Chaco. The rationale for including this set of natural factors is based largely on ethnographic and modern agricultural studies, but the predictive model differs from previous studies of agricultural potential in that it is independent of the specific archaeological distribution of evidence of agriculture in the study area. The results of this analysis suggest that previous models of Chacoan agricultural productivity have underestimated local production capacity. Previous studies have focused solely on floodplain contexts, whereas this study points to a more comprehensive and geographically distributed use of the landscape.