Karen Schollmeyer – “Perforated Plates, Fish Bones, and the Archaeology of the Upper Gila River in the 14th Century”

Each summer, students and professional archaeologists at the Upper Gila Preservation Archaeology Field School work together near Cliff, New Mexico, to understand what life was like in the region in the 1300s. A collaboration of Archaeology Southwest and the University of Arizona, this project is focused on how people formed the communities we are studying, which were long-lived and incorporated residents of different origins and ethnicities. Cliff Valley archaeological sites preserve evidence of long-established local Mogollon traditions of pottery and architecture combining with traditions imported from northeastern Arizona in the 1300s to form a new ideology that included people from several different ethnic backgrounds.  At the same time, farmers found ways of using local plant and animal resources that resulted in less archaeological evidence of resource depletion than the large villages of previous centuries.  Excavated rooms in Cliff Valley villages show an interesting range of activities, including craft production, purposeful deposits of items created when people stopped living in certain rooms within a village, and evidence for variability in how long or how often ancient farmers lived in the same rooms and villages or moved between homes.  This talk summarizes our latest research on these topics, including findings from this summer’s freshly backfilled excavations.