Patrick Lyons – The Davis Ranch Site: A Kayenta Immigrant Enclave in Southeastern Arizona

A recently published book reports the results of Rex Gerald’s 1957 excavations, sponsored by the Amerind Foundation, at the Davis Ranch Site, in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley. In this presentation, I will summarize Gerald’s findings as well as the results of recent studies, placing Gerald’s work in the context of what is currently known regarding the late thirteenth-century Kayenta diaspora and also the relationship between Kayenta immigrants and the Salado phenomenon. Data presented by Gerald and other contributors identify the site as having been inhabited by people from the Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah. The results of Gerald’s excavations, coupled with information gathered under the auspices of Archaeology Southwest’s San Pedro Preservation Project (1990-2001) indicate that the people of the Davis Ranch Site were part of a network of dispersed immigrant enclaves responsible for the origin and the spread of Roosevelt Red Ware pottery, the key material marker of the Salado phenomenon. Evidence from the Davis Ranch Site also lends support to Patricia Crown’s Roosevelt Red Ware stylistic seriation and more recently proposed changes to Roosevelt Red Ware typology and chronology.