Archaeology Southwest Publishes Much-Anticipated “Migrants and Mounds”

Archaeology Southwest (formerly the Center for Desert Archaeology) is pleased to announce the publication of Migrants and Mounds: Classic Period Archaeology of the Lower San Pedro Valley, edited by Jeffery J. Clark and Patrick D. Lyons. The richly illustrated volume presents the results of Archaeology Southwest’s long-term research program in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro River valley. The National Science Foundation, Salus Mundi Foundation, and private donors funded aspects of the program. Significantly, findings in the San Pedro told a story of migration, tension, and social integration over the course of several generations in the 1300s.

The new volume discusses fieldwork and related analyses, and explains what these data tell us about the lives of valley residents in the centuries just before the Spaniards arrived. Building on earlier investigations by southern Arizona’s prestigious Amerind Foundation, Archaeology Southwest’s work has resulted in important new insights about late thirteenth-century migrations from what is now northern Arizona into the San Pedro Valley. We now know that immigrant-local relations changed through time, creating the complicated archaeological pattern known as “Salado.”

Understanding where potters had actually made the ceramics recovered by the project was crucial to interpreting what happened here. Archaeology Southwest found that Roosevelt Red Ware—decorated pottery closely associated with Kayenta immigrants and their descendants, and ultimately with the mixed Salado culture that developed as local and immigrant groups came together—was produced at certain communities and circulated throughout the valley. This ceramic evidence, combined with data provided by source analysis of obsidian artifacts, indicates that immigrants and their descendants were not only present, but also economically and socially influential.

Migrants and Mounds: Classic Period Archaeology of the Lower San Pedro Valley
Archaeology Southwest Anthropological Papers No. 45 (November 2012)
Edited by Jeffery J. Clark and Patrick D. Lyons, with a foreword by William H. Doelle
504 pp., 212 figures, 105 tables
$50.00

Order online here, or call (520) 882-6946.

To view a presentation by Jeff Clark and Bill Doelle on the research that informed this volume, click here.