Our Projects

Click here (opens as a PDF) to read the latest article on the project in the professional journal American Antiquity (Vol. 80, No. 1, 2015). In the age of Facebook and Twitter, “social network” is a phrase heard or read almost daily—but social networks are a mainstay of the human experience...

Banner image: View of the Hohokam Pima National Monument, by BruceandLetty, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons The Snaketown Artistic Heritage Project preserved information. Archaeology Southwest (formerly the Center for Desert Archaeology) worked with the Arizona State Museum to scientifically docume...

The goal of the Honey Bee Village project was to engage the public in developing a multicultural interpretive plan for the Honey Bee Village archaeological preserve. This Hohokam village site is now in the center of the rapidly-growing town of Oro Valley, Arizona. The land containing most of this ar...

The Las Ventanas (or Candelaria) great house lies about 112 km south of the Chacoan center at Pueblo Bonito, within the boundaries of the El Malpais National Monument. The great house comprises a two-story structure with perhaps 80 total rooms that was built during the Chacoan era from A.D. 1050–1...

Archaeology Southwest has a long-term commitment to the archaeology and history of our home community. In the 1990s, we conducted a series of small excavations to locate buried adobe walls of the Tucson Presidio. Beginning in 2000, we played a role in the Tucson Origins Project funded by Tucson’s ...

Launched in August 2004, the Coronado Project was an outreach and public education project that sought to determine the route of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s infamous expedition of 1540 from northern Mexico to the Pueblo of Zuni. Archaeology Southwest (then the Center for Desert Archaeology) a...

When the Coronado Expedition entered the Southwest in 1540, they were pursuing reports of lost cities of gold. They ended up at the seven major pueblos that we now know as Zuni. Not quite cities, and totally lacking in gold, these settlements were a source of great disappointment to the Spaniards. T...

In the late 1990s, petrologist Beth Miksa began collecting and analyzing more than 240 sand samples from areas along the entire San Pedro River Valley in Arizona and Mexico. Her innovative petrofacies research using this data has played an important part in the Archaeology Southwest’s investigatio...

The Hohokam of the southern Arizona desert are best known for their creation and management of extensive canal networks. In recent years we’ve come to realize that other agricultural technologies also played critical roles in sustaining Hohokam populations. My work with Archaeology Southwest inves...

In 2001, I began my Preservation Fellowship to investigate how an array of stakeholders uses, values, and interprets the archaeological landscape in Arizona’s San Pedro valley. Bridging the disciplines of ethnology, archaeology, and ethnohistory, my research sought to understand the place of histo...

This research by former Preservation Fellow Anna A. Neuzil examined archaeological data from the Safford and Aravaipa valleys in an effort to understand the social consequences of migrations to southeastern Arizona in the 13th through 15th centuries. For more on her recent publication of this resear...

Aaron’s manuscript titled “Religion on the Rocks: Rock Art, Ritual Practice, and Transformation of the Hohokam World” (forthcoming, University of Utah Press) has won the prestigious Don D. and Catherine S. Fowler Prize. The Fowlers made the award announcement on Friday, October 19, 2012, at th...