My final Arizona post!
I'm an Alaskan Archaeologist, but sometimes it is fun to try my hand at archaeology in other regions. I've been visiting archaeological sites in Arizona since I was a little kid visiting my grandparents. But I've never really studied the archaeological history of the area. Still even with no background to work with it is kinda fun to interpret what you find on the ground.
At my grandparents old place there are a couple of prehistoric sites. In the old days we used to collect the 'arrowheads' we saw on the surface, but I learned the error of my ways and for the last 30 years I have not let anyone collect anything. So these days all the artifacts are just right there on the surface. And you can use the artifacts as clues to sort of guess what people were up to at the site.
One of the sites lacks pottery, and has lots of chipped stone and old tent rings - circular areas where all the rocks have been cleared off and often some rocks in a ring around it. I think this is an older 'pre pottery' site where they were hunting and gathering (hence the Mano and metate to break up some sort of plant food). There are also some petroglyphs close by to this site.
The other site is under a cave overhang and does have pottery, and it was badly pot hunted back in the 1950s. Locals dug in the cave and actually recovered complete pots. Today there are no complete pots but I did find pot sherds, some utilized flakes for cutting up meat and/or hides, and even a piece of calcined bone. This is bone that had been burned and 'calcined' in the hearth. The bone is very dense and I wonder if it is a tortoise bone - there are tortoises in the area.
It's also fun to look back and see how the sites have changed. We last visited the top site in 2011 (
click here for post on 2011 visit to site), and it is kinda cool to look back and see how little about the sites has changed. Same mano and metate in the same spot! It's just the people in the photos who have gotten older!
Patrick
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