Jenny L Adams

This reports contains the results of exploratory experiments connected the archaeological investigations at the prehistoric site of Las Capas, AZ AA:12:111(ASM), situated in the Tucson Basin of southern Arizona. The experiments focused on growing maize varieties most similar to those grown by early agriculturalists and processing the maize with replications of the tools recovered from Las Capas. Replication studies were also made of the fired-clay and stone pipes recovered from Las Capas. The report also considers the maize-based cuisine of early agriculturalists.

The results of the Las Capas investigations are presented in a series of Anthropological Papers, Technical Reports, and a book by Jane Sliva on projectile points.  The two Anthropological Papers (50 and 51) provide a broad overview and synthetic examination of the site, with a specific emphasis on the reconstruction of prehistoric life in the northern Tucson Basin during the Early Agricultural period San Pedro phase. A chapter devoted to the technological developments of early agricultural ground stone is in chapter 3 of Volume 51. These can be found at this link http://www.archaeologysouthwest.org/store/anthropological-papers/lcap-3.html.

Exploring Early Agricultural Technological Traditions at Las Capas with Experiments
Jenny L. Adams
Desert Archaeology, Inc. Tucson

Experiments conducted in concert with the analysis of ground stone artifacts recovered from Las Capas, AZ AA:12:111, (ASM) explored important early agricultural activities including planting and harvesting maize, processing maize, and making stone and fired-clay pipes. Results from the experiments combined with models developed from ethnographic references created workable correlates for evaluating features and tools associated with these activities. Las Capas style fields were planted with two popcorn varieties, Chapalote and Reventador, and one flour variety of maize, Tohono O'odham 60-day. Maize ears were harvested when immature and mature, they were processed fresh, died, and parched, and the stalks were juiced using replicas of the types of manos and metates recovered from Las Capas. Considering only the maize products, the Las Capas inhabitants had the necessary components for a varied and nutritious cuisine.

Descriptions of pipe manufacturing techniques in the archaeological and ethnographic literature of the U.S. Southwest are scarce. At Las Capas, pipes were made from stone and clay. Bifaces used to drill stone successfully replicated the marks on recovered whole and broken pipes. Clay was pressed around wood molds in a successful attempt to replicate the types of fired-clay pipes recovered from Las Capas.

Research conducted over several years on ground stone assemblages from seven Early Agricultural period sites in southern Arizona is summarized. The sites are located within the floodplain of the Santa Cruz River in the Tucson Basin. These sites provide a unique opportunity to examine technological development over a long period of time, from approximately 1200 B.C. to A.D. 550. Supplemented with data from other published data in the area this substantial database provides unprecedented insights into Early Agricultural grinding technology.

Changes in sizes and shapes of food grinding tools through time have been related to the different processing requirements of gathered and cultivated resources, and to increased reliance on cultivated foods.  Interpreted in these ways, manos in particular have become important correlates for recognizing differences in subsistence strategies. The technological approach used to analyze ground stone artifacts from Early Agricultural and Early Ceramic contexts at the sites of Santa Cruz Bend, Square Hearth, and Stone Pipe along the Middle Santa Cruz River through Tucson, Arizona enhances our understanding of how these tools were used by prehistoric people and facilitates a critical evaluation of how manos in particular have been used to assess subsistence strategies. This research also considers archeological contexts, secondarily used artifacts, and behaviors related to leaving a structure or settlement. L

There is no doubt that the large ground stone assemblage recovered from excavations at Las Capas, AZ AA:12:111 (ASM), includes the tools of farmers. Their fields, watering systems, soils, plants, and use
of the landscape are described in other chapters in this volume. The focus here is on ground stone artifacts from the early and late San Pedro phase (1200-800 B.C.) deposits uncovered during the 2008-2009 excavations conducted by Desert Archaeology, Inc.
The extent of the Las Capas settlement is large and deep, and ground stone artifacts were recovered from all reaches. Use-wear analyses were conducted to record how each tool was manufactured and used,
and each was subsequently categorized by the activity in which it was used. The food-processing tools used by early agriculturalists are of particular interest, and ethnographic and experimental research
helps recognize a range of possibilities for how Las Capas residents could have incorporated the foods they grew into their diets without the use of clay pots.

Housing development in the northern reaches of
the Tucson Basin, within the town of Oro Valley,
was the context for the 2006-2007 excavations at
Honey Bee Village, AZ BB:9:88 (ASM). The ground
stone artifacts and ecofacts recovered during these
excavations are the foundation for discussions here
about activities and technological developments at
the site. The assemblage is comprised of primarily
tools and paraphernalia used in mundane and ritual
activities.

The ground stone artifacts and ecofacts recovered
by Desert Archaeology, Inc., during the 2007 and 2008
excavations at the Yuma Wash site provide the foundation for discussions in this chapter about activities and technological development. The artifacts are primarily tools and paraphernalia used in mundane and ritual activities. Ecofacts are minerals, unusual rocks, and raw materials that were brought to the settlement but not modified. Together, artifacts and ecofacts are referred to as ground stone items, and they are considered clues to the lives and activities of the Yuma Wash inhabitants.

The development of grinding technology is a topic that has not received much attention from archaeolologists in the American Southwest.  Presented here is a technological approach to ground stone analysis capitalizing on the methods of ethnoarchaeology, experimentation, and use-wear analysis.  These methods are applied to an existing collection of ground stone artifacts amassed by the University of Arizona field school's excavation of the Point of Pines sites in east-central Arizona.  The heart of the technological approach is the recognition that technological behavior is social behavior and as such is culturally distinct.  Both puebloan and nonpuebloan ethnographies provide models for understanding how ground stone tools were used by different cultural groups in daily activities and for making inferences about gender- specific behaviors.  Culturally distinct behaviors are sustained through technological traditions, defined as the transmitted knowledge and behaviors with which people learn how to do things.
A technological approach is applied to the ground stone assemblages from nine Point of Pines sites that date within eight phases, from A.D. 400 to A.D. 1425-1450.  The assemblages are compared and assessed in terms of variation that might reflect developments in grinding technology.  Developments may have derived from local innovations or from introduced technological traditions.  Assemblage variation is evaluated in light of major events in Point of Pines prehistory, particularly the change from pit house villages to pueblo villages and the immigration of Tusayan Anasazi.
Point of Pines grinding technology continued relatively unchanged until late in the occupation.  Around the mid-1200s, an Anasazi group immigrated to the Point of Pines area and took up residence in the largest Point of Pines pueblo.  Foreign technology was introduced but not immediately adopted by the resident Mogollon.  Food grinding equipment of two different designs coexisted for about 100 years, until around A.D. 1400 when there is evidence of a change in the social organization of food grinding.  It is this change that signals the blending of Mogollon and Anasazi into Western Pueblo.

Preface (Watson Smith, Tucson, Arizona, 1988) The westering of America - a story told a thousand times - is old but ever new - in terms as varied as were the many individuals who have played their roles in a vast and mostly anonymous company. Most of them followed ill-marked paths toward the sunset, unwittingly becoming the stuff of a hallowed modem legend that ranges from suffering, horror, degradation, and failure to the romanticized grandeur of heroism, self-sacrifice, and fortune finally realized in the golden glow of hope fulfilled. That there were such westering pioneers at either extremity of that vast spectrum of human movement across North America is certain. But for most of them their way lay somewhere between the extremes, and for those few whose names are remembered, there were millions of ordinary folk who, though they passed unrecorded, have given genuine substance to what otherwise might be only the folk-legend of a restless people. Some where near the middle of the middle are Al and Alice Lancaster, whose story partakes of many of the commonplaces of their fellow wanderers, and whose record in many ways can be a paradigm for that of countless others. But the hearty particulars of their own lives, both beginning in the east and moving by very different routes to Colorado where they met and married, are remarkable. The satisfactions implicit in this evolution and its fulfillment are uncommon - for the very simple reason that Al and Alice are uncommon people. Their story, in itself is neither fabulous nor mythically heroic - it is as real and as human as are those of most of their fellows. And it is worthy of the telling for that very reason. There are some special considerations, though: Alice's pursuit of education, both for herself and for those she guided as a rural school-teacher and as the mother of six children, speaks for a greatness of spirit that is possessed by few people. And Al's insight and empathy with the archaeological past and its people have made him one of the most productive and honored dirt-archaeologists of the Southwest. But their story does not tell itself; it is revealed through the eyes of an author with a deep understanding of her subject. This author is advantaged in her telling by her genuine emotional rapport with Al and Alice, who have given of themselves because they have seen her as one who could have shared their Odyssey, if she had ever had the chance to do so, and who can certainly feel its pulse in her own heartbeat. A glorious story told without embellishment, it would probably not have inspired the reverence of Whitman in his paean Pioneers! 0 Pioneers! or Foss's melodramatic call for men to match his mountains. But it is as heartwarming as those impassioned poets could have made it. And I should know, because of my own privileged involvements in it for more than fifty years. The author gains, too, from a shared love of the Southwest, engendered by her experience within it and by her unusual emotional kinship with its spirit and its soul. One who reads this book will be rewarded not by just another tale of breaking sod, or homesteading, or following the sweating oxen in a dusty wagon-train (and Al and Alice did these things [except for the oxen]), nor even by the momentary thrill of riding the gossamer trestles that Otto Mears flung across the gorges of the San Juan Mountains, where there is, indeed, a touch of Katharine Lee Bates' "purple mountain majesty." Instead, it is the sharing of a rare kinship with people whose lives might have been ordinary, but for the miracle that they were lived by extraordinary people, and have been chronicled by a sympathetic and qualified recorder

Phase 1 Data Recovery was conducted at the Sunset Mesa Ruin, AZ AA:12:10 (ASM), to evaluate the archaeological resources that will be impacted by the gravel mining operations of Tucson Ready Mix, Inc. The information gathered from the excavated backhoe trenches, added to previous archaeological investigations at the site, has identified several loci where prehistoric and historic or modern features cluster. Two areas were also identified that may be cremation cemeteries. The historic features are from two occupations: one the turn-of-the-century homestead of Basillio Cuevas; the second the Sunset Dairy in operation from the 1920s to the 1960s. A total of 69 features was identified in 59 strategically-placed backhoe trenches, creating 2,018 m of trench cuts. Stratigraphic and ceramic data suggest that the prehistoric portion of the site is a single component occupied primarily during the Middle Rincon subphase (A.D. 1000-1100). There is some ceramic evidence to suggest that portions ...

In this report, experimental ground stone and maize processing experiments are described. These experiments stem from archaeological investigations at the prehistoric site of Las Capas, AZ AA:12:111 (ASM), situated in the Tucson Basin of southern Arizona. Testing and data recovery excavations at Las Capas were conducted by Desert Archaeology, Inc., from August 2008 through September 2009, with smaller phases of fieldwork in 2012 and 2013, as part of Pima County's Regional Wastewater Reclamation Department Regional Optimization Master Plan (ROMP). This massive project involved major upgrades and expansion of wastewater facilities at the Tres Rios Wastewater Reclamation Facility (WRF). Funding was provided by Pima County, and the excavations were conducted under the supervision of their Office of Cultural Resources and Historic Preservation, which requires all projects to adhere to the Federal standards of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (as amended)....

A series of archaeological investigations were conducted from 1993 to 1995 at four prehistoric sites in the middle Santa Cruz Valley. This fieldwork was part of the Arizona Department of Transportation's archaeological mitigation program of the Interstate 10 Corridor Improvement Project through Tucson, Arizona. The sites included the remains of three early farming settlements--the Santa Cruz Bend (AZ AA:12:746 [ASM]), Square Hearth (AZ AA:12:745 [ASM]), and Stone Pipe (AZ BB:13:425 [ASM]) sites—occupied during various intervals between about 800 B.C. and A.D. 550, and also having later occupations. At the fourth site, the Canal site (AZ BB:13:468 [ASM]), segments of several prehistoric canals constructed between about A.D. 1000 and 1450 and of a canal built in the late nineteenth century were identified. These sites provide new information about several watershed changes during the prehistory of southwestern North America, including the transitions to agricultural dependence and...

Abstract The presence of a handstone in an archaeological context is often used to infer food resources were processed there. This paper compiles data from archaeological, ethnographic, and experimental resources to identify important attributes for recognizing handstones used in other activities. Specifically, we explore multiple lines of evidence for identifying handstones used to plaster walls and floors from two locations on opposite sides of the globe: the Zagros region in Iran and the Southwest region in the United States. Ethnoarchaeological and experimental methods frame our research and provide middle range theory linking our inferences about artifacts found in specific archaeological contexts to two independently developed yet strikingly similar technological traditions.

Cultural features such as mortars, basins, and slicks on rock outcrops, boulders, and cave floors have been identified in many parts of the world. They clearly evidence the long history of human use of landscape features; at the same time, they are under-investigated and not well incorporated into archaeological interpretation. Indeed, even accurate documentation of such features is rare, if presented at all. Advances in digital techniques offer archaeologists new tools to address the situation. We recently piloted a new methodological protocol for the efficient and precise documentation of cultural landscape features at two sites in San Diego County, California. In this paper, we describe techniques for the creation of a high-resolution model of each site, of specific rock outcrops or boulders within each site, and of individual cultural features by using Structure from Motion photogrammetry. We present examples of various analyses that are possible once the 3D models are constructed, on intra- and inter-site levels. Our use-wear studies of 159 features and of a curated handstone collection provide new insights into past use of shallow and deep features.

Archaeologists refer to stone artifacts that are altered by or used to alter other items through abrasion, pecking, or polishing as "ground stone." This includes mortars, and pestles used to process vegetal materials, pigments, clays, and tempers; abraders, polishing stones, and hammerstones for manufacturing other artifacts; and artifacts shaped by abrasion or pecking, such as axes, pipes, figurines, ornaments, and architectural pieces. Because there is a fuzzy line between flaked and ground stone artifacts, some analysts state that ground stone includes any stone item not considered flaked.This manual presents a flexible yet structured method for analyzing stone artifacts and classifying them in meaningful categories. The analysis techniques record important attributes based on design, manufacture, and use.Part I contains discussions on determining function, classification, attributes of grinding technology, use-wear analysis, modeling tool use, utilization of ethnographic and experimental resources, and research suggestions. Part II contains definitions and descriptions of artifact types. Here the author also seeks to unravel the knot that has developed around conflicting application of terms.A significant reference for any archaeological fieldworker or student who encounters such artifacts."

Recent examinations of more than 13,000 disk beads from mortuary contexts determined that macroscopic examination was not always enough to distinguish shell, stone, and fired-clay beads. Using replication experiments and scanning electron microscopy energy dispersive spectrometry (SEM-EDS), we update the 80-year-old conclusions of Emil Haury, who defined features distinctive to bead manufacture. With this renewed confidence in materials identification, we analyzed the distributions of disk beads made from shell, stone, and fired clay among Hohokam inhumations and cremations at the Yuma Wash, Honey Bee Village, and Wetlands sites in the Tucson Basin. Not everyone was buried with disk beads, but all age groups were represented among those who were buried with beads. Some people were buried with only stone, or only shell, or only fired-clay beads, although more were buried with beads of some combination of these three materials. In this article, we consider why fired-clay beads were ad...

... Holley and Del Bene 1981: 337-348; Dumont 1982:209-211 ... of the surface through grain removal as a result of working an unlubri-cated, firm material; microflaking and striations in small amounts, the result of grit and autoabrasion; and abrasion on prominences (Brose 1975: 93 ...